Business process redesign promises to deliver increased operating efficiencies that can address pain points, improve customer and vendor relations, increase productivity and employee satisfaction, and create a more agile, competitive company. It can also be a time-consuming, daunting endeavor. But with the right approach, the investment can increase your company’s capacity to anticipate and respond to industry trends and market opportunities.

Areas of focus include:

• Identifying critical pain points that need long-term resolution. What’s the source of that problem? Is the sales process flawed? Are there distribution or supply chain issues? Drill down to the specific processes that are creating the problem you need to address, and make sure you’re not confusing wants with needs.
• Getting team buy-in. You might begin redesign projects by meeting with senior leaders, but you need to recognize the importance of “the people who touch the process.” Successful implementation depends on training those people and ensuring that group dynamics and communication support the initiative.
• Mapping processes, building your playbook. Verbal descriptions are a part of any teaching process, but their impact on learning can be limited. Mind maps, storyboards, flow charts, and other visualization tools can help people to see what’s happening and therefore have greater comfort and facility with the new process. In developing your process playbook, start with practical considerations. Make sure each redesign works with external processes and integrates seamlessly with the ecosystem.

Process redesign isn’t a quick fix, and it’s not a means of addressing an immediate operating problem. Even when a pain point creates a crisis, you can’t plan a process redesign reactively in response. You can’t do it in panic mode. Rather, you must look dispassionately at the process redesign, even if it was precipitated by a crisis.

Read the Process Redesign Built for Team Speed guide to learn how you can redesign process to push team speed—and growth—for the long haul.