Business Process Improvement Articles
Below you will find all articles and posts tagged with Business Process Improvement. These articles are either primarily about Business Process Improvement or about topics that are directly related to Business Process Improvement.
The economy is said to be improving. Though they’ve had their ups and downs, the Dow, NASDAQ, and other market indexes are up from a year ago. The housing market may have also hit bottom.
One indicator that doesn’t bode well, however, is the unemployment rate. Firms still aren’t hiring. They’re getting by with what — or whom — they have. What does this mean for the currently employed? It means we’re expected to be more efficient…more productive. “We’ve go to do more with less!”, we so often hear it. This is frustrating for both sides. Employees are trying their hardest, in virtually all cases. And, employers want to keep growing.
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Author: Steve Flick Published on: June 28th, 2010
Categories: Business Management & Operations
In part 1 of this two-part series, we discussed three important reasons why quality management systems (QMS) projects fail. Here are four other reasons:
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Author: Steve Flick Published on: April 19th, 2010
Categories: Business Process Improvement, ISO Quality Management, Process Management
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…
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Author: Chris Anderson Published on: October 5th, 2009
Categories: Business Process Improvement, Procedures & Process Training, Writing Policies and Procedures
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.)
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Author: Chris Anderson Published on: September 21st, 2009
Categories: Knowledge Management, Process Management
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. Â 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,
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Author: Dan Davison Published on: August 28th, 2009
Categories: Business Process Improvement, Knowledge Management, Sales and Marketing, Strategic Process Improvement, Value Proposition
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.
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Author: Editor Published on: August 26th, 2009
Categories: Business Management & Operations, Business Process Improvement
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.
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Author: Editor Published on: August 24th, 2009
Categories: Business Management & Operations, Business Process Improvement
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.
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Author: Chris Anderson Published on: August 3rd, 2009
Categories: Business Management & Operations, Business Process Improvement, Strategic Process Improvement
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.Â
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Author: Chris Anderson Published on: July 6th, 2009
Categories: Business Process Improvement, Knowledge Management
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.Â
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Author: Don Reed Published on: May 18th, 2009
Categories: Business Process Improvement, ISO Quality Management
