Process Improvement
Deliver Efficiency, Enhance Service, and Enable Strategy
Process Streamlining
Business Process Reengineering
Process Streamlining (PS) focuses on incrementally improving a process by improving or redesigning its steps. PS goals include improving effectiveness and efficiency and providing better customer service to enhance an existing process. PS asks How well are we doing the things we do? While Admissions is an example of a core process, it’s made up of many smaller business processes such as Application, Assessment, Notification and Acceptance. Any one of these business processes could be streamlined. PS recommendations focus on solutions that can be implemented in 90-to-120 days segments.
Business Process Reengineering (BPR) focuses on fundamentally rethinking and radically redesigning a process to bring about dramatic improvements in performance (Hammer & Champy, The Reengineering Revolution). BPR asks the fundamental question: Are we doing the right things? Goals include radical and dramatic outcomes to transform or replace a core process. Admissions is an example of a core process as it comprises multiple business processes and spans academic and administrative units. Significant recommendations result from a BPR, and implementation can take months or years.
Key Process Improvement Features
-
Process Innovation is designed for success.
PI methodologies can be customized unique organizational, management, and operational structures. However, they always involve a partnership where the Sponsor crafts End Results that paint a picture of the desired outcomes – the what – and the team redesigns the process and makes recommendations that enable those End Results – the how.
-
A structured methodology is key to Process Innovation’s success.
A team of staff who currently do the process participate in the review, providing first-hand knowledge and ensuring ownership of the outcomes. An experienced facilitator leads the team to optimize the methodology, remove perceived roadblocks, and provide external knowledge and perspective. Members are trained and facilitated through highly specialized problem identification, research, and solution brainstorming activities to enable thorough analysis and creative thinking. Solutions are reviewed and final recommendations are selected. Teamwork is framed by the End Results to ensure recommendations meet the Sponsor’s vision and goals. Activities are timeboxed to keep work on track and deliver recommendations on time.
-
Process Innovation helps you transform your process as well as your staff and culture.
A key result of PI is an improved process that meets strategic, operational, and service goals. But PI delivers additional benefits. Staff embrace change and don’t accept status quo when returning to their jobs. Quality service and the client become priorities. And staff have tools to identify future process improvement opportunities and effect change.
-
Let’s talk more about Process Innovation.
PI focuses on generating realistic solutions that lead to successful process improvements and culture changes in a short timeframe and build a forward-thinking organization that embraces change.