A few days ago, I had a very interesting conversation with a process improvement expert. He is part of a large multi-national company and for the last 18 months, he has been responsible for the deployment of process improvement best practices throughout his company’s IT department. This work has given him valuable insight on the subject of process improvement deployment, and I very much appreciate him sharing his experience and lessons learned with me. In this post, I will present the process improvement deployment experiences of this customer as a case study, with their lessons learned summarized at the end. This case study illustrates how theoretical concepts of process improvement can be put into practice.

For organizations embarking on the path of achieving a process improvement mindset, the first logical step is to capture their existing processes in a safe, usable, and accessible form. Safe meaning that the processes have the appropriate level of protection from misplacement and loss. Usable meaning that the processes are in a format (or formats) that can be easily used by all members of the organization. Accessible meaning that the processes are accessible organization-wide from a single well-known portal. Once the organization’s internal processes are captured in this manner, a gap analysis can be conducted and the indentified gaps filled by the industry’s best practices. This is a laborious step and requires careful planning and project management, but process authoring and management tools can substantially reduce this effort.

For this customer, the first step involved capturing a large number of processes, many of which were never previously documented. Their strategy relied heavily on tasking various subject matter experts (SMEs), from different IT groups, with process definition. The SMEs were provided with an intuitive tool and training. The SMEs, working from their own various geographic locations, were then able to enter their group’s processes in the central system. The process group constantly reviewed the entered processes and provided feedback to the SMEs. Once the initial processes were captured, the process group structured them into a reusable process architecture. SMEs, in turn, were able to review the process architecture and provide feedback. Employing this strategy, the customer was able to distribute the process definition effort across its IT department, and created a comprehensive process architecture in a matter of months. Moreover, this strategy made the process improvement adoption (institutionalization) more likely, as the user community was intimately involved from the beginning—versus being dictated to by an external group. It creates a sense of ownership.

At the end of this step, the organization had codified its distributed tacit knowledge.

To further increase process adoption by the organization project teams, the process group, with the help of SMEs, created variations of each process to better suit the various project categories. All the processes (and their variations) were made available for consumption from an organization-wide process portal. The portal also provided sophisticated “search and select” functionality to make sure the most suitable process could be quickly identified for a given project. Process search and selection will form the basis of a comprehensive process tailoring solution in the future.

The customer decided on this approach as opposed to burdening the project managers with the tailoring task. They felt tailoring processes by adjusting them was too complex a task for the project managers at this stage.

Based on my experience, many organizations underestimate the complexities of process tailoring. I feel this simplified tailoring approach is sufficient for most organizations, with the exception of matured process-centric ones.

To effectively improve the processes and the process architecture, the organization relied heavily on input from the end users. The “feedback” and “community” functionality of the process portal was used to collect and capture feedback and lessons learned from the organization’s project teams which, in turn, were used by the process group and the SMEs for ongoing process improvement.

Keep in mind that a single integrated system provided the process capturing, definition, architecture, tailoring, and feedback, with end-to-end traceability.

As the next step, the customer is developing usage models to accurately measure the rate of process adoption by the organization’s project teams. They feel having reliable adoption metrics is critical to sustaining  the support of senior management.

In summary, the following are the lessons learned from this process improvement effort:

• Identify and utilize SMEs for capturing the organization’s processes
• Importance of training SMEs and providing an easy-to-use tool for process definition
• Importance of a process architecture that supports reusability
• Create a sense of ownership as early as possible
• Simplify the task of tailoring
• Minimize the effort required by project managers to use a process in the their project
• Base the ongoing process improvement on user feedback
• Importance of end-to-end traceability
• Importance of usage models in winning and sustaining senior management support

This case study illustrates how theoretical concepts of process improvement can be put into practice.

I feel topics such as usage models and institutionalization/internalization deserve more detailed exploration.

This entry was posted on Monday, September 14th, 2009 at 1:30 pm and is filed under Case Study, Process Asset Repository, Process Improvement, Process Modeling. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.