Improve processes effectively
Improving processes helps companies stay competitive, give customers a better experience, and work more efficiently. Tallyfy provides tools to help organizations start ongoing improvement efforts.
People doing tasks every day often know how to improve them:
- Improvement comments: Use Tallyfy’s built-in comments to get ideas directly within specific process steps.
- Structured feedback: Add feedback steps at the end of processes to regularly collect suggestions.
- Anonymous submissions: Consider allowing anonymous feedback for more honest input.
- Idea voting: Let team members upvote suggestions they like.
This team-based approach ensures improvements are based on real experience and helps people accept changes because they were involved.
Outside views often show ways to improve:
- Customer satisfaction surveys: Collect feedback at key points in the customer journey.
- Service quality metrics: Track numbers like Net Promoter Score (NPS) or Customer Effort Score (CES).
- Support ticket analysis: Look for patterns in customer issues that point to process problems.
- Direct customer interviews: Talk to key customers about their experiences.
When looking at customer feedback, focus on finding the root causes in the process. For example, late deliveries might signal issues in scheduling or fulfillment processes.
Using data helps fix the right problems:
- Process duration analysis: Use Tallyfy Analytics to see which steps take longer than planned.
- Bottleneck identification: Find steps where work often gets stuck or delayed.
- Completion rate tracking: Monitor processes with low completion or high drop-off rates.
- Assignment analysis: Identify overloaded team members who might be slowing things down.
Tallyfy’s analytics features show how processes are performing, helping you find exact areas to improve.
Managing change needs good communication about the purpose and benefits:
- Clearly state the problem: Define the issue the process change is meant to fix.
- Explain the impact: Communicate how the current process affects customers, team members, or results.
- Share the vision: Describe how the improved process will lead to better outcomes.
- Connect to values: Link the change to company values or strategic goals.
This clarity helps reduce pushback against change and ensures improvements match company goals. As noted by experts like John Kotter, creating urgency and a clear vision are key first steps.
Tallyfy’s template system supports making improvements step-by-step:
- Immediate updates: Changes to templates apply instantly; no complex versioning.
- Updates go live instantly: The next process launched automatically uses the newest template version.
- Continuous improvement: Make small changes anytime without scheduled update windows.
- Simplified management: Avoid managing many different versions of the same process.
This approach shortens the time from idea to implementation, letting organizations improve processes continuously.
Small, consistent improvements add up over time:
- Start small: Focus on minor improvements instead of huge overhauls.
- Compound benefits: Small improvements build on each other, creating big results over time.
- Reduce resistance: Smaller changes usually face less pushback.
- Learn continuously: Use each small change as a chance to learn for future improvements.
As James Clear writes in “Atomic Habits,” small improvements add up significantly: getting 1% better daily leads to being 37 times better in a year. This applies to process improvement too.
Different changes achieve different goals:
- Process improvement: Making human tasks better by removing wasted effort, clarifying steps, or simplifying.
- Process automation: Taking people out of the loop entirely using tools like Robotic Process Automation (RPA) or API integrations.
- Hybrid approaches: Automating routine parts while improving the steps still done by people.
When looking at a process step, ask these questions to decide the best way forward:
- Can we eliminate this step completely?
- If not, can we automate it with technology?
- If people must do it, how can we make the step more efficient and less prone to errors?
This helps ensure people focus on valuable work, while technology handles repetitive, rule-based tasks.
Process improvements should improve things for customers, not just internal numbers:
- Customer journey mapping: See how process changes affect the customer’s overall experience.
- Outcome metrics: Track customer-focused numbers like satisfaction, retention, or referrals.
- Value stream analysis: Check how changes affect activities that create customer value.
- Customer feedback loops: Ask customers for feedback specifically about process changes.
Focusing on the customer ensures improvements add real value, not just make things easier internally or cut costs.
Well-known improvement methods offer ways to improve processes:
- Lean: Focus on removing wasted effort and maximizing value.
- Six Sigma: Reduce differences and errors using data analysis.
- Kaizen: Focus on small, ongoing improvements.
- PDCA (Plan-Do-Check-Act): Test changes in small batches before rolling them out fully.
These methods offer structured approaches you can adapt to your company’s needs. Many organizations mix elements from different methods.
Saving knowledge gained from process improvements is valuable:
- Update process documentation: Make sure Tallyfy templates reflect the improved processes.
- Record lessons learned: Write down what worked, what didn’t, and why.
- Share success stories: Tell others in the company about improvements and their results.
- Create improvement patterns: Identify successful approaches that could work for other processes.
This knowledge sharing stops the company from making the same mistakes and helps reuse successful improvements.
Process improvement often involves balancing being consistent with being flexible:
- Standardize the core: Make the main parts of a process standard to ensure quality and compliance.
- Allow contextual variation: Give teams flexibility to adapt to unique situations where appropriate.
- Define decision parameters: Clarify where judgment is okay and where standards must be followed strictly.
- Review exceptions: Monitor when standard processes are bypassed to find opportunities for improvement.
This balanced approach creates processes that are consistent enough for quality but adaptable enough for real-life situations.
- Process mining: Use special tools to find out how processes actually run based on system data.
- Cross-functional teams: Get input from different people when designing improvements.
- Pilot testing: Test big changes on a small scale before full rollout.
- Regular review cycles: Schedule regular process reviews instead of waiting for problems.
- Training and communication: Make sure teams understand and can perform improved processes.
- Recognition programs: Acknowledge team members who suggest good improvements.
By combining these strategies with Tallyfy’s features, organizations can build a culture of continuous improvement that gets business results through better processes.
Processes > Managing the complete process lifecycle
How To > Build an effective operations manual
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