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How. The way in which
task must be performed must be clearly known and made explicit (documented) with necessary level of detail. It is important that this set of descriptions and instructions are easy to update, so best practices and lessons learned can be incorporated and widely employed.
When. Which activities precede and follow task.
Where activity is carried out.
The importance of efficiently deploying a process is also Dependant on number of persons that will be following procedure. The greater number is, more value that an efficient deployment provides. Think of claim processing department of an insurance company, people analyzing mortgage requests in a commercial bank or a big call center. These units normally have a great number of people executing same process.
The objective is that people executing process perform it as close as possible to new version of process, in shortest possible period of time. These two variables are extremely important to generate value and to recover resources invested in reengineering process.
Some of practices that can contribute to this objective include making procedures easily available in a format that facilitates its look up, training, controlling, incentivating process compliance, etc...
But applying this techniques alone is not a synonym for success.
The real challenge is to get participant buy in. These is were social and cultural factors must be taken in to account, and change management, knowledge management, management of expectations, etc... come into play.
Experience has shown, especially with knowledge workers, that involving process participants in decisions that affect them, ensuring that they are well informed and making them feel that their opinion is being taken into account, is more effective than forcing them to follow new processes. Although there are some cases were strict discipline must be used to enforce compliance with process, it is usually better to reward good attitudes than to punish non compliance.
Once process is being carried out following new process it is also very important to enable feedback to system. Process participants' opinions are extremely important to enhance process and it is likely that they have some good ideas to improve it. For example, performing a specific task in a way that can be institutionalized as a best practice, incorporated to procedure and deployed to every participant in process.
Lucas Rodríguez Cervera is founder of Nevant} Knowledge Process a company specialized in human-centric knowledge intensive business process technologies. They pioneered this concept with metoCube.
