We live in a changing world, and in the world of business, things can change fast.
People can leave, be promoted, or fall ill. Strategies and plans can be changed with little or no warning. Competitors can blindside you with a single press release. Your product can drop in value overnight. Suppliers can vanish. A merger of rivals can completely change your operating landscape. Sometimes a day in the office can feel more like a tough twenty minutes on an obstacle course designed by the Marine Corps.
Yet every day, the business goals remain the same: minimize your costs, maximize your profit, try to avoid unreasonable risks, grow, don’t let anyone get hurt, uphold the brand, and so forth.
How can an organization consistently and persistently succeed in its goals faced with not one but multiple potential headwinds?
Many organizations have learned the answer is to take a process-centric approach to the way they work. They choose to become better structured in the way they do things.
A process can be defined as “a series of actions or steps taken in order to achieve a particular end”.
For example:
There are characteristics of a good process that we are all familiar with, predictability and efficiency being a couple of them. Of course, an important word here is “good”, because a badly designed process can defeat the purpose by being unpredictable and inefficient.
“Predictability” is a valuable characteristic because for a well-designed process, you know all of the possible outcomes. These are ‘particular ends’ as mentioned in the above definition. Predictability means uncertainty is removed. Consider a well-designed permit request and approval process: At the end of the process, a permit application is either ‘Approved’ or ‘Not Approved’. Any other outcome literally means the request is not yet at the end of the process, such as when a permit request is half-way through the process and still being considered.
“Efficiency” is a desirable characteristic because when a result is achieved with the smallest number of steps possible, minimal resources and time are required. Consider the well-designed process for catching a flight. You check in, drop off your bags, pass through security, and show the gate agent your boarding pass. Put another way, an efficient process has the minimal number of touch points with minimal involvement of participants. If you add in extra steps, the time taken for each process iteration to complete would take longer, and the overall goal takes longer to achieve. And your plane ticket would cost more.
Let’s think about that idea of minimizing the process steps. Imagine every passenger had to physically prove they were medically fit to fly each time they went to board an airplane. The test each passenger must pass is to do ten sit ups and then run for five minutes on a treadmill. The process of getting all passengers into their seats would be massively longer. It would be crazy. (Let’s not even imagine the smell on board!). The other interesting thing to note is that although there are really only about four major steps in the good “catching a flight” process, literally hundreds of pieces of information may be processed as these steps are completed, which again is an indication of efficiency.
In the business world, these two process characteristics, predictability and efficiency, can deliver huge benefits. For example:
- Decreased business risk
- Competitive advantage
- Increased profitability
- Enhanced organizational adaptability
- Increased confidence in decision making
- Better auditability
- Scalability
These benefits are all extremely important to an organization that has set goals it is trying hard to reach, in a challenging environment. (There are several other important benefits as well, but those we’ll discuss in our blog another time.)
So next time you’re running late for a plane, as you sprint through the terminal dodging your fellow passengers, all of whom are transactions in their own plane-catching process, be glad someone has thought about the process you’re in enough that you probably will make it onto the plane before the door shuts.
You’ll make your flight. The airline makes a profit. Everyone is safe.
And that is the power of processes.
