How to Design A Good Process

Great processes make an organization more productive, reduce errors, and help people to do their jobs better. They also make it easier for new employees to get up to speed quickly and enable them to work faster and more efficiently. We need to understand what makes a great process to succeed with process improvement initiatives. We need to know how to design it and how to implement it in our organization.

The ideal process optimizes the value creation of the organization by identifying these activities, eliminating them, and streamlining the remaining ones. Let’s explore 8 principles on how to design a good process as well as practical tips on implementing it in your team or organization:

Good Process vs. Bad Process

Any process can be improved. However, not all processes are created equal. An ideal process will be efficient, consistent, and easy to understand. It will also be effective at creating the outcome you need. A bad process, on the other-hand, will be inefficient, inconsistent, and not easy to understand. It will be ineffective at creating the outcome you need.

Let’s look at how we can further define a good process and a bad process so that we know how to go about improving our organization’s processes.

Bad process
A bad process is unclear who does what and why. This process does not create value for the people using it. The people doing it are frustrated and stressed because the process is unclear, inconsistent, and overly complicated.

Good process
A good process is clear who does what and why. This process creates value for the people using it. The people doing it are satisfied because the process is clear, consistent, and easy to follow.

Define What’s Important and Why

The first step in designing a process is to define what you want to achieve with the process. Every process begins with a question or problem to solve. The goal of your process should be to solve a problem for your customers or users.

You must also look at the organization’s priorities and goals to make sure that your process is in line with them. The next step is to define why the problem exists. Why do your customers have this problem? What is the root cause? Once you know the why behind the problem, you can create an effective solution.

The solution must address the root cause of the problem in order to be truly effective. You must answer the following questions to define what you want to achieve with the process:

1. What problem are you trying to solve?
2. Why do customers have this problem?
3. How do customers currently solve the problem?
4. What would the ideal outcome be?
5. What other solutions have been tried before?

Be Specific About Who Does What

Once you have defined what you want to achieve with your process, you can start to think about the specifics of who does what.

First, decide on the roles that people play in the process. Whose job is it to initiate the process? Whose job is it to receive the products of the process? Whose job is it to create and approve the process?

Next, decide on the interactions between the different roles involved in the process. Think about the interactions between departments within your organization as well as the interactions between your organization and its suppliers and customers.

The specifics of the process will also depend on the technology being used and the type of products being produced or services being provided.

Be Specific About How Things Get Done

Once you have defined who does what and how the interactions between roles take place, you can decide how things get done. Think about the information, products, or services that have to flow through your process. How do they get from one stage to the next?

What do they look like at each stage of the process?

It is important to keep in mind that the process is a representation of reality. It is not reality itself. Processes are imperfect representations of the real world.

So, don’t try to design your processes based on a utopian fantasy of how things should work. Design them based on the reality of how things work.

Be Sure People Understand the Why

While you are designing the specifics of your process, make sure that people understand the why behind the decisions you make.

Ideally, you would want to approach the design of your process with a “why question” in mind. For example, why are we doing this? Why do we have to do that? Why are we collecting this data?

The why behind all the decisions you make will give people the confidence they need to know that the process is valid and that they are not wasting their time.

Make It Easy To Do the Right Thing

While you want to make sure that people understand the why behind the decisions you make, you also want to make it easy to do the right thing.

Designing a process is a lot like designing a road. You want to make sure that the road gets you from one place to another. You also want to make sure that the road is easy to drive on and easy to navigate. If your process is hard to navigate, people will get lost. They will waste time trying to navigate it and won’t be able to do their jobs well.

Keep in mind that some people are inherently lazy. You have to design your process to make it easy for people to do the right thing.

Reduce The Need for Cognitive Capacity

Cognitive capacity is the amount of mental energy available for a particular task. It is influenced by how difficult a task is and how familiar we are with it. Processes consume cognitive capacity. Too many detailed process steps and too much complexity in a process will use up most of an employee’s cognitive capacity. They will be left with very little capacity left over to do their actual job.  The more complex your process is, the more people will struggle to understand it. As a result, this could lead to stress and uninterest to complete the task or job.   A good process will be easy to understand while also being efficient.

Keep Track of the Bottlenecks

A bottleneck is a part of the organization that is not able to keep up with the rest. This could be the part of the organization that uses the most resources or the part of the organization that has the highest turnover rate.

There are two main types of bottlenecks. There are bottlenecks in the workflow of a process and there are bottlenecks in the organization as a whole also known as short-term and long-term. 

In a process, a bottleneck is a part that is not keeping up with the rest of the process. For example, a short-term bottleneck could be an unexpected increase in demand for your physical planner that exceeds the production capacity. This could be the part of the process that takes the longest or the part that uses the most resources.

Understanding the problem can help you look at the current state of things and decide what needs to be done to fix things. The first step in designing a process is to define what you want to achieve with the process. You must also decide on the priorities and goals of your organization so that your process stays in line with them.

In summary, designing a good process starts with a clear understanding of what you want to achieve and why. Once you have a clear understanding, you can start to design the specific process. You must decide on the roles that people play in the process, the interactions between the different roles involved, how things get done, and how easy it is to do the right thing. You must also consider the bottlenecks that could be in place in the process and in the organization.

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