How to Manage a Business Process Improvement Project

Project management books abound, but you won’t find one that addresses how to manage a business process improvement (BPI) project. This article focuses on bridging that gap.

In a sense, a BPI project is just like any other project: You create a project plan to help keep you on track, as you always do, to ensure a successful implementation of a new or improved business process. However, the content is different and helps define the project management phases around the 10 steps of BPI. The 10 steps, outlined here, create most of the work breakdown structure (WBS) activities.

1. Create process inventory: identify and prioritize the list of processes
2. Establish the basis of the process.: identify the scope and limits of the process
3. Draw the process map: flow charts and business process documentation
4. Estimate the time and cost of the process: estimate process and cycle times, and calculate process costs
5. Validate the process map and time estimates: obtain acceptance of the activities of the process and the time required for each step
6. Apply improvement techniques.: improve the business process through the use of a series of techniques such as the elimination of bureaucracy
7. Create internal controls, tools and metrics: process error testing by identifying where an error can occur and how to avoid it, creating tools to help automate a step in the process and simplify an employee’s job, and developing metrics so you understand if the business process delivers what customers want from the process
8. Test and rework– Create the test plan to validate that the process and tools are working as expected and adapt as needed
9. implement the change: generate an impact analysis to highlight the changes that need to occur; a communication plan to make the appropriate customers, clients, and employees aware of the change; and a training plan to make sure employees understand the new process
10. Develop a continuous improvement plan.– Decide how often to review customer needs, internal controls, metrics, or other critical information

When creating a project plan, three stages which works well for a BPI project includes:

• Tea Design phase: This phase focuses on the definition and improvement of the business process and includes steps 1 to 6 and part of step 7.
• Tea Developing Phase: In this phase, the primary focus is on creating the tools (part of step 7) and testing the process and tools (step 8). In this part of the project plan, list the tools identified during the design phase and estimate how long you think it will take to create them. If a report, for example, is identified as an activity, it should include subtasks such as defining report specifications, agreeing on report design, and developing the report. While the design phase remains somewhat static from project to project, the developing The phase varies widely and estimating time becomes more difficult because it is not known in advance which tools the project team may identify during the first phase.
• Tea Implementation phase: This phase includes the implementation of the new process in the organization (step 9) and the identification of how to achieve continuous improvement (step 10).

As with any other project plan, you can use the concept of tracks within each of the phases to further organize the work. The implementation phase, for example, might include a change management track which lists the changes that have to happen for the new process to work; has communication channel that outlines the communication strategy you will use to inform appropriate employees of changes to the process; et un training track that defines how to train affected employees.

In addition to including the 10 steps in the project plan, it also includes other normal project tasks such as building the team, setting the budget, communicating with the sponsor or management, and creating an executive summary.

Managing a BPI project requires you to be more active than a conventional project manager on a large project. In a normal project, the primary responsibility of the project manager is orchestrate the work. At BPI, the project manager:

• You are also the leader, or facilitator, of the work and you are the person who leads the project team through each of the 10 steps.
• He is responsible for administrative tasks, such as translating the hand-drawn process map into a tool such as Microsoft Visio and creating process documentation.
• Manage team dynamics, anticipate issues, and diffuse team member concerns when a proposed process change may affect their work.

You can use project software, such as Microsoft Office Project, to create the project plan, or for simple BPI efforts, you can simply use a spreadsheet. Include the same information in the spreadsheet as you would in a software application, including task name, duration, start/finish dates, predecessors, and resource names. Of course, one downside to using a spreadsheet is that you have to calculate the duration of each task and its associated start/end dates. Another drawback is the inability to use a Gantt chart to display planned versus planned. actual schedules as the project progresses, and the Gantt chart is a good tool to use to show progress graphically. However, for simple BPI projects, a spreadsheet works well.

The best part of creating a project plan for a BPI project is that you can use the framework over and over again because of the similarity of BPI projects. While you’ll need to adjust the time estimates based on the complexity of your chosen business process, the activities and tasks remain the same.

Copyright 2012 Susan Page