Evolving your operation is an essential part of fostering sustainable growth. With iterative improvements providing the mechanism by which you can incrementally elevate operations.
Established process management best practices have been tried and tested to showcase the levers you can pull to grow in the right way.
Your operation, however, is unique. Even when compared to those around you, within your niche or specialism.
As such, your process must align to your characteristics, and your characteristics alone.
The universal facets of process management best practices exist to guide each and every operation.
Those who take the next step mould them to their own circumstances.
What Are The 9 Process Management Best Practices?
1) Introduce Performance Driven Change
In order to improve, there can be no guesswork.
By leaving decisions to chance, or gut instinct, you may get lucky once or twice.
But, over time, you’ll be making decisions that hinder, rather than help, foster growth.
Performance driven change can allow for proactive change, as well as reactive action.
2) Measure, Measure, Measure
A crucial exercise is to identify the metrics against which you will define success or identify a requirement to change.
The bottom line for process management best practices is that we allocate resources to things that matter.
Any actions must be rooted in your own data. Where measurement allows us to know if we are acting consistently and appropriately.
Find what can be measured and place a value on the figures.
3) Balance Efficiency & Efficacy
Processes must work for company and customer in equal measure.
Often, a company will have a process that is highly efficient, but the effectiveness (the end product) is terrible. Or vice versa.
There must be a balance between optimising revenue and crafting a customer experience to match your product offering.
That is what keeps people coming back for more.
4) Account For Your Internal Characteristics
Without accounting for the quirks and traits that make your company unique, you can’t hope to produce the best results.
And involving the people enacting change within the process itself is non-negotiable.
Process management best practices are universal, however the right process for your business is not, and should not, be the same as any other.
It’s time to embrace your circumstances, only then can you adopt and adapt to them accordingly.
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5) Orientate Around Customers
It may seem obvious, but countless companies implement change without listening to their customers.
And there is often a clear difference between what you believe and what they perceive.
Your customers are your greatest source of learning and should be leveraged to ensure any process changes you implement impact them positively rather than negatively.
If not for generating ideas, creating a feedback loop for proposed alterations may give you answers you never thought about.
6) Slow & Steady Wins The Race
There’s a time to rush and a time for patience.
And when evaluating business wide process changes, its better to take 6 months and implement changes that will stick.
Otherwise you risk changing too much at once resulting in minimal uptake or activation.
Likewise, introducing proposed alterations to a smaller sample size allows for redesigning and optimising should tweaks need to be ironed out in the “real world”.
7) See Failure As A Learning Curve
Sometimes, despite having all the best intentions, a process change can backfire.
If you are willing to accept that and prepare for it, there will be no surprises, and you can act accordingly.
Take these anomalies as learning curves.
As opportunities for further refinement to ensure the next generation of your process is truly fit for purpose.
8) Digitise & Automate
Digital transformation is part and parcel of process management.
Think swapping paper invoices for digital signatures. Snail mail for email.
40% of business leaders agree that digitisation enhances employee productivity; often with customers being equal beneficiaries
Once you’ve moved your processes from manual to digital, it also makes sense to automate repetitive work.
Automation speeds up task completion, reduces process mistakes and reduces overheads.
Consider your own processes, how could digitising or automating improve your productivity and boost customer experience?
9) Choose The Best Tool To Support Your Journey
Least, but certainly not least, ask yourself… is your existing infrastructure up to scratch for facilitating your adoption of process management best practices?
Anthill is here to bring calm to the chaos and provide you with a solid platform for secure revenue growth.
By streamlining processes, and aligning your team across channels and locations, you can define what good looks like and implement it at scale.
Ready to explore how Anthill can help you develop process management best practices? Schedule a demo today.
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