Leading an organization requires managers to periodically take a step back and assess the organization’s operations to truly see the cards they have in their hand. An awareness of the current situation gives managers that critical understanding of their strengths and their deficiencies – necessities when plotting a future course of action. Without such knowledge, any strategy or plan floats without connection to reality and this is a surefire way to ensure confusion and chaos reign in the employee ranks. 

Documenting a process generally results in at least a 25% gain in productivity – and often even greater gains. Translating work effort into discrete steps reduces confusion, drives consistency of execution, accelerates training, and usually uncovers efficiency opportunities along the way. But it comes with a risk – the risk of improving a segment of an organization to the detriment of other areas. We call this a localized improvement.  

When analyzing a function for improvement, it is common practice to document the existing operations into what is widely known as a current state. This current state operational view serves as a baseline for improvements. It identifies the inputs, work steps, and outputs (and often a lot more). It serves to ground the team and provide a starting point for designing a future state. In contrast, future states are the destination. They are the sum total of the improvements to the current state to get to a new more effective and efficient operational state. Generally current state and future state views are documented as process maps or flows. Both the current state and the future state are powerful steps for improvement teams to understand where they are today and where they are going in the future.

Projects create a maelstrom of documentation – charters, workplans, issues logs, process flows, requirements, solution designs, parking lots, and many more. With the deluge, invariably some of the documentation is relegated to the hard drive of death – hidden out of the view of those who might benefit from its availability.

Is your improvement project failing? Depending upon which study you reference, roughly two thirds of projects fail to produce their promised outcomes. Such failures result in a tremendous waste of resources and even more unfortunately – lost opportunities to seize advantage over competitors. Looking deeper, we often find failure is almost preordained. Projects are pushed out of the chute armed with confusing directives and inadequate resources. Once a team is assigned to address an opportunity, invariably the first task is to translate leadership intentions into a realistic deliverable. Such translations can be overly challenging to make. In the name of expediency, project teams are routinely asked to run out on the ice before strapping on their ice cleats. Without stable footing, epitomized by a well-defined mission and clear field instructions, they lack the foundational necessities to hit the ground running.

Process improvement efforts have historically aimed at improving the quality, increasing the throughput, reducing the cost, or improving the predictability of a major process. Today though a considerable number of process thought leaders are pushing process improvement theories and practices into new areas – most prominently strategic planning. Processes represent the unique way an enterprise creates value for consumers. It follows that by adjusting an enterprise’s processes, products can be adjusted to deliver enhanced value for a consumer. By leveraging this direct relationship, an enterprise can define its strategic intentions in terms of its plans to adjust processes. This approach forges a solid link between strategic intentions and the eventual outputs.

Nowadays it seems every mid to large size company is getting clipped at the knees. For example, take the tech industry. Not ten years ago, the industry was dominated by household names including Intel, IBM, Microsoft, Cisco Systems, and Oracle. With the passing of years their core businesses have eroded as upstarts nabbed market share. Today, those maintaining their market position often do so only through the acquisition of their smaller rivals. Their internal growth engines are sputtering if not dead. Why? The issue is not that these tech giants don’t have the resources to compete. Nor is it that they don’t have experienced leaders and talented workforces. They simply are unable to adjust their product portfolios to seize market opportunities. Burdened by traditional corporate structures and business practices, when sparks of innovation flare up they are quickly dowsed by the corporate bureaucracy.