Monday, June 22, 2009

Business Process Improvement for Nonprofits - Part 9: Final Step?

Step 9 – Start Again

This is not like the penalty card in some board game that sends you back to the beginning. Instead, see this as closing a loop and taking the opportunity to circle back through the process in a healthy, endless review and improvement of your business processes.

As one process improves, it may help you identify others that need improvement or even pave the way to improve related processes you could not have changed before. As your staff gets on the BPI wagon, they will start spotting opportunities for even minor improvements in isolated processes. Finding ways to improve the work they do makes the work itself more interesting in some ways and certainly focuses their minds where you want them: thinking about the best way to perform their responsibilities at work.

If you collect your project materials in an electronic folder, review and update them to adapt to each new initiative, and document the baselines before and performance results after your changes, you will develop quite a history of progressive improvement for your department or entire organization. It will become a legacy anyone can be proud of.

Here is the final outline of this series of posts:
7. Monitor the results: “Are we getting the results we sought?”
8. Diagnosis/Assessment: “If no improvement, why?” “If that worked, what else can we improve?”
9. Begin a renewed effort: no process is perfect and no office runs perfectly. There is always room for improvement!
Happy BPI'ing!

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