Getting to the Root Cause of a Process Inefficiency
Process inefficiencies are a major hindrance to the success of any organization. They can lead to wasted time, resources and decreased productivity. While it may be tempting to simply address the symptoms of these inefficiencies, truly effective solutions require getting to the root cause. Diagnosing symptoms in a process only postpones issues, which can have a more drastic effect on your team and goals later on. By identifying the underlying issues and making targeted improvements, organizations can streamline their processes and achieve greater efficiency.
Process inefficiencies can manifest in a variety of ways including employee frustration, delays, bottlenecks, and mistakes. Identifying the weed and pulling all of its roots out is crucial for organizations to remain competitive, improve their bottom line, and stay on top of goals.
Frame Your Process
Before you dive into the reasons for process inefficiency, it's important to understand why you even have the process in the first place. A good visualization here is a SIPOC diagram. SIPOC stands for Suppliers, Inputs, Process, Outputs/Outcomes, and Customers.
I typically start with outcomes and work my way from right to left but if you haven’t fully defined your Voice-Of-The-Customer (VOC) then you need to start with your Customer column. Your VOC defines what your customer cares about - is it speed and timeliness, is it high quality, is it project cost effectiveness? There are multiple factors that can build out a VOC. It’s important to have this clarity when building out your processes so that your time can be best spent on things that actually impact your customer.
It’s also important to note here that sometimes your customer is internal. For instance, a salesperson has external customers but also has to collaborate with accounting departments for the customer/client to be accurately invoiced for projects. In this sense, the accounting department is the salesperson’s customer as they need to provide the proposal and contract details so that the accounting department can effectively do their jobs.
After defining your customer and your desired outcomes, you can then identify what inputs are needed to execute on the process and who the suppliers are (the people actually providing those inputs).
Framing your process like this helps keep what matters in perspective as you investigate inefficiencies.
Get to the Root Cause
Once you understand the purpose of a process, you can then start investigating. Investigation shouldn’t imply that someone is doing something wrong or that a particular department is to blame. It simply means you’re going to start turning over rocks to really figure out what’s going on.
My favorite method here is to do stakeholder interviews and ask “Why?”. During interviews, employees can lay out their perspective of a process from beginning to end and they get a chance to vent. It’s almost like corporate therapy. A lot of employees have never really been asked what’s frustrating them or what’s not working for them so these interviews can actually be very insightful. To keep the focus on the process and not on office gossip, I ask why for everything - why they do something a particular way, why they are frustrated with something, why they haven’t tried something else. Why is a simple yet impactful question that helps paint the entire picture.
You can also use group brainstorming approaches like Fishbone Exercises or Critical Feedback Times to engage in healthy conflict discussions that can unveil hidden team dynamics that contribute to inefficiencies.
After you complete whichever approaches you choose, map out the process. It’s easier to compare flow chart maps from one process to another than it is to compare detailed notes. This visualization will help to highlight gaps, points of miscommunication, potential errors, etc. It’s important that you have a visualization that includes all stakeholders - stakeholders are anyone involved in or affected by a process. Limiting notes to just management paints a limited and inaccurate picture that will ultimately not reveal the root cause of your inefficiencies. Your employees are your on-the-ground-intelligence as they are the ones executing most of the day-to-day tasks in a process, so why would you paint a picture that doesn’t include their perspective?
Implement Change
Change management has many different approaches and can take on a life of its own. If you’ve built a culture that is focused on continuous improvement, then change management doesn’t need to be something scary. And it’s much easier to enact change in smaller teams than at the large, corporate level. For the sake of this article, we’re going to keep change management relatively simple.
Once you’ve identified the root cause of your process inefficiency, you need to rework your process to address these issues and then implement change that will be effective long-term. Stakeholder interviews already address a huge challenge in change management – buy-in. By interviewing your team, your team already feels heard and valued and are therefore more likely to go along with process changes. Though, those changes need to address their concerns and if some concerns are not addressed with the changes, it’s important to explain why.
Any changes should be mapped out on a flow chart and detailed in an SOP so that your team has a visualization and clear instructions on how to execute tasks in the new process. These documents should be presented to the team with the opportunity for them to ask questions so they feel confident with any changes. You should also identify a process owner. This person will hold everyone else accountable for following the new process. Your process owner should understand that this is not a “power position” to point out when people are doing things the wrong way, but rather a position for accountability, effective communication, and leadership. It should be someone that is heavily involved in the process and who will be able to easily spot if process changes aren’t being implemented effectively.