Business Objectives and Process Improvement

Organizations generally have many different business objectives:

• Produce quality products or services
• Create value for the stockholders
• Be an employer of choice
• Enhance customer satisfaction
• Increase market share
• Implement cost savings and successful practices
• Gain industry-wide recognition for excellence

To achieve a strong competitive edge in a rapidly moving marketplace, you might like to aggressively take advantage of opportunities and avoid simply reacting to change. You might also like to improve your ability to predict costs and revenues, find ways to raise productivity, and implement means to lower expenses. These measures could help you to anticipate problems, and develop ways to address them early.

To meet any of these objectives, you must have a clear understanding of what it takes to produce your products or services. To improve, you need to understand the variability in the processes that you follow, so that when you adjust them, you'll know whether the adjustment is advantageous. In short, you'll want to manage your business using accurate data about both products and processes.

But, how do you know that your data is reasonable or accurate? Can you compare information between projects? Generally, there has to be some consistency in the work you do if you are to make valid comparisons. You want to be able to measure your success and make sure that the processes you follow add value to the products and services that you provide. Of course, that implies a standard way of doing things and a baseline against which to measure your subsequent efforts.

Now we are getting down to the nitty-gritty: Does your organization have experience with writing and following a process, and can it support the development of common, standard processes? Can you determine the best ways to go about a particular task? Establishing standard processes that are appropriate and successful for your workplace and business is fundamental for process control and improvement.

Without good project management and fundamental technical skills, projects cannot operate effectively enough to spend any time on improvement. Basic activities such as planning and tracking need to be understood and encouraged. Version control and risk management are essential disciplines that need to be addressed. In addition, managing requirements so that you deliver value to your customer is a key business objective.

As you can see from the preceding discussion, getting to the point where your organization enjoys a competitive edge requires a number of incremental improvements. That's where process improvement can really help. Process improvement activities focus on improving process capability, organizational maturity, process efficiency, and process control so as to help you advance the organization and accomplish its objectives. They can provide you with guidance on how to document and standardize processes, increase your work effectiveness, limit rework, measure the performance of the organization, and use the data to manage the business.

Of course, there is a cost associated with process improvement. Experience shows that it can take between 2 percent and 10 percent of normal engineering effort to support a significant process improvement initiative. At the same time, experience also confirms that process improvement brings a significantly positive return on investment (ROI) and improvement in key business indicators.