x CONTE NTS

CHA PTER 7:
Step 7: Create Internal Controls, Tools, and Metrics: Making It Real 167
Internal Controls 167
Tools 173
Job Aids 174
Custom Email Forms 174
Excel Tools 180
Metrics 181
Chapter Summary: Step 7 186
Time Estimate 187
Project Team Meeting 187
Postmeeting Work 188
Project Team Meeting 188
What You Have Achieved 188

CHA PTER 8:
Step 8: Test and Rework: Making Sure It Works 189
The Five Steps to Testing the Business Process 192
Step 1: Create the Test Plan 193
Step 2: Develop the Scenarios 197
Step 3: Implement the Test Plan 202
Step 4: Summarize Feedback and Rework 203
Step 5: Retest 203
Chapter Summary: Step 8 204
Time Estimate 204
Create the Test Plan 205
Write Test Scenarios 205
Implement the Test Plan and Rework 205
What You Have Achieved 205

CHA PTER 9:
Step 9: Implement the Change: Preparing the Organization 207
The Implementation Plan 208
Overview of the Three Phases of the Implementation Plan 211
The Design Phase 211
The Development Phase 212
The Implementation Phase 213
The Four Tracks in the Implementation Phase 213
Change Management Track (Impact Analysis) 213
Testing Track 215
 C ONT E N T S xi

Communications Track (Communication Plan) 215

Training Track (Training Plan) 218
Chapter Summary: Step 9 223
Time Estimate 224
Develop the Implementation Plan 224
Develop the Impact Analysis 225
Develop the Communication Plan 225
Develop the Training Plan 225
Gain Sponsor Buy-in 226
What You Have Achieved 226

CHA PTER 10:

Step 10: Drive Continuous Improvement: Embracing the New
Mindset 227
The Continuous Improvement Cycle 229
Evaluate 230
Test 235
Assess 236
Execute 238
Continuous Improvement Plan 239
Chapter Summary: Step 10 242
Time Estimate 243
Develop the Continuous Improvement Plan and Schedule 243
Gain Sponsor Buy-in 244
Test, Assess, Execute 244
What You Have Achieved 244

CHA PTER 11:

Create the Executive Summary: Getting the Recognition 245
The Six Sections of the Executive Summary 246
Section 1: Project Focus 247
Section 2: Goals 249
Section 3: Summary 250
Section 4: Key Findings 257
Section 5: Deliverables 258
Section 6: Appendix 259
Chapter Summary 259
Time Estimate 260
Create Analytical Tables 260
Write the Executive Summary 261
What You Have Achieved 261
xii CONTE NTS

CHA PTER 12:

Case Study: Sharing a Real-World Example 262
Background 262
Step 1: Develop the Process Inventory 263
Step 2: Establish the Foundation 268
Step 3: Draw the Process Map 271
Step 4: Estimate Time and Cost 283
Process Activities and Process Time 284
Annual Volume 290
FTE Formula 293
Employee Costs 295
Step 5: Verify the Process Map 295
Step 6: Apply Improvement Techniques 296
Benchmarking 296
A New Approach 302
Step 7: Create Internal Controls, Tools, and Metrics 310
Internal Controls 310
Tools 313
Metrics 316
Step 8: Test and Rework 318
Step 9: Implement Change 321
Communication Track 322
Training Track 323
Change Management Track 323
Step 10: Drive Continuous Improvement 323
Chapter Summary 328
What You Have Achieved 328

INDEX 331
The Power of
Business Process
Improvement
This page intentionally left blank
 CHAPTER
1
The Roadmap
Learning How to Navigate

H ave you ever had a problem that you know little or nothing
about land on your desk at work? Does the problem make you
feel overwhelmed and uncertain as to where to begin? Chal-
lenges like this usually occur when you already have a full work-
load, unrealistic deadlines, and limited resources. What can you
do when you feel lost, like Hansel or Gretel trying to find your
way out of the forest?
Learning to navigate through unfamiliar territory goes a
long way toward easing the burden and can help you feel com-
fortable dealing with the unknown. Business process improve-
ment (BPI) work, the systematic examination and improvement
of administrative processes, can seem scary and overwhelming
because no one teaches this navigation skill in school. But once
you give it some thought, everything is a process, from making
breakfast for yourself in the morning to building the space shut-
tle. In both cases, you follow a series of actions or steps to bring
about a result. Making breakfast, no matter how informal, is still
a process. You brew the coffee, cook the eggs, and toast the
bread. If Vince Lombardi had run a business instead of a foot-
ball team, we might remember him today for saying that process
isn’t everything, it’s the only thing.
The techniques covered in this book help smooth the
path to successful BPI by clearing away the unknowns and deliv-
ering the power of process improvement directly into your

1
2 T HE P OWER OF B US I NE SS P RO CESS I MPRO VE M EN T

hands. Whether you consider yourself an expert on the subject

or do not see yourself as a process person, you will appreciate
learning how to tackle process improvement work in a bottom-
line, straightforward approach. For the inexperienced, The
Power of Business Process Improvement guides you along a
proven, step-by-step approach to a successful result; for the ex-
pert, it becomes a handy A-to-Z reference guide to help you en-
gage an organization in a process improvement effort.
This guide cuts through the long, confusing, and diffi-
cult-to-comprehend explanations regarding BPI and takes you
directly to the core of what you, the business professional, want
to understand. It describes a pragmatic approach to business
process improvement that I developed over the years and that
anyone can use in real time to solve real problems. The ten sim-
ple steps to increasing the effectiveness, efficiency, and adapt-
ability of your business processes start with the creation of a
process inventory and end with how to keep a business process
continually delivering value to the business.
If you want to evaluate how your company hires employ-
ees, secures sales, or manufactures a product, examining the un-
derlying processes helps you better understand how the
business works. Every day we experience challenges with inef-
ficient or ineffective processes and, after you start thinking of
business processes as the foundation to the business, you begin
to see the power of having a process focus and wonder why you
waited so long to change your perspective.
Bill Gates wrote in his book Business @ the Speed of
Thought: Succeeding in the Digital Economy (Business Plus,
2000) that ‘‘A rule of thumb is that a lousy process will consume
ten times as many hours as the work itself requires.’’ We have all
seen bureaucracy and red tape continually added to a business
process. Bureaucracy happens not all at once, but incrementally
over time. A business process can easily become bloated, leading
to an ineffective, inefficient, and inflexible process.
Improving business processes enables you to stay com-
petitive and to increase your responsiveness to your customers,
the productivity of your employees doing the work, and your
company’s return on investment. The expertise to examine and
 T HE R OADMAP : L EARNING H OW TO N AVIGATE 3

understand how business processes work sets you apart from

the rest because you have the power to demonstrate the value
that the process delivers, its importance to your company, and
the effect that a single change can produce.
People become interested in process improvement for
any number of reasons. Do any of these scenarios sound fa-
miliar?

? Your customers, clients, or suppliers complain about the

business process.
? You find that your department makes numerous errors and/
or makes the same one again and again.
? You want to understand how your department can improve
its efficiency so that your employees can spend their limited
time on more valuable work.
? You have accepted responsibility for a new business or
department, and you want to understand the work.
? You discovered challenges with the handoffs between
departments.
? You want to increase your department’s productivity.
? You noticed duplication of data or tasks in multiple depart-
ments.
? You started a new job and want to understand how the
department works.

If you encountered one or more of these experiences,

then BPI can help. It improves your ability to meet your custom-
er’s needs, helps you eliminate errors, identifies opportunities to
yield a more effective and efficient process, assists you in learn-
ing the end-to-end process for a new part of the business, makes
clear the relationship between departments and the roles and
responsibilities of each, improves your department’s productiv-
ity, and eliminates redundancy.
Working on business processes helps demystify the proc-
ess and makes a seemingly complex process less intimidating.
Process improvement work also gives you the chance to engage
a cross-functional team in the work so that everyone can learn
the end-to-end business process, instead of simply focusing on
4 T HE P OWER OF B US I NE SS P RO CESS I MPRO VE M EN T

his or her own piece of the process. You will find that, as you
do the work, few employees understand the end-to-end process.
Employees may understand their own piece, but not how the
entire process works from beginning to end. When a team works
together on improving business processes, the work itself pro-
vides a means for colleagues to talk about common topics, and
the team effort promotes an understanding of the interconnec-
tivity of their work.
When you focus on a business process, it appears less
threatening to colleagues than focusing on the employees who
do the work. The process of finding challenges and linking those
challenges to the process instead of to a particular employee
leads to easier, less threatening solutions. No one employee or
group of employees has to worry about repercussions.
On the other hand, BPI does affect the entire business
system, including the employees who do the work; the informa-
tion technology systems that support the process; the measure-
ments established to assess the effectiveness, efficiency, and
adaptability of the process; and reward and recognition pro-
grams that exist in a company.
If you still find yourself wondering whether you should
undertake a process improvement effort on one of your proc-
esses, ask yourself four questions. If you answer no to any of
these questions, you should start examining your business proc-
esses:

1. Does your process include a high level of customer/client

interaction?
2. Does every step in your process add value for the customer/
client?
3. Have you established customer- or client-focused metrics
for the business process?
4. Are your employees evaluated on their contribution to the
business process?

Throughout this book, the term customer refers to some-

one external to a company who pays money for a product or
service. The term client denotes an internal customer within a
company.
 T HE R OADMAP : L EARNING H OW TO N AVIGATE 5

If you work as an internal consultant in your company,

then you probably work with clients. The client’s business proc-
esses should support the company’s business goals, which in
turn should support the paying customer. Remember, in busi-
ness process work, the customer is king, and you should always
focus on the customer.

Can You Do It?

Many of the process improvement books on the market
support the myth that business process improvement must be
time-consuming and complex. The Power of Business Process
Improvement shows that nothing is further from the truth. It
presents you with numerous tools and examples that you can
use to make the work simple and yet maintain high standards.
Perhaps you have shied away from process improvement
because it looks like something that only an expert can do. In
reality, you can do this work without having to learn the ins and
outs of quality management or reengineering. This book shares
my own unique approach to BPI, an approach influenced by
both quality and reengineering, that works for me every time. I
have successfully used the approach outlined with every em-
ployee level in different and complex situations. It works. It
works even with people who start out as skeptics.
As you apply the ten simple steps introduced in this chap-
ter and covered in depth in the chapters that follow, you will
find yourself adopting several of the quality and reengineering
philosophies because the focus on the customer is at their core,
but you use them in a seamless way that makes the work palat-
able to the business.
I geared each step toward ease of use. This book answers
basic questions and elaborates on how to perform each step by
demonstrating its application. It explains topics that no one ever
bothers to tell you about, either because book authors, consul-
tants, or colleagues assume that you already know about them
or because they do not want you to know the full story, believing
that knowledge is power and wanting to hold onto that power.