Ten â€œMust Dosâ€ For Designing Customer-Aligned Business Process

change management Ten â€œMust Dosâ€ For Designing Customer Aligned Business Process Here is a synopsis of a thought provoking post from Dick Lee’s excellent High-Yield Methods weblog, Ten â€œMust Dosâ€ For Designing Customer-Aligned Business Process:

Many companies make a fundamental error at the start of redesigning business process to support customer-alignment. They call over to manufacturing. Or they may call a six sigma or Lean process consultant. Or, they may even call IT. Regardless, the results are the same. Manufacturing (or systems) process denizens wind up applying inappropriate process design approaches in customer-facing areasâ€”which often does more harm than good, and at best produces mediocre results.

How do you know if this scenario is about to do a tap dance on your head? Look for these ten key elements the process design approach youâ€™re about to apply to customer-facing functions.

Here are 4 of the must-dos that I find of particularly critical…

1. Start with customer-aligned strategies. â€œCustomer-aligned processâ€ means business process fully supports customer-aligned business strategies. If you donâ€™t align strategies with process, by default youâ€™ll wind up designing for efficiency, which almost always means taking value away from customers rather than adding value. Ironically, because taking the customer-aligned approach creates the freedom to restructure rather than just trim around the edges, it almost always produces more efficiency than designing for efficiency.

2. Workflow redesign must be coupled with information flow redesign. In variable environments such as sales, marketing and customer care, work means managing and communicating information. Work and information are tied at the umbilical cord. So if you optimize workflow, it only makes sense that you have to change information flow with it.

3. The work process reengineering must lead to application software requirements. Variable workers need application software tools for managing and communicating information. And if the work process design doesnâ€™t produce software requirements, youâ€™ll inevitably wind up with software thatâ€™s misaligned with work.

4. Process design must include change management strategies. Variable functions have great interdependency. A change in one may rebound all over the company. Plus, because of the complexity of variable environments, process change inevitably triggers unintended consequences that must be carefully managed. Companies have to carefully plan and stage changeâ€”and the planning has to emanate from the process work.

The other 6 must-dos are:

5. You need a workflow scanning tool.
6. Workflow must be uncoupled from individual work process.
7. The drill-down to work process occurs after workflow is redesigned.
8. The process approach has to â€œspecifyâ€ systems architecture changes.
9. Business process redesign, including both workflow and work process, has to be participative.
10. The process methodology has to be accessible to all.

Check out the complete source article for explanations of the each of these must-dos.