Process Management Can Be Your Secret Weapon – here’s how
Organisations may face a variety of challenges in their effort to achieve their business goals including productivity, financials and customer relations. These challenges need to be overcome to ensure that the business will continue to thrive and grow. Often, these problems arise due to awkward processes and the sooner these problem areas are identified and rectified, the more confident an organisation will be at handling challenges that come their way.
Here are some of the ways process management can be your secret weapon when challenges arise:
Helps with productivity
An organisation uses various processes to accomplish a specific goal which may include a separate process to generate sales reports, produce financial reports, report on website optimisation and analyse social media. However, some processes are too complex, rigid, difficult to understand, or redundant.
These cumbersome business processes will likely result in slow response times, unsatisfied customers, low employee morale, delivery delays, and increased cost. Process management allows an organisation to analyse each procedure, to weed out unnecessary or inefficient steps and redesign the procedure to achieve a streamlined and more efficient process.
Some processes may also be automated or semi-automated, resulting in the timely delivery of outputs and allowing employees to focus on tasks that are more productive. By streamlining the business process, you limit the chances of errors and delays, increase production output, reduce waste, lower production costs and improve customer satisfaction.
Manages expectations
Expectation pertains to the belief that the solution will be delivered as expected, based on the set standards, timeline and cost. Expectations management is a critical element to the successful delivery of solutions.
Business process management allows an organisation to manage these expectations. By having a clearly defined and efficient business process, you can confidently set clear and realistic deadlines for each deliverable. A streamlined process provides the organisation more time to focus on the needs of its customers/clients and provide definite answers to their issues and questions.
Managing team expectations, on the other hand, involves clearly defining each role, responsibility and quality of outcome to avoid misunderstandings. It also includes consistent communication and feedback to ensure issues are resolved and poor performance is addressed in a timely manner.
Allows oversight rather than micromanagement
While it is useful when it comes to overseeing small-scale projects, micromanagement is usually frowned upon as it often results in low employee morale and the manager not being able to see the bigger picture.
An organisation may instead assign an oversight team that will standardise the processes and policies, monitor and ensure that they are followed, identify risks and issues and guarantees every step is accomplished according to the set timeline and budget.
Provides accountability (assigning roles, meeting deliverables)
Critical to the successful implementation of a business process is accountability. Part of business process management includes clearly defining the responsibilities of each team member and assigning people who will be held responsible and accountable for each task and outcome. Also, it is important that each task has a clearly defined next action, ensuring a smooth transition from one activity to the next.
Business process management allows a business to develop and implement robust and clearly defined solutions to everyday challenges, allowing the organisation to achieve and maintain optimal productivity levels, control costs, manage expectations, monitor progress and improve overall performance.