Business and organizational development is about business process change: not as in “process change - the event”, but “process change - the journey“.  Your business processes change in response to market forces, competition, regulations, customer demand, the economy, culture, personal beliefs, and many other factors.  The question isn’t about what is causing the business process changes — we know your business processes are going to change — the question is…
(more…)

The first phase in any project management process is project initiation, where the goal is to uncover the project’s scope — the boundaries for resources, expectations, results, feasibility, the team, and your requirements — and produce a project charter.  Now that you know the project’s goals and scope and you have a project charter, what’s next?

Project planning is the second phase of any project management process and consists of developing the core planning elements.  The output of this phase is a set of project management documents, or plans.  The most important one is the project plan itself.  (Figure 1 shows the table of contents for a project plan.) (more…)

The process maps we described in recent weeks are tools for you in your role as data collector and analyst: your role is to craft and communicate a story for change and improvement that people understand, accept, support, and will ultimately act on.  As you move from gathering data about the current process to improving it, you need tools to help communicate your improvement plan and train participants on the new process, (more…)

Over the last four weeks, we have focused our discussion on process maps. We’ve tried to answer some of the most common questions about process maps by taking a look at seven different types of process maps and how they’re used to describe processes.  A process is a structured set of activities that transforms inputs into outputs, but the way we describe a process may vary dramatically, from a text-based procedure to different forms of process maps. (more…)

In the previous article, we discussed Document Maps, and Activity or Value Stream Maps. Today, we will review Work Flow Diagrams and Rendered Process Maps.

Work Flow Diagram

Work flow diagrams translate abstract UML, or Unified Modeling Language, symbols of squares and diamonds into graphical images, which are used to tell a more complete story than engineering notation communicates.  Engineers are used to thinking conceptually and using symbols, but the workers in the field may need something less abstract and more concrete.  Task-level communications require more clarity and work much better when we get closer to reality. (more…)

You have probably heard of the term “Process Map” or a process flow chart (the terms process map and process flow chart are used interchangeably) to describe a process. But what exactly is a process map anyway? Are there different types of process maps? Are all process maps created equal? We’ll try to answer some of these questions by taking a look at seven different types of process maps and how they are used to describe a process. After all, the foundation of all businesses is a common set of core processes. (more…)

Change management is at the heart of programs like ITIL, lean, ISO, or six sigma.  Change and improvement needs to occur on a regular basis, but it does not happen by accident.  It takes commitment from top management.  How does top management show their commitment?

Two ways - budget and a show!  That’s right you need to fuel innovation for change and improvement and budgets are what top management understand.  (more…)

You have identified a problem, and you have made an immediate correction to fix it for now.  How do you make sure the same problem doesn’t happen again?

That is the role of corrective action in continual improvement of an organization.  In a reactive organization, we constantly react to problems in a corrective mode.  We make the short term fixes – over and over and over again.  (more…)

This month our theme is voice of the customer.  This is very coincidental because this is also the month we have undergone our ISO 9001 Certification audit (as anyone following our blog surely knows…).

The connection between these two items is the customer-centric nature of ISO 9001.  In fact, you could say that there are two overarching aims of the ISO 9001:2008 Quality Management System Requirements: (more…)

If your goal is ISO certification, the best method is to create a compliant QMS in stages. (more…)