Workflow Benefits

I've recently witnessed numerous cases of businesses that are lacking processes for their core business deliverables. We've been told that processes run the business and people run the processes, but I personally believe that people play a larger role in the business than just running processes.

Nevertheless it is difficult to provide consistent quality and scale the business if good processes are not in place. The companion to a good porcess is a process tool. I was asked yesterday "how do you keep people from backsliding on new processes that you set up?", and the answer is simply to institute tools to track progress and make the new porcess a part of the job. Once a tool is in place and funtioning porperly it is awfully ahrd to move back to the old way of doing things. Sometimes we refer about this as adoption, and work very hard to get buy-in from the various users of the process to ensure that the tool is adopted fully. I argue that once this has happened it is much harder to backslide to an old way of doing things, and if the tool is configured well, it can identify a lack of adoption, or exceptions to the process-which in turn become management tasks.

Mark