When there are too many factors within a process to be improved and multiple processes to be assessed and improved as well, what would be the best way to approach it? One of the ideas I have is to try affinity mapping. Any other suggestions? Saving Changes...
A simple suggestion would be to use FMEA and work on improving one thing at a time. Affinity mapping can be part of the process for individual improvements.
Have you analyzed the situation using value stream mapping (if its applicable to your situation)? Saving Changes...
I’ve spent a bit of my career as an enterprise level process SME and I would start by saying that you may have to try multiple approaches before you find one that works. For example, a manufacturing process may have more data to use for something like Six Sigma, than an office process that is difficult to measure.
Some process improvement efforts start with a failure of some kind, and you may be able to use an approach such as the 5-Whys, to find the root cause. If you have multiple parts of a process that need improvement, you can try to do that at each step. Sometimes you find however that approach doesn’t work and you wind up going in circles. If you have several things that went wrong at one step, your 5-whys becomes very large and unmanageable. It can become unclear what is the cause vs. effect.
What I do then is work in a chronological fashion, map out the entire process clearly, gather the people who work the process, and then simply brainstorm at each step what went wrong without trying to drill down deeper to root causes, and capture everyone’s thoughts. Then just as you mentioned, you can affinitize the problems and find general themes. It is less structured, but that can actually help keep people engaged because people often like to complain about why their jobs are difficult.
Communication issues are a good example. When you have process issues where communication is a driver, you will often see it at multiple steps. The 5-whys becomes repetitive, but the general nature of the issue will start to become apparent when you see it occurring in several places. By affinitizing the inputs from the team, you can identify systemic problems that need to be address throughout the process, rather than trying to find a discrete single point failure. Saving Changes...
Luis BrancoCEO| Business Insight, Consultores de Gestão, LdªCarcavelos, Lisboa, Portugal
Dear Divya
Interesting your question
Thanks for sharing
It seems like a good idea to start by mapping the processes
Use A3 to identify and solve problems Saving Changes...
Depends what you are trying to improve. Is it effectiveness - accuracy and consistency? Is it efficiency?
The specific approach you use and the tools supporting that will depend on what the objective is...
Kiron Saving Changes...
Sergio Luis ConteHelping to create solutions for everyone| Worldwide based OrganizationsBuenos Aires, Argentina
Difficult to add something to @Ketih comments above. In the last years I am using my own method that was taken by other organizations which uses a convination of Reingeneering (as Champy) and Lean. It works fine. Saving Changes...
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