3 Ways to Measure the Effectiveness of Your Processes

Congratulations! You’ve documented your company’s core processes. It’s a big undertaking for teams to simplify and document their processes. The next step is to roll them out to everyone in the company and get them followed by all. But how do you do that?

Developing A Scorecard

You should be measuring the performance of your processes on a company or departmental scorecard. Some teams get stuck here, because they want to measure too many steps of their core processes, which is overwhelming. Or they don’t measure the right steps on their scorecards. Either way, they don’t truly have a real-time pulse on whether their processes are working or not.

Here are three steps to simplify how and what to measure on your scorecard to ensure that your processes (and people) are working!

1) Measure Compliance

First, you’ll need to know whether your team is complying with the steps in your core process. You’re asking if the process is Done Right. One way to measure this is to spot-check a key step in your process to make sure it’s Done Right. You don’t need to check every step or every instance of every step. You just need to check enough instances and steps to get sufficient data to satisfy yourself that your people are consistently following the process.

2) Measure Frequency

How often is the step performed? If it’s something that only gets performed once a quarter, it’s probably not worth measuring on a weekly scorecard. If it’s a step that gets performed 42 times in a week, then having a handful of spot checks may give you the data you need.

3) Measure the Outcome

Here you’re measuring the Desired Result. If all the steps of the process were followed, the result of doing the process should produce the correct result. For example, if the goal is to produce 42 widgets a week, or to generate two new clients a week, then those are the desired outcomes that we want to measure on the scorecard to know whether the right results are being generated in any given week.

Putting It Together

Here’s how you put it all together. Imagine that you’re measuring compliance, frequency, and outcome on one of your scorecards. And suppose that the compliance and frequency numbers show that a given process is on track, but the outcome measurable is off track. This will show you one of two things:

• You’ve got a GWC™ issue.
• The numbers were misreported.

In other words, you’ve got a People Issue, and it gets brought to the surface quickly. Using your Process and Data Components™ together in this way will eliminate any ambiguity for your people. They will know where they stand and whether they’re doing the job right, often enough, and with the desired result – and so will you.