Process Management!

Process Management – The Way To Optimize Your Company

We know how difficult it can be to face head-on the need to organize and optimize your company! No matter how many times the company may have great organization difficulties, too much work for too little staff, discontent or operational problems such as task redundancy, unbalanced workload among people, or even that “organized mess” (don’t mess with my mess because I know where everything is in this chaos!).

We know that even so our posture is often similar to that of children (not always only children) who love a shoe, and even though it no longer fits, they shrink their toes so that they can continue exactly the way they are, without change.

Human beings tend to adapt to difficulties in order not to change. And so, like the frog in the popular saying that jumps if thrown into a pan of boiling water but dies if the temperature is gradually raised, we keep everything the same as it has always been…

But how to start?

Just as we said before, we should not start by buying computers and software!

The way to start organizing a company is to see what the company is supposed to do, then how it is supposed to be done and how it is delivered. The business of the company (what makes the money come in) is always the clearest thing, and from this point, we need to start designing the way our company should operate.

The value chain of the processes that make up a business has 3 divisions: Management, Business, and Support. The Business must be our starting point in the organization!

When we can answer these questions (What is our business? How should it be done? How should it be delivered?) we will have the necessary material for the analysis of all the processes that need to exist but are not part of the business. From the Management of the company to processes such as Finance, Accounting, Human Resources, etc.

These supporting processes will be identified through questions such as:

– What resources do we need to do/deliver our business?

– What requirements do we need to fulfill to do/deliver our business?

But why processes?

We tend to record what we do as what we are supposed to do. Not only that but from the assumed thinking, we adopt that this is the truth and the only way (or the best way) to do what our company does. Not only this, we tend to personify activities and tasks: “The invoicing is done by João. The selling is done by Filipa. Nuno is responsible for shipping the products”.

This leads us to two errors

We associate tasks with people and fail to question these assignments

We load into our analysis the personal attributes of each employee. By doing this we categorize, divide, and create a bias about what should be done not by the process, but by who does it today.

When we start from the drawing we made of our ideal Business model and then start identifying everything that should happen to support the Business (support processes) and everything that should be managed/monitored/coordinated (Management) but without taking into account our current configuration and team we will be closer to determine where we want to go. By being able to describe a sequence of activities that start with an input and end with an output we will have the identification of a process.

Processes allow us to see the company through logical lines where something enters from one side, undergoes a transformation or processing, and comes out from another side. Tasks are small parts of processes and if we look only at them we may not see clearly where they fit, how useful they are, and the resources they consume.

We can have in the same company two people doing similar tasks for different departments: logistics upload an invoice into the system when receiving goods, and then production uploads the same invoice for inventory purposes. Do the goods-receiving process need this duplicate operation? The tasks seem correct when analyzed individually. When we analyze the process we identify a redundancy (and an opportunity for optimization).

What about the people?

The work of managing processes and not tasks is far from being something cold and impersonal. Quite the contrary! It is fundamental to also have a reading of how the company works today. How people work. What do they do? How do they do it? Why do they do it?

By having two paths designed (the process based on how we see the business and the process carried out) we have the opportunity to compare the two scenarios and identify opportunities for improvement.

By also identifying the “Why they do it” we have a unique chance to understand the motivations, visions, and fears of those involved in the process. We may discover that our employee has a peculiar way of performing a certain task that should become the standard procedure because he or she has a different experience or knowledge. Or we may identify that certain people do certain tasks for fear of becoming unnecessary and losing their jobs.

Process management is, in essence, managing people and resources in the most organized and optimized way possible!