This week’s blog is the beginning of a 3 part series on Process Change Management. The first part of this series will discuss the first step of current process evaluation and preparation for the next step.
Step 1 – Evaluation and Preparation
The first step is to understand the current process. When I say understand the process I don’t mean simply understanding the process to the point of being able to draw a diagram of it (I say that because I’ve seen this mistake many times) I mean truly understanding it on 5 levels
Level 1 – What
What is the process? What are the inputs and outputs of each step? This level should provide enough information to build a high level diagram of the process to work from.
Level 2 – Who
Who is directly and indirectly involved in the input, action and output of each process step. It’s important to talk to these people about what works well and not so well from their perspective. This is important for 2 reasons; the people involved in the process often have a unique perspective about what works well and what can be improved upon and secondly, this is an excellent opportunity to start putting the idea of change in their minds and to start dropping seeds of “what’s in it for them” – the benefit of this will become more apparent in later steps.
Level 3 – When
When does each step take place? What steps are time sensitive? How long should each step take?
Level 4 – Where
Where does each step take place? Does the step occur in a physical or virtual location?
Level 5 – Why
Why, this question should be asked of all of the above levels. For example, why is the process done this way? Why are the sales staff involved? Why does invoicing occur before shipping? Why does order picking take so long? Why do orders need to drop by noon? And then when you get answers, ask why again.
After completing these steps, document the results. It’s a good idea to prepare various forms of documentation such as written descriptions and diagrams. These documents will be used to confirm understanding between the project team and the customers.
In preparation for the next step, the documents will be used to confirm if your understanding of the current process is correct and to identify what revisions may be required. Once this is confirmed and accurate, expectations need to be identified, discussed and agreed upon. This process make take a few facilitated sessions to complete, it is well worth the time it will take and will be very helpful to have documented and agreed upon before moving to the next step.
In summary, it is essential to have this in-depth understanding of the existing process before attempting to undertake any changes. Many times I’ve seen BA’s who say they understand the process and can show a very pretty Visio diagram of the process but later on in the project it quickly becomes apparent, that there understanding is only superficial.
To be continued…