The Secret To Successfully Rolling Out Process Improvements

The key to a successful process improvement initiative is in its execution.

What we normally do in improving a process in business is establish priorities based on a problem to be fixed. Organizations tend to devote so much time fixing one area of the business.

For example, a company makes a quarterly prioritization around onboarding and doing this massive optimization of onboarding. This never works because what happens when you improve only one area or one department is that everything else does not match the same level of quality–giving customers an inconsistent experience.

Here’s what you should do instead:

👉Improve processes across the entire customer experience

Instead of zooming in and improving one department or one area only, you’re looking high and wide across the entire customer life cycle from Presales to Follow-Up & Repurchase. Then you aggregate your improvements together because the power of process improvement is in the accumulation of the tiny things you are improving.

When identifying process problems to solve, prioritize the ones that improve your customer experience and drive value. They are completely equitable. Identify the ones that are going to drive the most ROI in the shortest amount of time. Prioritizing problems to solve sets the scope for your improvement.

👉Put a time limit and set a Go-Live

Once you identified the problems to focus on, set a time limit of 30 days to develop improvements or what we call countermeasures. In general, you are looking at about 20 improvements in one go-live. You set a go-live date for every version of your improvements. This way, you have a clear delineation when your people can say from that day onwards we do things this way. You roll out versions of improvements just like product development.

There is a three-to-four-month lead time for every version. After three to four months, you roll out another 20 improvements. Then you continue to roll out versions until you’re sustaining a level of quality, meaning you are able to drive consistency in your processes. Only when you are able to deliver the same…