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Inside the March issue:

Question of the month: What is (or should be) the primary benefit of well-planned, well-written procedures?

Find the answer at the end of this newsletter.

March 30, 2005

This month our focus was on change management. Change is an inevitable part of continuous improvement. The challenge is to effectively manage it to produce desired outcomes.

Understanding the Elements of Change

You saw how change requires three elements to work effectively. The combined forces of dissatisfaction, vision and first steps need to outweigh the inevitable resistance to change. Understanding and identifying these three elements enables you to achieve success and create value for the whole organization a lot faster.

Read more about faster change management...

Facilitating Change in Your Organization

Your assumptions about what motivates people will determine the success or failure of your change program. With incorrect assumptions, you risk not gaining stakeholder support and ownership of the change process. Starting change management within your organization involves seven steps: create a baseline, define strategies, change measurements, communicate details, reward and communicate success, measure progress and ensure sustainability.

Read more about facilitating change management...

Solving Problems or Improving Processes?

When you solve problems, chances are you are addressing local issues. However, process improvement is more about a systemic approach to resolve global issues—that affect the whole system of processes. When you are on a process improvement mission, you should visualize the big picture, identify the critical path, prioritize issues, analyze and communicate objective information and take decisive actions to effect change.

Read more about problem solving & process improvement...

Eliminating Delays

Wouldn’t you agree that for change management to succeed, you need to eliminate one of the major causes of poor process performance? Eliminating delays requires first measuring and understanding them. Eventually it may involve reducing transition steps between processes or optimizing processes for bottlenecks. In any case, a lack of thorough process understanding could lead to overcorrection and bigger inefficiencies.

Read more about eliminating delays...

Change is all about continuous improvement. Rather than solving problems, it’s about preventing them by improving the system and overall results. Therefore, to succeed, any change management program must take into account the big picture—the whole system of processes—instead of focusing too deeply on individual, localized issues.

Reader Feedback

As always, we thank you for your feedback and words of encouragement. Many of you have said that the articles are “very informative and useful.”

And remember, the articles and newsletters are meant to discuss issues that are important to you. So keep your feedback coming and let us know if you’d like any specific topic addressed.

On That Note

Answer to this month's question: 

The main objective of writing and using procedures should go beyond simply documenting the current state. Well-designed procedures help you improve your processes and overall results.

Next month we will explore how writing policies and procedures fits in with process improvement and change or better yet, how to make sure your documentation does not end up as dreaded shelf-ware.

Best,
Bizmanualz Team

P.S. We want to know what you think. So please email us with any comments, questions or stories.