Asking “why?” can go a long way – improving business processes
This post about business processes as a competitive advantage hit home for me (it references a poor experience with an airline — which I’m sure we’re all familiar with). I am often jokingly ridiculed for how often I ask “why?” when evaluating internal business processes and the way data is organized in the enterprise. Quite often the answer is surprisingly, “I don’t know, that’s how it was done before I got here.”
In the link above, the same is true for the airline industry. It’s as if the entire industry was designed for an ideal world where there are no mechanical malfunctions, bad weather, or delays. Contingency planning and business process optimization go such a long way to improving operational efficiency and most importantly, customer satisfaction. Revisiting pre-existing processes is also a great way to find the low-hanging fruit of improvements.
When building any new business process or system, I find that the following question is helpful to ask over and over during the planning phase: Does this process add value for the end-user?
Such a simple question can go a long way to avoiding a situation like in the above post/link.
No comments yet, be the first.