Remember how clean and organized your car’s trunk was when you bought it? What does it look like now? First, one or two things take up residence, then a couple more, then….

The same thing happens with processes and procedures in organizations. When they’re first designed, they work well. But then life intrudes; the procedures need to be adapted to changing requirements, so they become more complex and less effective until they finally don’t fit your organization’s needs very well at all.

This happens so gradually that we don’t notice the decreased effectiveness, increasing workarounds, or increased frustration. We adapt and keep on trucking (pun intended), and the processes continue to require ever-increasing resources.

Unfortunately, processes and procedures do not have a “self-cleaning” option. The best way to streamline them is to map them out in some detail and ask, for each step, “Does this step add value to the final paying customer?” If the answer is “no”, you can (and should!) discontinue that step. If the answer is “yes”, you then ask, “Is this best way to accomplish this step?”, then take appropriate action.

This tool is called Value Stream Mapping. It works for ALL organizations in ALL industries. We recently led a workshop for a professional services company, teaching their employees how to use the tool to streamline one of their customer-facing processes. It worked wonderfully well. They will be using Value Stream Mapping to simplify and streamline other processes throughout the company.

Gary Langenwalter