7 Deadly Sins

of Process Excellence
Is your organization’s
process excellence program
victim to any of these 7
deadly sins? Read on to
find out what they are…
Sin #1:
Designing systems and
processes that don’t meet
customer needs
Ignore the needs of your customer at your peril. As Henry Ford once put it, “it’s the
customer who pays the wages.” If you get caught up in designing fancy processes
and systems that don’t ultimately serve the needs of those who pay your wages –
i.e. your customer - you might just find you’ve engineered yourself out of a job!
Sin #2:
Not involving your workers
in process improvement
Process improvement would be easy if it weren’t for the people, right? Wrong!
Your people are your most valuable source of ideas and information. They’re the
ones actually doing the work so they’ll be able to spot the opportunities and
problems faster than you. Not only that, but the likelihood that process
improvement will be successful is rapidly improved if workers come up with their
own solutions. After all, who likes to be bossed around?
Sin #3:
Misguided & misaligned
metrics
You can’t manage what you can’t measure was the mantra of former GE CEO Jack
Welch. Metrics are an important mechanism for making problems and
performance visible and helping to guide better decisions. But too often,
companies try to measure everything. This results in a situation where you’re data
rich but information poor. Worse, badly designed metrics can go awry and end up
rewarding the wrong kinds of behavior or even leading to completely unintended
consequences. Make sure you’re measuring what you should be measuring, that
the data is telling you what you think it’s telling you, and that you’ve thought
through how that information will be used.
Sin #4:
Lack of process visibility
and ownership
Does anyone in your company have any idea what’s really going on? In most
companies, everyone is so focused on their own piece of the puzzle that they lose
sight of the bigger picture. This can lead to inefficiency, sub-optimization and even
“pain” for your customers who get shunted from one department to the next.
Someone needs to be responsible for understanding and improving the entire
process and making its performance visible.
Sin #5:
Ignoring technology
Forget the old monolithic IT behemoths of days gone by. Today’s technology is
faster, lighter and easier to implement than ever before. You have the potential to
radically redesign and reinvent your processes for improved business performance
and happier customers. And if you don’t do it, you can bet your bottom dollar that
your competitors are working out how they’re going to. So time to cosy up and get
friendly with your IT team…
Sin #6:
Failure to continually
improve
In nature, species are constantly evolving to better adapt to their environments
and outmanoeuvre their competitors. Those that fail to evolve rapidly enough
don’t survive. Why should companies be any different? Making continuous process
improvement part of the DNA of your company is not a “nice to have” but essential
to the long term success of your business.
Sin #7:
Making it too complicated
Do you really need a machine gun to kill a fly? Didn’t think so! If you find yourself
designing to complex solutions to simple problems, take a step back and ask
yourself “what would Steve Jobs have done?” Reduce complexity, strip out the
unnecessary and make your processes beautiful!
Do you agree with these 7 Deadly Sins of Process Excellence? Get your voice heard
by joining the roundtable discussion on them at the Nordic Enterprise and Process
Excellence Forum this May. http://www.pexnordics.com/
Meet and work with fellow process peers & colleagues from across the Nordic countries to gain
critical knowledge, debate tactics and figure out how to implement the next generation of
transformational strategies.

 NEW for 2014: find out how to achieve improved performance in all business units, from
product generation to customer focused process culture.
 NEW for 2014: address the 7 Deadly Sins Of Process Excellence in our dedicated
roundtable discussions.
 From your feedback in 2013: we're scheduling more case study presentations than ever
before, giving you first hand access to tried-and-tested process strategies.

Find out more at http://www.pexnordics.com/