A nexus to help business to analyse and improve processes

However, businesses with less experience in process improvement can be overwhelmed by the plethora of best practice approaches, ideologies and a large array of potential tools and techniques. In addition, a lot of research in this area has focused on antecedents or critical success factors for organisations to consider before embarking on their process improvement journey, and these have accumulated over recent years.

Although well intentioned this can produce a barrier type checklist that business feel they must address in some form before commencing. These two factors taken in conjunction with a potential lack of skills in this area means businesses sometimes struggle as to how to get started with developing their process improvement capability. 

Organisational capability can be classified as sets of activities, also known as practices or routines. In simple terms these are activities that groups of people in organisations should be proficient at in order for their organisation to develop capability in that area.

Research at Leeds Business school project investigated how to configure these ‘initialising’ practices to support the birth to infant stage of process improvement capability in contexts where there was limited or no process improvement knowledge or skills.  The findings identified a small number of core actionable practices that process improvement agents should be doing with participants and process actors (people who work in the target process to be improved)

Of particular note was that the research showed that each practice is a positively interdependent, in the sense that enacting one practice will potentially enhance all others. This can therefore be conceptualised as a ‘nexus’ of initialising practices. These practices are shown within a nexus of practice in the figure below, with enacted practices represented as black lines.

The grey lines indicate the research findings that enacting the core practices gave rise to a set of secondary positive practices including empowerment, trust and open relationships, and a process view, which means improvement agents can focus on the core practices.  

Another significant finding It was also identified that the choice of methodology used was not as important as having a clear pathway that agents and actors could all understand and follow, allowing businesses not to get bogged down in concern over the ‘right’ methodology, tools or techniques.

The work showed that previous descriptors of practices related to process mapping were not sufficiently discriminatory, and as a result not as helpful as they could have been in relating to practice. The table below is designed to help practitioners identify how these practices are identified and ordered making them easier to enact. 

The research also identified a difficult transition for process improvement practitioners – that of moving from constructing a process map of an existing process to that of understanding why a process behaves as it does, what is termed process analysis. The more proficient as business is at this practice the easier and more effective the process redesign, and this leads directly into better process management in the future.   

Other research projects have shown that sub practices associated with process analysis, that of sourcing data, data analysis, and visualisation of analysis are all difficult skills for businesses to acquire but this can be done via a combination of knowledge transfer and team coaching [Quartet Project].

Having a clear view of the core practices, and what they consist of, can give businesses a boost when it comes to initiating process improvement activity.

This blog is part of a series written by Dr Ollie Jones. Read Dr Jones's blog on using the 'Kazien model' to develop process improvement practices.