This guide has been written to assist you the process owner, facilitator or leader to achieve business performance improvement through Process Management implementation. The specific objectives of these guidelines are to:

• Confirm your understanding of process management and its role in quality management implementation.
• Improve your understanding of the steps involved in the Process Management methodology.
• Give you a brief description of potential tools to use for analyzing and improving processes.
• Give you the understanding and confidence to guide process owners, other team leaders and members to perform quality work and to get results.
• Provide you with an understanding of how to be most effective within the organization.

To gain maximum benefit from this guide, Process Owners facilitators or leaders should have previously participated in a Process Management Implementation workshop and will have been a team member or leader under the guidance of a previously qualified facilitator.

The guide will help you to resolve process problems, continuously improve a process, and design a process (often referred to as process re-design or re- engineering or process engineering). The following are the sections and sub-sections covered in the guide.

B. What is quality?
Quality is defined as meeting customer requirements. Customers may define their needs, but suppliers are often the experts on what can actually be delivered. Therefore suppliers must agree with customers on what it is to be delivered. These are the customer requirements that suppliers must meet exactly and consistently.

Customer needs keep advancing over time. Creativity and innovation is needed to meet tomorrow’s customer needs. Suppliers must anticipate these changing needs and agree on the requirements that will be met. Exceeding today’s requirement will quickly change the requirement to be met. It is important, therefore, that requirements be met exactly until a new requirement has been agreed to.

All work is a process – things go in, get worked upon, and come out differently. Each activity has an output that goes to someone – an internal or external customer. Since processes deliver to customers and it is the outputs of these processes that must meet customer requirements, we must ensure that outputs meet requirements. In addition to customer requirements, other stakeholders have requirements. Processes are also the vehicle to meet these requirements. Depending on the scope of your implementation efforts, you may also want to define these requirements and use the same approach to ensure they are also met.

C. The process management focus of quality management

Business performance improvement management implementation focuses on four key areas:

• Process management.
• People development.
• Measurement.
• Technology.

While attention to any one of these elements is likely to improve performance in the short term, a balanced focus on all four areas will build permanent foundations for improved organizational performance that is self-sustained and continuous.

As already stated, Process Management is a vehicle to shift from management by control-functions and people-to management by commitment-commitment to managing processes and meeting customer requirements. In parallel with the requirement to establish effective improvement mechanisms and measurement for the processes, there is a need to identify necessary cultural change. Cultural change is started because process management requires a process focus and this process view is not consistent with the functional view of the organization, since processes cross traditional functional boundaries. Processes convert customer needs into satisfied customers and money in the hands of the shareholders. The traditional functional view of the organization is not aligned with this.

The implementation of Process Management is initiated as a top-down effort and transitions to a bottom-up effort. Initially a number of processes are selected for implementation efforts. Process management implementation is a progression through three phases as illustrated below.

These three phases overlap and are addressed using the Process Management Methodology. Sometimes a part of the implementation strategy is to also establish issue/problem solving teams and/or process design teams. The same methodology is used. This 17-step methodology is broken into two parts in this guide.

• The first part, described in Chapter II, is called Process Analysis and covers Steps 1 to 8.
• The second part, described in Chapter III, is called Process Improvement and covers Steps 9 to 17.

A diagram of the steps themselves follows in section E of this chapter.

D. How to use this guide
In this section we will outline what you will find when you open this guide and describe how the sections are organized. This will help you to use the Process Management Methodology in the most effective way possible.

This guide has 3 main components:

• The Process Management Methodology (Chapters II to IV).
• Standard forms used by the team (Chapter V).
• Tools for Process Management (Chapter VI).

Sprinkled throughout are key pieces of advice. To highlight these, we have used a special key symbol to alert you.

E. Process Management Methodology steps