PROCESS

“If you can’t describe what you are doing as a process, you don’t know what you’re doing.”

– W. Edwards Deming, Management Innovator

 
Early in my career I absolutely hated the idea of processes. I was all about strategy, innovation, breaking paradigms, and process just seemed like the old establishment that was going to waste away. To me, process was all about rigidity, claustrophobia, and monotony.

When I began to lead large teams, I came to fully appreciate the importance of process to an organization. While much of strategy focuses on the “What”, “Why” and “Where” of strategy, when you take a step back, often just as important or even more important is the “HOW” we get things done since this is where most of an organization’s resources, time, effort, costs, and capital are tied up.

While you can point a ship in a different direction, if it can’t go any faster, and navigate the seas very well, then it will most likely be passed up by the competition. To dramatically increase the capacity of an organization, dramatically improve the efficiency and effectiveness of the organization’s processes.

In this section, we’ll cover the top tools to crank out the efficiency and effectiveness of your company’s processes, including:

1. Process Mapping
2. Process Maturity
3. Theory of Constraints
4. The 8 Forms of Waste
5. Lean Improvement Tools
6. Kaizen
7. Six Sigma & DMAIC
8. Automation

Just like all of the sections on this site, you can pick and choose a topic or if you want a nice overview of a section read the topics in order.