The (Magnificent) Seven Steps to Operational Excellence
Operational excellence is no longer the exception, it’s the expectation from consumers. To remain competitive in your market, you need to take a considered and intentional look at your business and make changes where appropriate. These seven steps will set you on the right path to kickstart your operational excellence initiative no matter the industry.
1. Discover & Ideate
To get the most out of an operational excellence initiative, the starting point should always be “what is” rather than “what we think.” So, the first step is to identify the way an organization is currently working.
This may involve automated process mining to discover information buried inside electronic systems, or talking to key staff who have a wealth of corporate knowledge in their heads, or any of a range of techniques for finding and collecting data.
Success at this step means developing a firm understanding of how things currently are working, discovering what the people using the process or system think is not working well, and listening to ideas for improvement: in other words, starting to get a better grasp of why things need to be done differently.
2. Benchmark & Validate
The organizational knowledge collected in Step 1 is valuable because it represents reality. However, given that you’re seeking to improve the way you work, it’s crucial to test and validate that what you’re seeing is in fact what’s really happening. One way to achieve this is through benchmarking.
Benchmarking establishes a standard which you aim to consistently meet, or which you currently meet the majority of the time, for a given process.
In this context, validation does not refer to the quality of the data itself, but rather to buy-in from others. As you identify and generate risks, opportunities, and issues, it is crucial that you validate your findings and suggestions with the appropriate stakeholders, ensuring what you are about to undertake is going to be appreciated and valued.
3. Evaluate & Quantify
Benchmarking and reviewing is necessary and valuable, particularly as it can often generate lots of interesting ideas and opportunities. Some of these may be exciting, others may be very easy to implement, but in most cases they will simply draw focus from your overall goal. Therefore, you need to take time to evaluate potential ideas and prioritize them, making sure the best ones receive the most effort.
Of course, prioritization also means that you need to quantify the time, cost, and effort to implement the revised practices or processes.
4. Simplify & Standardize
Having worked out what you’re going to change and why, many organizations jump straight in and start to create new processes or automate existing ones. Instead, consider how to simplify the work by eliminating steps and activities you don’t need to do.
In these cases, it may be more useful to establish common terminology and a shared understanding of the goal of a process, but then have local procedures to operate it. In this way, you can take advantage of both standardization and localization.
5. Generate & Automate
Having worked out which parts of your organization, processes, and practices to focus your improvement efforts on, you can now think about streamlining the work, by generating opportunities for automation.
This can range from simple automation of repetitive tasks (clicking a single button to create an invoice, for example) to large and complex projects involving custom systems and connections to non-automated processes.
6. Share & Govern
No amount of simplifying, standardizing, or automating will improve your business processes if nobody knows about the new way of working. If you want your staff to act in a new way, they need to understand why they are being asked to change. Involving people in the decisions that affect them, and ensuring that the right information is available to the right people at the right time, is a good start.
7. Monitor & Measure
Improvement and excellence projects are only effective when they deliver the expected results. The only way to assess this is by measuring the results you are achieving, and the only way to measure your results is to continuously monitor your business processes.
If you want to learn more about how Signavio’s Business Transformation Suite can assist you with achieving operational excellence, sign up for one of our free webinars. Or, if you’re ready, take our products for a test drive with a free personalized demo at www.signavio.com.