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Generating, testing, and prioritizing improvement ideas

From idea to impact: Choosing the right improvements

Once you’ve analyzed your process and identified root causes for problems (as discussed in Simple root cause analysis techniques), the next exciting step is to generate, test, and prioritize potential solutions. This is where creativity meets practicality to forge effective process improvements.

Generating improvement ideas (Ideation)

Don’t limit yourself to the first solution that comes to mind. Encourage a diverse range of ideas, even those that seem unconventional at first.

  • Brainstorming: This classic technique involves a group freely generating ideas without initial criticism. Encourage a high volume of suggestions. Variations include:
    • Negative Brainstorming: Ask, “How could we make this process even worse?” Then flip the answers to find positive solutions.
    • Brainwriting: Participants write down ideas individually before sharing with the group, ensuring quieter voices are heard.
  • SCAMPER: This acronym prompts structured creative thinking:
    • Substitute: What components, people, or rules can be replaced?
    • Combine: Can you merge steps, roles, or objectives?
    • Adapt: What else is like this? What other ideas does it suggest?
    • Modify: Can you change an attribute, like size, shape, or frequency?
    • Put to other uses: Can the process or parts of it be used differently?
    • Eliminate: What can be removed or simplified?
    • Rearrange/Reverse: Can you change the order of steps or do things in reverse?

Tallyfy for Idea Generation:

  • Use a dedicated Tallyfy template for brainstorming. Each step can serve as a creative prompt, with team members adding ideas in task comments or dedicated form fields.
  • Mine existing Tallyfy comments on operational processes – they are often a goldmine of improvement suggestions directly from users.

Testing your ideas (Piloting)

Before committing to a full-scale rollout of an improvement, it’s wise to test it on a smaller scale. This is called piloting.

  • Why Pilot? Piloting helps to reduce risk, gather real-world feedback, validate assumptions, and refine the solution before wider implementation.
  • Running a Simple Office Pilot: For a process managed in Tallyfy, piloting can be as simple as:
    1. Copying the existing Tallyfy template.
    2. Modifying the copied template with the proposed improvement.
    3. Assigning this pilot template to a small, representative group of users or for a limited number of cases/time period.
    4. Clearly defining what you will measure to assess the pilot’s success (e.g., time reduction, error rate, user feedback).

Tallyfy for Piloting: Tallyfy Analytics on the piloted template can provide quantitative data on its performance, while task comments will capture qualitative feedback from the pilot users.

Prioritizing improvement ideas

Often, you’ll generate more good ideas than you can implement at once. Prioritization helps you focus on the changes that will deliver the most value.

  • Impact/Effort Matrix: This simple 2x2 matrix helps categorize ideas based on their potential impact (high/low) and the effort required to implement them (high/low).

    • High Impact, Low Effort (Quick Wins): These are often the best candidates to tackle first.
    • High Impact, High Effort (Major Projects): These require careful planning and resources.
    • Low Impact, Low Effort (Fill-ins/Incremental): Implement if time allows, or bundle them.
    • Low Impact, High Effort (Reconsider/Time Sinks): Generally avoid these unless there’s a compelling strategic reason.

  • Criteria Selection Matrix: For more formal prioritization, list your potential solutions and score them against pre-defined criteria (e.g., cost to implement, time to implement, customer satisfaction improvement, alignment with strategic goals). Each criterion can be weighted based on its importance.

Tallyfy for Prioritization: Ideas captured in Tallyfy comments can be discussed collaboratively. The anticipated impact might be informed by Tallyfy Analytics (e.g., “this step takes 50% of the process time, so improving it would be high impact”). The effort can be judged by how easy it is to modify the Tallyfy template.

By systematically generating, testing, and prioritizing your improvement ideas, you can ensure that your efforts are focused, effective, and lead to meaningful enhancements in your Tallyfy-managed processes.

How To > Improve processes effectively

Organizations can continuously enhance their operations by gathering team feedback analyzing customer input identifying bottlenecks through data and implementing changes systematically while maintaining focus on delivering customer value through standardized yet flexible processes.
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