Performance and process

The need to deliver improved performance naturally leads organisations to review their business processes.

“Performance” is measured in different ways: it may be that a product or service needs to be delivered on time, to a defined quality standard or benchmark, with agreed costs and levels of resource. Performance improvement is about measuring current levels of activity based on one of these criteria and trying to do something about improving “it”.

The drivers for doing this include private sector companies recognising the need to increase competitive advantage and drive down costs. In government agencies, both local and national, the demands of CPA (comprehensive performance assessment), the initiatives being driven from the Gershon report, Best Value audits and so on, are forcing organisations to look at improving performance.

Current thinking on performance management appears to stop at measuring the outcomes of processes, i.e. knowing what your performance is against a bench mark or objective. The challenge is then to act on this information, identify the issues in the process and introduce change.

But where do you start to deliver improvement against the demands?

LEAN process thinking

In manufacturing the methodologies employed to deliver improved performance are well documented and include LEAN, Six Sigma and others. The aim of a LEAN process is to create a continuous flow where a product is “pulled” through the organisation by customer demand: bottle necks and slack are removed so the process becomes continuous. With continuous flow any uptake by the customer causes an immediate reaction throughout the production process.

Can the lessons of LEAN be translated in to your business processes? Can we learn how to deliver improved performance in a financial institution or government agency by realigning the processes using LEAN thinking?

Well at C I Systems we believe that they can and we have introduced new learning initiatives based on LEAN. Introducing games and role play where teams work in “factory units” to deliver product with the objective of being on time and to customer specification participants learn the thinking required to improve working processes and to test ideas in a practical workshop.

The workshops are effective as the learning is though experience, questionnaires and discussion. They are stimulating, memorable and fun, but most of all because they are relevant to your people and processes. If you are a Performance Manager seeking to get buy in from managers to re-evaluate their processes these fun, 1-day workshops, are an ideal first step. If you have gone on and documented the “as-is” but want to understand how to go about attaining the “to-be” the practical Lean process workshops will help you drive the process forward.

To find out more about the process workshops email us today: