Process thinking and doing is not something to be done by a specialist group, it should be done by everyone. It’s not something we do once a year as part of an annual planning cycle, everyone should be doing it every day. Continuous improvement means exactly that – continuous. Most changes will be quite small, occasionally they will be large. The objective is to nurture an ecosystem that is continuously and actively self-correcting. There is an important role for a central group of process specialists. Their role is not to “do process” to the rest of the organisation but to be educators, coaches, auditors and thereby support the development deep and wide process capability. We don’t want 5 process analysts, we want 5,000.

The only reason for discovering and analysing the stakeholders of a process is to find out how they measure its performance.

Modelling, analysis and presentation tools are important but they are useless without a sympathetic audience for their outputs. If you have the right mindset it’s a reasonably simple matter to choose the right toolset. The right mindset means that key stakeholders, especially senior decision makers, are convinced that process-based management is a compelling approach and that there is an urgent need to make it happen. To achieve a truly process-centric organisation you might spend 90% of your efforts on ‘mindset’ and 10% on ‘toolset’.

If process improvement projects only find the same changes any problem solving approach would discover, then what’s the point? We need to know that we’ve found the best ideas, ones that are occasionally remarkable. Process improvement and management is much more than traditional problem solving. It takes more effort, changes can be harder to implement, there will often be more resistance – in many respects the process approach is more challenging than isolated problem solving. There needs to be a return on this investment. We can’t expect it to happen every time, but, if the process approach is to have any credibility, occasionally the results of our process improvement projects need to be remarkable. Nobody is impressed by discovery of the obvious.