Tag: Design

Workflow Design Principles, A Start

Posted on by tjustman

With any design principle, it’s a guideline, not a rule.  Design principles must be balanced and aligned to customer needs.  Building a house is a great example of balancing design principles against needs.  If you want a side entry garage, for example (so the neighbors can’t easily see your disastrous clutter) you likely need a corner lot.  But if your design principles tell you to avoid corner lots due to traffic and resale value, then you have a conflict of principles.  Same with these.

For the purpose of these principles, let’s loosely define workflow as steps taken in a presumably transactional process.  My lean towards transactional, information-based processes is strong in these, but I think they are generic enough to be applied to any workflow.  Indeed, I have applied some Lean Six Sigma, which are methodologies rooted in manufacturing.

Workflow Design Principles

  • Workflow should be progressed as far as possible by the same person before handing off to another associate, to automation, or to the customer (minimizes hand-offs and waiting time)
  • A task should minimize the number of systems the associate must use
  • A task should minimize switching back and forth between systems
  • A task should minimize the number of people required to touch it
  • A task should minimize manual computation or lookup steps (e.g. use of automatic calculations)
  • A task should minimize user judgement calls (e.g. use of decision tools)
  • Job roles/responsibilities and organizations should not be defined by the system, but rather by internal/external customer needs

How to apply these?  One approach would be to write them on a whiteboard as you work through designing a process and refer to them continually.  Also, once you have a completed process, review this list and then refer back to your process to see how well you adhered to them.  Again, with any design principles, you will need to consider your constraints and every one of them won’t be achieved fully.  By thinking about the ideal state we can start building a project backlog for future efforts.

I’d love your feedback, if anything, to add to the list!

First Post, Welcome, and what’s a Process Sherpa?

Posted on by tjustman

Welcome to my little bit of the Internet! The purpose of this website is to connect my passion for business process improvement with those who share my passion or could benefit from it. I like the idea of sharing my experience with others to make positive change in the world!

                  Hillary and Norgay

What’s a “Process Sherpa?” On a practical level, I must admit it’s a domain name that hasn’t been taken! Ok, then what’s a Sherpa? Sherpas are the mountain people who live in the Himalayas and they are renown for being guides for mountaineers attempting the treacherous ascent of Mount Everest. These people are natural mountaineers, acclimatized to the oxygen-deprived atmosphere in the mountains. They lead the way, they know the route and the pitfalls, they carry oxygen bottles, and they make the journey possible. Sherpas seem to have been somewhat missed by history. If you’re like me (old!) you grew up being taught that the first person to climb Mount Everest was Sir Edmund Hillary, yet there was no mention of his Sherpa guide Tenzing Norgay! Now I don’t know how Mister Norgay took that snub but let’s assume the role of the Sherpa was to turn the mountaineer’s resources into success. The Sherpa takes the strategic direction from the intrepid mountaineer and turns it into accomplishment, without perhaps need for praise or fame, but satisfaction for a job well done. Part silent partner, part subject matter expert, and part project manager. In this context I seek to be your Sherpa of business process. You bring the strategic goal and I bring the know-how and the execution!

I ask for your strategic direction but what about mine? My objectives are to create awareness of tools, tips, pitfalls on the road to better processes. I want to share my stories – successful ones as well as failures – to engage your interest and open conversations. And I want to do it with my voice intact – I seek to avoid the dry, corporate, and clinical you get from my peers and really make this work FUN! Because life is too short, and I really want to work with fun people! I also NEED your input, your feedback, your stories, because I have so very much to learn!

So welcome aboard! please bring your comments, moaning, wailing, and complaints. Challenge me where applicable, and make me think deeper, because I aim to do the same for you!