process-design

Process design

Map what happens, not what is supposed to happen

Follow a real instance end to end and record every step, handoff, wait, and rework loop. Talk to the people doing it, who will describe several steps that exist nowhere in the documentation and one or two that everyone has quietly stopped doing.

Then measure two things:

• Touch time — how long the work actually takes.
• Elapsed time — how long it takes to get through.

The gap between them is the process. In most broken processes, work is waiting more than ninety percent of the time, which means speeding up the work changes almost nothing. Attack the waits.

Find the real constraint

One step governs throughput. Improving anything else produces inventory in front of the constraint and no more output. Find it: the step with a queue in front of it.

Common constraints that are not the obvious step: a single approver, a specialist everything routes through, a system that only one team can access, and a batch cycle that makes everything wait for the weekly run.

Redesign

In this order, because the order is the leverage:

1. Eliminate. Does this step need to exist? Many exist to catch a failure that a different fix would prevent entirely.
2. Simplify. Fewer handoffs, fewer approvals, fewer systems. Every handoff is a place work stops.
3. Standardize. One way of doing it, written down, with the decision rules explicit.
4. Automate. Last. Automating an unexamined process makes a bad process faster and much harder to change.

Push approval to the lowest level that can be accountable, and set thresholds so routine cases do not queue behind exceptional ones.

Make it hold

A documented process that relies on discipline degrades within a quarter. Build the control into the system: required fields, blocking gates, defaults that are correct, automated handoffs.

Never fix a recurring failure with a reminder. If people are forgetting a step, the system permits forgetting it. Fix that.