In startups, you move fast: it’s lean in all respects, from the size of teams, to budgets, to process. In the enterprise, it’s weighed down by red tape: large, dense teams, opulent budgets, and heavy on the business process.
Focusing on the larger organizations, my experience has been that there is an endless stream of people perpetuating new business processes for what seems like everything. And it also seems like as soon as some new business process comes in, it’s already being questioned, or changed.
Why do people keep creating new business processes?
First, people create new processes because there is some perceived need for it. In some cases, it makes sense, like a manual workaround in relation to a software application that doesn’t do what people want it to do for something. But rarely have I seen enough people really ask “Why”.
Business processes are important and are needed for people to function in any organization, but the amount of new business processes that get created can be staggering in some organizations. And once the process is created, how many people actually follow it and who maintains it? The answer to this is generally elusive.
Why creating new business processes doesn’t always work.
- There isn’t a clear need for it.
- There are no KPIs to measure the process and therefore no way to demonstrate its value other than anecdotes.
- There becomes too many processes that people have to follow, parlaying upon one another, thereby creating red tape for too many things which makes operations inefficient.
- The process itself is inefficient.
- The process doesn’t work properly with deployed software solutions.
How to fix things
- Assemble a team and gather as much of the documented processes in your organization as you can. For larger organizations, break the teams out to work on a department-by-department basis.
- Each team assigned to a department will review the business processes. Add AI into your workflow to streamline your analysis.
- Conduct interviews with staff in that department who work with the various processes. These interviews are to further understand the process and to ask whether there are any challenges with the processes and whether they are even being used or not.
- Once this work is done, the teams will document their findings in a central place. The objective is to identify all of the wasteful process: processes that either aren’t followed at all or ones that are problematic for a variety of reasons. If the teams have time, they should try and document some metrics (e.g., how long in minutes or hours a process takes).
- Once all of the above is complete, decisions can be made about which processes to cut and which ones to improve. Again, AI can be leveraged to analyze the output of this work and make recommendations on what to do with the various processes.
Advice and Next Steps
Resist the urge to create new business processes over time. The best business process is no business process. This may come from automation through software, which is often difficult to achieve and expensive. But that shouldn’t deter you.
Robotic Process Automation is a valuable approach, and tools such as Microsoft’s Power Automate can make quick work of automating a complex, manual process in a way that is low code: easy to create, implement, and maintain.
