Tips for Prioritizing Business Process Improvement Efforts

Prioritize processes that have the greatest impact on customers.

The following tips can help prioritize your efforts in process improvement.

• Determine which process in your team is most critical to your team's ability to contribute to the organization.  Ask team members, as well as external stakeholders such as vendors and customers for their point of view.
• Prioritize processes that have the greatest impact on customers.
• Select processes for improvement that will generate the most benefit for the least amount of investment
• Look for processes that result in costly problems--such as failure to meet customer needs, high costs, or long cycle times.
• Identify processes needing improvement based on internal considerations.  For example, a problematic process is causing unnecessary conflict among team members, preventing them from concentrating on meeting customers' needs.

ACTION POINT:  Consider the tips above when reviewing processes that need improving.