The Path to Process Excellence Maturity

Where does your company fall on the process maturity curve? Find out so you can lead process improvement efforts.

Part of a series.

Processes across your company should work together to drive business value and increase efficiency. Many companies struggle with disparate, inefficient business processes that not only hinder process excellence but harm performance and delay progress and innovation. Even measures designed to increase efficiency, like automation, can backfire, serving to drive poor results in a quicker manner.

How do you make progress when there are more opportunities for improvement than there are hours in the day? How do you convince budget decision-makers to invest in process improvement projects against technology improvements? How do you combat the ever-present “if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it” mentality?

You can start with understanding the value that excellent processes add to your company. When your processes work together, you can work proactively and spend more time innovating. When you align your broader end-to-end processes with your strategic goals, you find opportunities to further improve specific processes and overall process capabilities.

Without process excellence, you might manage reactively, regularly thinking on your feet to resolve issues that come up or losing efficiency because your employees perform non-value-adding tasks you could automate.

Let’s look at the steps you need to take to drive process improvement results.

Embarking on a Process Excellence Journey

Sometimes it’s difficult to know where to start. To understand your organization’s readiness for process excellence or business process improvement initiatives, consider:

• What has already been attempted – and how successful or “sticky” were those efforts?
• What are the structures, including organizations, people, technologies, controls and performance measures in which your business processes operate?
• How can owners and users understand and improve their processes and supporting structures?
• Are your current C-level executives “process focused” and “process interested?”
• Is your business striving to be a “process-driven organization” or have “high-performing processes?” Or is your business interested in implementing a new process or redesigning an outdated process?
• What should the boundaries be? Where should we start? What are the next steps? What is the finish line?

Regardless of the current status of your process excellence activities, it can be a challenge to determine what, how and where to direct internal and external improvement capabilities and resources. After answering these questions, there are two steps you need to follow to determine where your business can go on the path to process improvement.

Identify Your Firm’s Maturity along the Process Excellence Curve

We recommend starting your process improvement initiative by identifying where you are today to help better define your vision for tomorrow. Use the process maturity model below as a catalyst to direct your improvement efforts and move your company further along the process excellence curve.

Complete a simple self-analysis to determine where your company currently stands on the curve. Then set goals for where you would like to be in the future. Now you can start developing a framework to achieve your goals across processes.

Evaluate your Process Maturity

Not all structural competencies will be at the same level of maturity. By evaluating your organization’s process maturity, you can identify strengths and gaps. This honest identification fosters successful business process improvement and management initiatives.

You can apply this process maturity model at any level of the organization: single process, division or entire company. You can also apply it at the department level, but it will generally result in a high number of level 1 and 2 ratings since this level typically is not cross-functional.

By understanding your company’s process maturity and its supporting organizations, leaders and owners can determine the best approach to initiate process excellence efforts.

Is Process Excellence Right for My Organization?

Process excellence is not the first step for all organizations. For example, a company without documented processes, assigned process owners, an overarching implementation approach, or aligned IT teams would need to address lagging competencies first (or in parallel to) new improvements.

Process excellence is critical to successfully implementing a business process management solution. If you don’t assess and address process optimization and improve lagging competencies prior to selecting and implementing technology, it often creates success and cost challenges.

Conclusion

Remember, these improvements take time. Experience shows that moving your organization up one level across all process excellence competencies typically requires a 6-to-18-month organizational commitment. But you can achieve smaller improvements in specific processes throughout this time frame.

Leveraging the process maturity model as your first step will allow you to “Think big, start small and act quickly.” It will help you define where you are today and what it will take to achieve your process excellence goals.