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What influences a process? – part 13

5/23/2012

20. Do people get trained?
A funny question? It is surprising what people don't get trained on but are expected to know what to do. People must be trained and have the right skills for the process.

21. What is the skill level of the people?
The quality of your labour will impact both the cost and quality performance of the process. It can be better to have fewer, higher paid, higher skilled people than lots of cheap unskilled labour because as we all know you get what you pay for.

22. Are the working hours appropriate?
If someone is working regular overtime they are either:

Milking overtime rates, or
Have to much work, or
Do not have the right skills or training

There are also two other reasons to know the working hours:

If you are comparing your process against someone else, do they work the same hours as you?
If people need to contact others as part of the process are those people available (ie: if borders are crossed are there time zone changes)

What influences a process? – part 12

5/15/2012

19. What IT systems are used?
Systems can cause process issues. They can be:

Old with limited functionality
Highly customised so they become hard to maintain and upgrade
Simple, small or not able to scale up to the volume of activity required
Complicated with users not able to take advantage of what is there
Strictly structured without the flexibility the organisation needs
Structured in such a way that the organisation needs to redesign its process to fit the system. Fine if the organisation is prepared to do this, but more often than not the organisation tries to adapt the system to fit it
Locked down with users not able to access areas they need to see to do their jobs
Costly to implement and maintain. If you opt to implement one of the gold plated solutions you had better have deep pockets. Their functionality is great but their cost is high and they need focus to get the most out of them.

What influences a process? – part 11

5/10/2012

17. Is performance measured?
To understand and improve a process its performance needs to be measured. You need to know what is happening to the process and what the people involved are doing. But don't get carried away. You don't need to measure everything.

18. How good is the process?
Is it simple and easy to follow? If the process is time consuming or difficult to follow people will not complete it properly or try to find ways around it (guaranteed).

What influences a process? – part 10

5/3/2012

16. What is the leadership style?
The culture of an organisation and the atmosphere of a team come from its leadership. But unfortunately not everyone is a born leader and not everyone who thinks they are a good leader really is.

Micro managers can drain the initiative from a team and make people nervous about making decisions.
Temperamental managers have people ducking for cover
The “my best mate” managers can find dealing with poor performance difficult.

People can be trained to be better leaders and managers but often people are promoted into manager roles and left to sort it out for themselves.

What influences a process? – part 9

4/22/2012

15. What is the culture of the organisation?
All organisations have their own culture. You will find similarities across organisations but this is one area where they are often unique as a consequence of the mix of people within the organisation.

Culture has a huge impact and is at the root of many process issues (eg: problem ownership and acceptance of change). But it is the hardest thing to change, and if you want to change it takes dedication and time.

If you want to successfully implement process improvements you need a culture that promotes and accepts change.

What influences a process? – part 8

4/11/2012

13. What is the pay structure?
Are you are good, bad or average payer?

Besides impacting your cost performance, if you are a bad payer your cost may be low but your staff turnover is probably high unless there is some other advantage to people staying. But being a top payer is not necessary good.

14. What is the location?
Are you in a political / economically stable country with good infrastructure? Instability increases cost and reduces quality.

If you are in a low cost country you may focus on using labour rather than technology. That brings management / skills headaches and labour rate benefits do not last forever.

If you are in a small town your premises and labour costs are probably cheap compared to large cities. But getting good staff may be hard as there is a smaller labour pool. If you are in the centre of a large city your premises costs will be higher than the suburbs and you may have higher staff costs to attract people into the centre of town through rush hour traffic.

What influences a process? – part 7

3/25/2012

12. How many are there of the following?

· Stock purchasing / receipting locations
· Finance teams process crosses
· Locations process crosses
· Businesses process crosses
· Industry sectors process crosses
· Countries process crosses

The more of each of these factors your organisation has the harder the standardisation of the process becomes. It can be hard enough achieving consistency and responsiveness in one location for each of these factors. Add multiples and you can expect minor drops resulting from each factor in the areas of cost effectiveness, productivity, turnaround times, responsiveness to queries, etc.

If you have multiple for each of these factors accept they will have an impact. You may have to accept more process variations than you would like. You will need to get smart on how you communicate (Intranet, workflows, site visits, regular communications) as you need to keep people informed and develop relationships to get the process to work. You will need to monitor your process to maintain standardisation and will need a way of tracking queries to see where they originate from and how long they take to resolve. Especially as the further away a location is geographically the harder it is to justify the travel costs of sending administration staff out to those locations to resolve issues and develop relationships.

What influences a process? – part 6

2/26/2012

10. How many people are involved in the process versus those in the organisation?
If only 2-3 are involved in the process with 1000 in the organisation it will be hard to get people excited about improving the process, but it would be easy to improve. If 100 people were involved in the process it would be much easy to get managements attention, but the task of improving the process is made harder by the sheer numbers.

If the organisation is small people are probably multi-tasking and may not have the time or skill sets to perform the process properly and / or focus on improving it.

11. What is the organisation structure?
The organisation structure needs to fit the process.

A multi-layered hierarchy implies control but also less initiative and slower decisions making. Flat structures are more flexible but provide fewer promotion opportunities.

What influences a process? – part 5

2/12/2012

8. How many process variations are there?
The more variations you allow with the process the harder it will be to manage.

9. How many people are involved in the process?
People are generally the major cost for a process. The more people you have the greater the potential to save and the easier it is to justify technology investments. More people also mean’s better role coverage and perhaps specialisation.

But more time will be spent on staff management and it is harder to maintain standards. Also the more people involved in a process and the more people the process touches, the bigger the change management task for improving the process.

What influences a process? – part 4

12/8/2011

6. What % of the customers / vendors / stock / or whatever (relevant for process) are actually active?
The bigger the gap between what you have and what you actually use also impacts the cost and quality of the process. It will take longer to find what it is you actually want and wrong selections will be more common.

7. How many customers / vendors / stock / or whatever (relevant for process) produce 80+% of volume
The fewer of something you have making up the top 80% the easier the process will be to improve.

If you have 5000 customers it becomes daunting, but if you start with the top 100 you have an achievable target. Also it will get to the point where the marginal gain is not worth the effort. If some one trades with you only once or twice a year you may still want them as a customer but will want a simple, trouble free way of dealing with them.

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