Day 11: Optimizing Processes
In every organization you can distinguish a lot of processes that are dominantly present in your IWMS implementation. In Day 11 of the 31 Days to Improve your IWMS implementation challenge you are going to optimize processes.
Today’s teaching
Processes can be found everywhere within your organization in all kinds of different formats. E.g. A leave request of an employee, a purchase approval, construction of a new building. Every element within the workplace management domain is subject to processes. Just take a look around at your workplace (assuming that you are in your office building).
- The chair – Is it adjusted to your height? Who did this?
- The desk – How did it get there? Was it moved from another location? Or from the central storage?
- The office space – How do you think it stays clean? How are the cubicles organized
- The temperature – What does it take to ensure a constant temperature for you to work in?
- The office building – How do you think it is maintained? Or valued?
- Etc.
My point is that in every organization processes are in place to maximize your contribution to the organization. Unless you are working either for the Facilities Management or Real Estate Department your task is to contribute directly to the primary process of your organization.
How different is the world of the FM/RE Professional of which the sole task is to support you in any way they can. It seems a bit radical, but this is how the world of the FM/RE professional looks like.
These professionals can only effectively manage all these things by optimizing your business processes. This management approach is generally referred to as business process management.
Business Process Management
Business Process Management (BPM) is a field of management focused on aligning organizations with the wants and needs of clients. It is a holistic management approach that promotes business effectiveness and efficiency while striving for innovation, flexibility, and integration with technology. Business process management attempts to improve processes continuously. It could therefore be described as a “process optimization process. (Source: Wikipedia)
Although not every aspect of the definition is relevant for today’s task, it is one of the foundations of improving your IWMS implementation. You don’t improve your IWMS implementation overnight, it takes a lot of effort.
Business Process Lifecycle
At the hart of the Business Process Management methodology lies the Business Process Lifecycle.
The Business Process Lifecycle consists of 5 phases:
- Design – The identification of the current processes and the to-be processes
- Modeling – Model the theoretical process and combine these with (what-if) variables
- Execution – Execute the processes by using Integrated Workplace Management Systems.
- Monitoring – Identify problems and optimization chances for processes
- Optimization – Improve process performance
Each of the five phases will be discussed below, but the most emphasis will be on the Design, Modeling, Monitoring and Optimization phases as the Integrated Workplace Management System handles the automatic execution of processes.
Design Phase – Identifying Processes
If you want to optimize your processes, you need first to identify those processes. There are a couple of ways to identify processes within your organization:
Interview with FM/RE Staff
Your FM / RE staff has a lot of knowledge about the processes which occur in your organization. By interviewing them you can identify a lot of these processes. If you are going to interview them, you could use questions like:
- Which processes do you encounter the most?
- Which processes are most time consuming, and why?
- Which processes need improvement, and why?
- Which processes can be standardized, and why?
- Etc.
You want to identify processes and optimize them either by using your IWMS or by optimizing the organizational context.
Online Survey
In addition to interviewing FM/RE staff you can also publish an online survey about the processes. The reason NOT to include FM/RE staff in your analysis might be that FM/RE staff are sometimes biased and reduce the quality of the results.
An online survey could help you to identify processes which are either not implemented yet in your Integrated Workplace Management System, or just causing problems and annoyance.
Questions could include:
- What service should be available for you?
- What causes the most disturbance to your daily tasks
- What annoys you the most?
Responses to these questions can help you identify processes that need improvement. In addition to that, these responses will help you to prioritize the processes and align these with business goals.
Analyze the Help Desk Calls
Most organizations have some kind of help desk system to deal with employee service requests. In general, help desk functions are available for employees either by a call center or a web based self service system.
If you want to identify processes within the organization, analyze the numbers of calls coming in. The calls which come in most will have the greatest improvement potential.
Design Phase – To be processes
If you want to improve your IWMS implementation, you don’t only analyze the current processes, but in addition to that you also need to identify processes which have not yet been implemented in the organization.
The interview and the survey will provide some guidelines about which processes can be implemented. What’s more, an organizational vision on FM/RE can give you a lot of insight in processes that you can optimize.
Modeling Phase – Business Process Modeling
If you have identified organizational processes within the workplace management domain, you need to optimize those processes. To allow better understanding of the processes, the best thing to do is to model these processes. This is referred to as Business Process Modeling.
Business process modeling (BPM) in systems engineering and software engineering is the activity of representing processes of an enterprise, so that the current process may be analyzed and improved in future. BPM is typically performed by business analysts and managers who are seeking to improve process efficiency and quality. The process improvements identified by BPM may or may not require Information Technology involvement, although that is a common driver for the need to model a business process, by creating a process master. (Source: Wikipedia)
I would suggest to use Microsoft Visio or similar to create graphical representations of the processes you have identified.
Execution Phase – Business Process Execution
During the initial implementation you have most likely introduced a number of business rules that have been incorporated in the Integrated Workplace Management System.
The system should take care of the workflows, business rules and processes without any user intervention. Most IWMS systems have these options out of the box.
Monitoring Phase – Monitoring Processes
If you want to optimize your processes, you need to monitor constantly. In general, monitoring using a Integrated Workplace Management System is done through reports. Most advanced Integrated Workplace Management Systems provide:
- Internal Report Writers
- Dashboards
- External Report Writers such as Chrystal Reports, Cognos, etc.
Reports are an excellent way to identify bottlenecks in the processes. In addition to that, they can help you come up with optimization strategies.
What I wrote yesterday for the vendor scorecards is also very much true for your business processes. Only report on:
- Relevant criteria
- Actionable items
Remember that the content of the reports will be the foundation of your optimization efforts.
Optimization Phase – Optimizing Processes
If you have unambiguous information based on a report that based on the business rules you have set, something or somebody is frustrating the process (and the overall performance) it is time to take action accordingly.
E.g.
- Suppliers which consistently don’t live up to their Service Level Agreements – Select a different supplier
- Mechanics who endanger themselves – Give them a warning or fine
- Cleaning staff that forgets the dustbin in the toilet – Renegotiate the cleaning contract
- Lease contracts that have been automatically renewed because of neglected notice periods – Think of any action….
- Etc.
If you are going to remove actors from the process, or change actors always ensure that you monitor the effect of your actions constantly. In this way you ensure that the processes keep improving. (And your boss will be happy)
Today’s task
There are more processes than you can handle in day. Therefore today’s task is to
- Identify the 5 most frequent processes (Help Desk)
- Monitor these processes over the last 3 months (Reports)
- Analyze performance (both from the supplier side and yours)
- Make an action plan to improve the process
- Monitor the improvement
Good Luck
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good share, great article, very usefull for us…thanks!