Process Improvement in Practice

Examine five work management styles, from traditional and involvement to cross-functional, matrix, and process-focused, and see how organizations mature in quality, service, and cost reduction through process management.

Explain how traditional organization uses a directive, top-down approach with managers supervising and making decisions. Note the blame-gaming culture within this hierarchical structure and the limited autonomy for employees.

Senior management values workers' ideas and uses quality circles, task forces, and teams to collect and implement them, while sub-optimization and conflicting objectives across functions threaten the entire process.

Functional managers oversee a specific process and its human resources, secure buy-in, remove obstacles, listen to concerns, keep people informed and involved, and guide through consensus and problem-solving.

Identify a broken process by recognizing symptoms such as long cycle times, multiple owners, finger-pointing, excessive approvals, and firefighting. Use customer feedback and quality data to select priority for improvement.

Analyze frustration through the four lenses to reveal process frustrations and quality problems. Apply the idea bin tool and a 2-by-2 impact-effort matrix to identify feasible, high-impact improvements with buy-in.

Apply step three of the process improvement methodology to map the functional and task-procedure flowchart of the air-cooled chiller process and diagnose time, cost, quality, and frustration for improvement.

Step four introduces customer interviews within the ten-step process improvement method, guiding you to sample customers, rank needs and wants, and generate a customer report card.

Benchmark your process against direct competitors, non-competing organizations, and world-class practices, using customer report cards and industry sources plus Baldrige and EFQM frameworks for best practices.

Design guides require a feedback loop with metrics and KPIs to measure process health, use quality control charts, and listen to workers to drive continuous improvement.

Apply four-lens diagnosis, customer interviews, and benchmarks to craft a future process map and improvement log guided by 32 design principles in the air-cooled chiller design-to-ship case study.

Teams refine multiple design proposals, present them to sponsors, secure stakeholder buy-in, and assess implementation risks to select a final future process with step seven implementation options.