Process Improvement

Consistently successful organizations excel at sound process.

We understand the connections of culture to process and know how to systematically address your process issues.

We help our clients to:

  • Discover how to identify and examine existing or needed processes
  • Help you distinguish the purported process from the actual
  • Identify how to streamline and improve the processes that are deployed
  • Enlist the support of stakeholders into real process change
  • Change the knowledge set of the process users
  • Understand how to change the deep cultural components and artifacts that resist the establishment of intentioned disciplined process. 

Research studies have overwhelmingly shown that most of the time the primary causes of quality, customer, and service problems are found in the processes that are deployed – and not in the employees who run them.  Yet, the frequent management response is to change the people, and not the faulty process, providing a hopeful but unrealized quick fix, in effect making the problem worse while only postponing addressing the real root causes of the problems.  Why does this happen?

  1. One reason is that organizations on their own find it extremely difficult to recognize how their actual processes work let alone identify why problems occur.
  2. Secondly, even when the causes of process breakdowns are understood, they find it very difficult to lastingly change them.  Why is this? It relates to the next point.
  3. Most fundamentally, problems with process are caused less by lack of employee knowledge and commitment, and more because of connections with more deeply entrenched cultural issues which are more difficult to change.