Four tips: How to create a solid foundation for process management

Working with process management can be complex and overwhelming. Therefore, thorough groundwork is essential to ensure a solid foundation. This provides both a good starting point and the opportunity to ensure scalability and continuous value creation for your company. In this article, we have distilled our most important experiences implementing process management into four tips that give your company a strong foundation for taking your processes to the next level.

Most companies work to varying degrees with process documentation, process optimisation – or at a slightly higher level: process management.

Nevertheless, many organisations find it difficult to realise process improvements: Describing processes is very time-consuming, the descriptions often become too complex, there are challenges spreading awareness of the processes, and the ongoing work with process improvements proves more difficult than expected.

For employees who are not process specialists, the descriptions often seem unnecessarily complex, resulting in employees spending time understanding symbols rather than the actual process.

Therefore, companies rarely achieve a satisfactory return on process management initiatives.

We want to address this, and therefore we have distilled the most important lessons learned through many years of working with process optimisation into the four tips we share here:

1. Make ownership visible

If your company is to succeed with the process management initiative, visible ownership of company processes is essential. One way to achieve this is by creating a specific role for this purpose – a Chief Process Officer (CPO). The CPO should have in-depth knowledge of working with process management and an understanding of the company's processes.

The role should act as the person having the overall responsibility for the company's framework for process documentation, standardisation, and optimisation of processes across teams, departments, and countries. In other words, it's the CPO's task to establish the guidelines for process management in the company. By having a CPO, your company ensures that documentation, methodologies, conceptual frameworks, etc., are standardised across the company.

A CPO need not be a dedicated employee. Depending on scope, the CPO can be a full-time resource, but if the initiative is limited to a single department, there is nothing wrong with assigning the CPO role to one of the employees in the department.

2. Spread awareness

Processes are dynamic and change over time. Additionally, existing documentation is often hidden on file drives, and new employees might not hear about it. Instead, they learn the process 'on the fly' – and simultaneously might save their own documentation on a new file drive to remember the process.

We observe that the lack of awareness of existing processes results in multiple versions of the same process – sometimes even when the employees performing the process sit next to each other daily.

The lack of uniformity often means that processes are not performed optimally, costing time, money, and resources. Even the best process descriptions lose value if employees don't have knowledge of and easy access to the latest updated and current version.

Another important element of awareness is that employees must understand the process documentation. It should be easily comprehensible and clear – even for employees who aren't used to working with various symbols and notations. This element is unfortunately often overlooked when companies document and spread the use of processes, but if the recipient doesn't understand the documentation, the precision and complexity of the processes become irrelevant.

3. Ensure maintenance

To succeed with continuous updating of process documentation, it is crucial that accessing and updating process descriptions is quick and easy. If this isn't the case, our experience shows that maintenance of documentation becomes deprioritised to something that, at best, happens once or twice yearly – and at worst, doesn't happen at all.

That's why it's important that employees are comfortable with the tool, and that the tool makes it easy to use process descriptions when employees perform processes in their daily work. This way, employees become familiar with using process documentation and take responsibility for it.

Furthermore, it's important that it's easy for employees to log change proposals, ask questions to the process owner, and highlight unclear points and errors. We often see that this needs to be done through a channel separate from the process documentation – e.g., through email, phone calls, etc. Unfortunately, this results in a lack of precision and makes it difficult to follow up on employee enquiries.

4. Limit the scope

Admittedly, company-wide process management is a big undertaking. And as with all other projects, it's advantageous to start small. Therefore, we rarely recommend starting a process management project that covers the entire company.

Instead, choose a limited area in the company where they are already skilled at working with processes, e.g., in Finance or somewhere in the organisation where a need has arisen due to reorganisation, regulatory requirements, or perhaps a merger. It's ideal to start the initiative here and develop a framework for the entire company based on the experiences gained in that department.

Once the framework has been tested, the initiative can be expanded to the rest of the company, perhaps in phases depending on the company's size. This also means that the company already has super users, experts, and other employees with experience working with the tools when the initiative is scaled.