Process improvement has always been the mainstay of organizations' attempts to enhance their overall performance, in part because it's much easier to reduce expenses and streamline existing processes than to increase revenue or create new ways to solve old problems. Management approaches that focus on improving processes (e.g., reducing expenses or costs -- Six Sigma is one of the latest examples) significantly outnumber those that focus on driving revenue.

When organizations feel the effects of slower overall economic growth or market contraction, business leaders tend to focus even more tightly on process improvement as a means of "cutting their way to the top." While the validity of this thought process can be debated, organizations have clearly demonstrated this tendency over the past year.

Yet embedding process improvement approaches such as Six Sigma or Lean into an organization as the uniform and primary means of improving effectiveness and efficiency has been notoriously difficult. While such efforts may be admirable, they must show a positive return on investment (ROI) to carry conviction that they're worthwhile.

Admittedly, ROI for these initiatives is not a simple calculation. The expenses they generate -- employee time, training, outside consultants -- are often easy to identify, but the dollar value of the improvements is not. Some hard improvements (e.g., changes that clearly reduce cost) may be easy to measure, but how does an organization evaluate less tangible, but clearly significant, benefits such as improved decision-making?

The traditional answer has been to measure the outcome and value the improvement based on that. For most organizations, though, this is more easily said than done. The connection between an improvement and an outcome is often muddied by multiple influencers, lack of clarity in process definition and discipline, and cumbersome manual reporting. Yet measurement is crucial; if the success of the initiative isn't measured, over time the organization will lose enthusiasm and move on to seeking the next silver bullet.

To ensure that a process improvement project is effective, regardless of the particular approach that's adopted, an organization must address the two primary reasons why these initiatives so often fail. First, deciding which processes are priorities for improvement often requires considerable effort. By the time the organization gets past that point and begins to make changes, so much time and money has already been spent that a positive ROI seems unlikely.

Second, once the process changes are in place, it's difficult to make them stick. The process improvement team moves on to the next project, and then it's the responsibility of the process manager to maintain the changes. But the manager often has little support; no infrastructure exists to reinforce the new processes, and there's little in the way of monitoring adherence. So, over time, people revert to what they've always done, and the improvement is lost.

Fortunately, these two problems have a common solution. For organizations that have already implemented business performance management (BPM), significantly improving the effectiveness of process improvement initiatives and boosting ROI can be surprisingly easy. This is because the key to preventing process improvement failure -- and the primary focus of BPM -- is good information.

Identifying Opportunities

If a BPM initiative is well implemented, the work that's involved in deciding which processes are most critical should already have been done for the organization. The goal of process improvement initiatives shouldn't be simply to grab the lowest-hanging fruit (as is often the case); it should be to grab the lowest-hanging fruit that's most valuable to the organization. To extend the analogy a little, it does a restaurant no good to choose fruit that isn't needed for the dishes on its menu simply because it's readily available and cheap. It still has to pay for the fruit. After all, it costs the organization resources (which equals expenses) to make any improvement.

A BPM-enabled approach is in sharp contrast to the route taken by most process improvement initiatives, which typically involve a long series of process definitions across a wide range of processes to uncover opportunities for improvement. Often it's the predicted percentage of improvement that can be realized that drives the choice of target processes. BPM limits the scope of the processes to be considered and defined (if necessary) to those most critical to overall success, thereby streamlining the process selection task.

It's easy to see how BPM can help with mainstream processes such as sales, manufacturing, or service delivery (applying the typical "bottleneck" theory), but it can be equally helpful with support roles -- if they are critical. For example, if the HR department's hiring and on-boarding processes are crucial to the organization's success, then the BPM hierarchy of measurements should already include those processes. Some additional process definition is often necessary to hone in on the most promising processes, but this step shouldn't be needed if a BPM initiative has been properly implemented.