The six best practices for improving processes are to map the process, analyze it, redesign it, acquire the necessary resources, implement and communicate the change, and evaluate the results once implemented. Applied in that order and aligned with business objectives, they turn the intention to improve into incremental, measurable improvements sustained over time.
Processes are one of the most important elements for a company to function properly, and yet on many occasions it is taken for granted that they do not need to be improved, without considering the impact of not having an adequate process in multiple areas of the organization. Good process design makes everything in the organization work properly and strengthens the business model. This piece brings together, in an infographic and an executive analysis, the six practices that distinguish companies that truly improve from those that only try.
Picture the executive committee of an insurer reviewing the results of a difficult year. The backlog of pending claims is growing, the cost of handling each claim is too, and customers complain about having to repeat the same information. Everyone agrees that processes must be improved. Two working groups are formed, a budget is approved and an initiative is announced. Six months later, the indicator is where it was and the enthusiasm has run out.
What happened is common. Having the intention to improve processes is not enough for them to actually improve, which is why certain activities must be carried out correctly. The insurer's initiative began redesigning without having mapped, set goals without having analyzed, bought tools without having designed and announced changes without having communicated them to those who would carry them out. Each skipped step cost credibility.
The six practices we present are designed to avoid that scenario. They serve to improve processes incrementally over time and obtain better results, and their value increases when they are applied as a sequence and not as a list of independent ideas.
>> What is a business process? <<
>> How the Value Stream Map drives the customer experience <<
Improving a process means reducing the effort, time, error or cost required to deliver a result to the customer, without degrading its quality. It is a leadership decision and not just one for the operating area for a simple reason. Processes cut across departments, and no department head can change them alone. The one in a position to arbitrate between areas, allocate resources and sustain the change is the executive committee.
The history of management offers a useful warning. In a classic Harvard Business Review article, Michael Hammer argued that companies should not automate work as it existed, but rethink it. That idea remains valid. Before investing in technology or reorganizations, leadership needs an orderly way to understand the work and decide what to change. The six practices are that way.
Everything begins by representing how the work is done today, with its steps, owners, systems, times and decisions. The map is not an end, but the condition for the team to see the same thing. Many differences of opinion between areas are resolved when the flow is placed on the table, because each person discovers that their stretch is only one part of the customer's journey.
A widely used tool for this purpose is the value stream map. The Lean Enterprise Institute describes it as the diagram of the actions that create value and those that do not, along the flow of materials and information that takes a product or service to the customer, and notes that it usually starts from a current-state map and then draws the future state. Although it originated in manufacturing, the institution itself indicates that it has proved effective in any industry, and a bank can use it for a loan application with the same logic as a plant for an order.
Mapping has a known risk, that of documenting the ideal process and not the real one. To avoid it, it makes sense to build the map with those who carry out the work every day and validate it with recent cases. A store chain that maps its returns process with cashiers and not only with the policy area soon discovers that there are three variants depending on the store, and that two of them generate complaints.
With the map in hand, the analysis looks for the points where the process loses time, money or quality. It reviews the waits between steps, rework, approvals that add no control, data that is captured more than once and activities that depend on one particular person. The analysis answers two questions. The first is where the problem is concentrated. The second is how much it costs.
The second question changes the conversation in the boardroom. When the analysis shows that one stretch of the process consumes the longest cycle time and also generates most of the complaints, the priority stops being an opinion. A consumer goods manufacturer analyzing its order fulfillment process may find that the longest delay is not in production but in credit validation, a conclusion that none of the areas involved had seen on their own.
It makes sense for the analysis to reach the causes and not stop at the symptoms. Simple techniques, such as successively asking why a problem occurs, prevent the company from investing in resolving an effect when the root is elsewhere.
Design turns the analysis into a proposal for how the process should work. It decides which steps are eliminated, which are simplified, which are executed in parallel, where to automate and who is responsible for each result. A good design also has indicators from the start, because a process that is not measured cannot be managed.
A useful principle for executives appears here. Processes do not work in isolation, which is why it is important to integrate each practice properly into the business, aligning it with corporate objectives and making sure that business objectives fit what the process needs in terms of technology and human resources. An elegant design that ignores the real capacity of the team or the limitations of the systems ends up as an unused document.
Design must also consider the customer experience. An insurer can shorten the internal time of a claim and yet keep asking the policyholder for the same documents three times. The best design starts from the customer's journey and works backward toward internal activities, not the other way around.
No improvement is sustained without the resources that make it possible: budget, technology, training and the time of the people who will have to carry out the new process. This is the most underestimated practice. Many initiatives are approved with enthusiasm and executed with the spare time of teams that are already at their limit, which guarantees delays.
Leadership must ask what the new process really needs in order to work. It may require an integration between systems, a new role, a different business rule or specific training for those who will operate it. A hospital redesigning patient admission needs, in addition to the flow, staff trained in the system, adequate physical spaces and a clear escalation rule. If the resource does not exist, it is preferable to adjust the scope of the change rather than promise a result the team will not be able to deliver.
It also makes sense to decide realistically whether the process requires new technology or whether the problem is solved with the existing system. A hasty choice of platform often aggravates the problem that was meant to be solved.
Implementation puts the new process in people's hands, and there the decisive factor is communication. Those who carry out the work need to know what changes, why, what is expected of them and how the result will be measured. When people learn of a change through rumor, they resist it. When they understand the reason and have taken part, they defend it.
John Kotter, in his Harvard Business Review analysis of why transformation efforts fail, describes, after observing more than a hundred companies, that changes advance in phases and that skipping steps only creates an illusion of speed. Among the mistakes he identifies are under-communicating the vision and not planning for short-term wins. For a process, that translates into two practical habits. The first is to explain the change through several channels and with concrete examples from daily work. The second is to choose a stretch of the process where the improvement will be noticed soon and make it visible.
A gradual implementation reduces risk. A group of stores, a branch or a pilot team test the new flow, contribute adjustments and become references for the rest. What is learned in the pilot costs far less than what is discovered after deploying across the entire company.
Evaluating is verifying that the improvement occurred and that it is being maintained. The indicators defined in the design are compared with the starting situation, the opinions of those who operate the process and of the customers who receive it are gathered, and a decision is made on whether to adjust, expand or repeat the cycle. Without this practice, the company never knows whether it invested well, and the improvement erodes over time, as people return to their previous habits.
Evaluation closes the cycle and opens it again. An improved process reveals new bottlenecks, because when the heaviest one is eliminated the next one appears. That is why process improvement is not a project with a closing date but a capability that the company develops. Organizations that master it periodically review their critical processes, assign an owner to each one and consider every adjustment as a learning opportunity.
Following the sequence is not enough if execution fails on three fronts. The first is intermittent sponsorship. An initiative that has leadership's support in the first month and its divided attention in the fourth loses momentum just when resistance appears. The second is measuring activity and not results. A team that reports how many processes it mapped, but not how much cycle time or cost per transaction was reduced, cannot demonstrate value to the finance committee. The third is treating the change as a technical event and forgetting the people, who are the ones who will make it work or let it die.
There is also a reasonable argument against formalizing too much. Some companies argue that the speed of the market does not allow time to map and analyze. The answer lies in proportion. It is not about documenting the whole organization but about applying the sequence with varying intensity, light for low-risk processes and rigorous for those that touch revenue, compliance or customer experience. A company that invests two weeks in understanding a critical process before redesigning it saves months of correction, and that logic is what underpins each of the six practices.
For the chief revenue officer, improving commercial processes means shortening the sales cycle and reducing the leakage of opportunities between areas. For the person responsible for the customer experience, it means eliminating frictions that customers tolerate in silence until the day they leave. For the chief financial officer, it means a lower cost to serve and a more productive use of capacity that today is consumed in rework. And for the CEO, it means turning improvement into a management routine and not an initiative that depends on an enthusiastic sponsor.
The discipline of the sequence also has a cultural effect. When leadership demands a map before redesigning, an analysis before investing and an evaluation before declaring victory, teams learn to argue with data. Over time, that way of working becomes a competitive advantage harder to copy than any tool.
Choose a process that directly affects the customer and that leadership recognizes as problematic. Bring together its owners and those who carry it out, and devote two sessions to mapping it and measuring its real times. Before proposing solutions, write on one page what the problem is, how much it costs and what improvement you hope to achieve. Only then design the change, estimate the resources and define how you will communicate it. Agree on the date on which you will review the results and who will do so. This path, which can be completed in a few weeks for a bounded process, avoids the most frequent mistakes and leaves a reusable template.
Aligning the process with corporate objectives is the last check before moving forward. If the change does not contribute to a company goal, such as growing sales, retaining customers or reducing the cost to serve, it probably does not deserve the effort.
ICX Consulting accompanies companies in each of these practices. Our teams carry out process mapping and analysis, lead the redesign with business cases and support implementation and measurement with the ICX Process Transformation Framework methodology. When the new process requires technology, we implement it on the most suitable platform. You can explore the full range of our capabilities on the business process consulting page.
To bring these practices to your team, download the ICX Process Transformation Framework Toolkit.
With the process that combines the greatest impact on the customer and the greatest cost to the company, for example order fulfillment, a claim or a quote. A bounded process makes it possible to show results soon and build support for the next ones.
Yes, in essence. Each practice feeds the next, and skipping one usually produces rework. In small processes some can be combined, but the map and the evaluation should never be missing.
A bounded process can be mapped, analyzed and redesigned in four to eight weeks. Implementation depends on resources and the number of people affected, and the evaluation should take place at least a quarter after the change.
A person with the authority to coordinate all the areas that take part and responsibility for the final result, not for one stretch. Without an owner, improvements fade when priorities change.
Improving processes is not a theoretical exercise but a decision about how the company wants to keep its promises to customers. If you want to evaluate which of your processes to improve first and in what sequence, request a diagnostic with an ICX consultant and turn the intention to improve into measurable results.