Process Management

Framework for Process

Improvement

Ray Gomez March 2016 Taken from an Article by Tawna Lawrence

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Mission
• Demonstrate process maturity, highlight
weaknesses, create space for improvement.
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• We need to respond faster and with more agility to internal and external
conditions and look to the proven benefits of process management for
help. Within process management, a process assessment framework (PAF)
can give you a structure and an analytical tool to develop your
organization’s foundation for strategic process visibility to meet its mission
and objectives. The PAF facilitates your development of an “as is” picture,
your initial baseline for immediate process improvement efforts; it can also
help you establish the mechanisms for solid process governance and
decision making to respond to new or changing quality requirements from
clients and stakeholders. Last, the PAF can give you the foundation for
business process management (BPM) efforts as you mature in your process
management capabilities and continuous improvement efforts.
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• When established correctly, a PAF enables you to demonstrate the

extent of process maturity in your organization, highlight areas of
weakness within functional activities, and create the space for
improvement to support operational excellence.
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• To maximize its value, use the process assessment framework to

describe (or profile) how well your organization’s processes are
enabled (or not) to meet business objectives. You can also use the
PAF to characterize the overall capacity of specific process areas; this
will supply your projects and operations a visibility into their own
processes as well as those of others, and show how well they support
specific functions for the overall benefit of the organization.
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• To baseline your initial profile, use the PAF to help to develop an

objective viewpoint for problem identification in your organization’s
process activities. You can also use it to prioritize operational areas
for improvement to best support the organization in meeting its
business needs.
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• Figure 1 below depicts a scalable method

that supports a PAF implementation.
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• Figure 1: Scalable assessment process (e.g.)

• Best practices for your initial PAF assessment include:
• Performing interviews and reviewing current processes for process discovery of the as-is state
• Documenting results of the interviews and analyzing them against best practices to determine project and portfolio
strengths and weaknesses
• Developing a phased implementation plan to methodically step through the identified improvements
• Developing a management approach to consistently monitor for continuous improvement over time
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• Figure 2 illustrates a generic PAF assessment and implementation approach. This begins with the
PAF current state assessment in Phase 1, pursuing the future state in Phase 2, and building through
Phase 3 to transition to and institutionalize a sustainable process management discipline in Phase
4.
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• Step 1: Your first task is to define the current state using assessment
interviews or reviews. These activities can include in-person
interviews, documentation reviews, and so on. The PAF documents
the interaction of your Team with the tools and processes currently in
place in the organization—including automated systems that enable
appropriate implementation and communication among and between
business functions. Your initial interviews also create the opportunity
for your stakeholders—executives, managers, and employees—to
comment on current operational methods. Using this data collection,
the assessment gives stakeholders the foundation for a feedback
channel (see steps 2 and 3) for how an improved future state could be
achieved through new or changed process activities.
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• Potential problem—lack of resources to define the current state.

Depending on executive resource commitment for your effort, you
will have to determine the best way to generate the data in building
your current state. Limited resources (e.g., time, access, and people)
may guide you to a documentation review in a specific functional
area, while strong executive visibility may give you the resources for
extended, focused interviews across multiple operations and
functions. Your key objective is to generate concrete data or evidence
that provides insight into how much (or even how little) your
organization structures and understands its process activities.
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• Step 2: Following the interviews and data collection, analyze your

current state process evidence using best practices or frameworks
established by relevant processes , e.g., Project Management; Tools;
Six Sigma; and others. Then organize your analysis to highlight and
baseline any gaps existing between your process implementations
and the best practice or benchmark. Your resulting PAF maturity
profile is the basis for your improvement recommendations to build
the process maturity of your organization and enhance its business
performance. These improvement opportunities are prioritized with
management to determine which key process improvements can be
implemented for “quick wins” and which will require a more
deliberate approach over a longer period of time
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• • Potential problem—lack of extended management involvement results in

skewed prioritization efforts. You must focus prioritization efforts to guide and
inform multiple key stakeholders and management to effectively prioritize
potential process improvement efforts. Quite often prioritization criteria are
focused too specifically on a single stakeholder or indicator, for example, a
specific operational silo or cost reduction. Your prioritization should include
enough criteria to cover the people and technology perspectives of your business
processes, not just the activities, to promote more comprehensive efforts to
enable change and improve multiple performance indicators within the scope of
your analysis. Your key objective is to ensure a proactive and collaborative
approach to evaluate and prioritize improvement efforts, enabling all aspects of
your processes to respond to changes in your organization’s environment (e.g.,
the economy, customer demands, new competitors, etc.). You will increase the
likelihood of success and sustainment if you ensure that improvement priorities
are in line with both strategic and operational needs across the organization and
not simply focused on a very thin slice of the whole picture
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• Step 3: At this point your PAF provides the data, gap analysis, and
prioritized improvements that are subsequently constructed into a
phased implementation plan. This plan serves as a roadmap to
achieve increased process management efficiency within your
organization, including the key activities, products, and technology
enablers required to roll out and sustain improvement solutions. The
plan provides a definitive, documented set of activities and tasks for
completing improvement efforts and ensuring that process and
organizational objectives are fully met. This approach enhances
executive knowledge and control over project activities, reduces
overall risk to the effort, and serves as a basis for communication and
resource planning for implementation
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• • Potential problem—maintaining momentum and communication. You

will achieve process improvement through change, and change cannot take
place without management supporting and driving the effort and
supporting the structure to sustain it. You must develop a plan geared
specifically to your organization’s needs and focused on achievable tasks
and milestones; this will make improvements more likely and more
effective, and create the energy and momentum to sustain the effort in
periods of stress or adjustment. Additionally, your plan should include
regular communications as a core activity, which is also an area for
executive support and critical to the success of process improvement
efforts. Where appropriate, you should incorporate reassessment tasks for
appropriate sections of the baseline to measure the positive impact of
performance improvements, and share those results (and credit) with all
stakeholders in the organization.
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• Step 4: When you use a PAF to baseline and develop a phased

improvement effort, your organization is much more likely to achieve
observable business goals in addition to achieving higher process
capability.1 It is important you ensure that “progress” includes the status
against all process improvement goals, not just the percentage of process
activities satisfied in your capability profile.2 Once the organization’s
processes are documented and improvements deployed, you should track
the extent of progress made within the process profile, and then document
and implement a strategy to collect performance data on the progress of
process improvement goals and activities. Then, the improved processes
and their associated artifacts become the new standard against which your
organization can perform subsequent benchmarks to understand and
document continuous improvement over timed phases.
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• Figure 3: Process implementation over time

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• Over time, implemented and managed consistently (Figure 3), your PAF can
help to establish and support mechanisms for more refined process
management efforts such as business process management, which can
help your organization respond more flexibly to changes in its business
environment and subsequent process activities. As the basis for a BPM
effort, the PAF serves as an instrument to compile and analyze your
organization’s process capabilities, supporting it in becoming more process-
centric by providing visibility into decision making and management
efforts. A sound process-oriented perspective with a PAF can ensure more
efficient operations and the ability to respond rapidly to new demands.
This ultimately helps you identify and reduce redundant work activities in
the organization’s processes and provides more precision in managing
those parts of the process that are not automated, allowing your
organization to adapt to ever-changing market and business environments.
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• Notes:
Process improvement goals will provide the business objectives the
organization wants to achieve, which can be tracked over time with
the changes marked in the capability profile. Capability is the ability
to meet service or product quality objectives using a given process;
the “capability profile” characterizes the organization’s progress over
time against a selected benchmark, for any given process area.
Process Management: Credits

• M.B. Chrisses, M. Konrad, and S. Shrum. CMMI: Guidelines for

Process Integration and Product Improvement, second
edition (Addison-Wesley, 2006).

• Tawna Lawrence: Consulting Manager