Process: Define and Improve

The process has been designed or corrected, conflicts resolved, and gaps closed.

 

The resulting process has been reviewed and approved by stake holders.

 

​Technology and other external requirements have been determined.  Decision have been  made about things the process depends on or provides.

 

The process has been validated, and demonstrated.  Data and people have participated in mock runs (modeling) of the process with as many variations as needed.

 

The process is documented, so it can be communicated clearly to the next step towards the goal. 

 

The deliverables are detailed and formatted as required by the next step and methodology, such as Agile, CMMI, ISO, SSAE, SOC, etc...

The service uses one or more screen shares to review, design, create models, and test processes, with the people and data.  A visual and interactive screen sharing keeps participant focused and productive, and moves very quickly.  It’s easy to ‘undo’ or try something, and validate the process, on the screen share.  

 

Participants may also be involved in writing specific business rules, field mapping, or constraints interactively as required.  The participants are always, 'active participants’.

 

Several iterations are used to mimic process refinement over time, and move those lessons learned from “after implementation” into this process improvement step.

 

Offline, the information learned is processed into the custom level of detail and format requested.

Over 500 services performed in the last 10 years, helping stakeholders and CEO’s define processes for new products, apps, order management, supply chain, M&A, and risk management.  Thousands of lessons learned from seeing the resulting processes in action over 25 years.

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25 years of experience designing business and technology processes in Financial Services, E-Commerce, E-Learning, Airline, Human Resources, Hospital and Health Care, Shipping, Venture Capital and Private Equity, Defense and Space, and Telecommunications.

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Is this Agile or Waterfall?

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This service can be applied at any level of detail, and at any moment in project lifecycle.

It can be comprehensive and early, and produce waterfall scale results, or iteratively producing agile scale results and improvements.  The service is intended to facilitate meeting the business goal, and does not depend on the overall methodology used to achieve the goal.

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This service is very focused on only what is needed to move forward towards your goals.  Such as unblock specific revenue, integrate two systems, create or answer an RFP, pass compliance audit, design a new web app, answer M&A questions.  It is not a broad SixSigma or ISO process mapping event.
 

The time to complete the service is dependent on:

• The availability, information, and decision making of the participants.

• The number of steps and branches the process may have.

• The level of detail and the format of the output.

• The current state of the process, new, broken, changes required.

• External changes that the final process will depend on.

• Newly discovered details that must be incorporated into the process.

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During hundreds of recent executions, the durations have varied:

• 2 hours of screen sharing over 3 days, for an integration of 3 API’s for sales orders.

• 12 hours of screen sharing over 3 weeks for a complex ERP integration of multiple vendors and systems.

• An ongoing series of bi-weekly 2 hour sessions as a new line of business was created and incrementally rolled out to the public.  The output is given to the VP of sales for training, and to development for implementation.

• 6 hours of screen sharing interviews in a week, to provide due diligence during an acquisition.

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An estimate is provided after a scoping conversation, a retainer is used to burn down on an hourly basis in 30 minute increments.

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Hourly rates vary by origination of the request.

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Previous engagements have ranged from $1,000 to $20,000