I’ve been through a lot of process mapping sessions in my life. I’ve had the good opportunity to lead many, and also the opportunity to sit in and observe. It always surprises me how often the current state processes are mapped, and then people go straight into the future state process mapping without real reflection. Sometimes I’ve even seen people go into future state without bothering with mapping the current state.
There are a couple of ways to draw conclusions from current state maps. Usually consulting organizations or the internal organization will simply look at the current state maps and compare them against best practices that the consultants have experienced with other clients. It’s funny when a software vendor does process mapping because inevitably the opportunities that they find in the current state have nothing to do with industry leading practices, but instead about software capabilities. Theoretically these capabilities should be roughly aligned with leading practices and client enhancement requests, but if you look at future state demos, they are still all about the flashiness of the product and not demonstrating business and process value.
The second way of looking at current state processes is the Kaizen burst, a method used often in LEAN approaches. The Kaizen burst looks at the current state process and asks a series of questions. Where is there delay/waiting, unnecessary transportation, over-processing, and excess motion. You can often see these wastes from the current state process maps based on simply the number of boxes involved in a particular sub-process. For example, you can find unnecessary transportation in the HR arena pretty much any place you have a manual handoff that software could automate in a workflow. Over processing often involves a single process that is performed by more than one person, or might involve multiple systems to complete the process. Whatever it is, Kaizen bursts are useful to view waste and identify where the ore opportunities are – it’s sort of the 80/20 rule, and the Kaizen burst can easily and quickly identify the 80% in 20% of the time, in other words, it will identify the low hanging fruit.
I’m not saying that you should go in and implement the Kaizen burst or a LEAN methodology, every quality and process methodology has a similar approach. What I am saying is that these approaches yield a quick analysis that is often a simple visual measurement of the current state process and that they can discover significant cost savings without much effort. They also take you away from the wrote consulting or vendor “boxes” that seem so prevalent in the industry these days.
2 responses to “Kaizen Bursts”
Hi Dubs,
Although I agree that current state needs to be taken into account in process redesign efforts, I often see far too much time devoted to documenting a current state that is admittedly inadequate. This is particularly true in HR/Talent Management processes which do not require the precision of manufacturing processes. The highly detailed documentation of current state processes was invented by consulting firms as a way to generate tons of documentation and bill clients for lots of time. This focus on current state results in organizations clinging to old methods and attempting to duplicate as much of a current state as possible – rather than embracing the opportunity to adopt new processes/technologies and all the opportunities they offer. I believe in many cases it is appropriate to spend as little time as possible on current state if an organization has made the decision to leverage technology to transform their processes.
I absolutely agree. Often, especially when adopting new technologies, the current state can be almost completely ignored. I don’t really advocate this, but organization leadership often realize it’s time to completely deconstruct the existing and pop in a future that is redesigned from the ground up.
From a change management perspective, and from a role redefinition point of view, it’s really hard to actually implement behavioral change without a good current state analysis.
IMHO