When launching a process improvement effort, your foundational step is understanding how your business currently works and how it needs to change. I call this “process baselining”. It gives you the baseline or starting point upon which your process improvement efforts can be built.  Baselining involves:

documenting the process steps along with their supporting information (i.e., roles, timing, volumes, metrics, etc.), understanding the places where the process breaks down (breakpoints), identifying areas of waste (i.e., redundancies, delays, etc.). 

Gregg V. Rock talks with Dr. Geary A. Rummler, industry pioneer in process and performance improvement

Dr. Geary A. Rummler’s book, Improving Performance-How to Manage the White Space on the Organization Chart, is considered one of the groundbreaking works in business process and performance improvement. As a co-founder of the Performance Design Lab, he has continued to evolve and expand the theory base and methodologies that can lead to breakthrough approaches to management systems, measurement, strategy, and organization structure design and implementation. His latest book, Serious Performance Consulting According to Rummler, is designed to enable performance consultants to move beyond their focus on individuals to produce organizational results. He talked to Gregg V. Rock, Editor of BPMinstitute.org.