Introduction
When approaching process improvement, I have found that the most effective changes were implemented when I have followed a structured flow.
I have mapped out the structure below as a principle methodology for when I am working to improve a process.
Although each project is different, some may even skip around these steps or may start halfway through. This process has worked well for the projects I've done.
It all starts with data
Foundational Data
I typically start by trying to find data where it may already exists, often times teams have reports for the actions their teams complete, or the things that impact their business.
We are looking for data of two types; first is metrics that matter and impact the individual or business.
This is things like KPIs, quantity of tasks, or market details;
Business Metric:
Tasks completed each week
Time between tasks
Items sold in a week
Employee Wages
Personal Metrics:
Weekly Chores Completed
Time at Work
Income
Bill Costs
Regardless of personal or professional, these are the things that we may not be able to change directly, so we want to identify what other metrics we may be able to track more specifically that are things we can improve
So the next piece of data we want is the things we think might be related to these things that we can control (some ;
Employee Break Durations
Time Spent Focus at Work
Time Spent Driving to Work
Average Bed Time
Common Existing Data Sources
Reporting Reporting
Key Production Metrics (KPIs)
Tableau, PowerBI, Excel Spreadsheet
Historical Bills
Task Management Tools
iOS Reminders
JIRA
Planner
Asana
Notion
Existing System Software
More Unique
Website Data Requests/Extraction
Network Monitoring
Chat Services
Government Public Data