With the New Year upon us, it’s a good time to consider how your organization is best using its resources. Often, we’re drawn to the latest trends in operational management – centralization, decentralization, agile and so on. Many of those approaches are great in the right context and offer numerous benefits for the company that they fit well with. However, sometimes it’s better to let your teams focus on what they do well rather than trying to shoehorn them into a one-size-fits-all strategy that only really helps some parts of the business.
When it comes to your business processes, no one knows them better than the people using them day in and day out. They’re your subject matter experts with a wealth of hard-won knowledge about your operations and best practices. It makes no sense to task business analysts with amassing this information when it’s already right there, waiting to be captured. Instead, utilizing a process platform that puts the power to easily capture and map processes in the hands of front-line workers allows them to document their work efficiently and build up a valuable knowledge asset in the process. Effective artificial intelligence (AI) tools can be implemented to assist in the exercise, serving as a copilot for your teams and reducing the burden of breaking down what they do into viable process information.
That then frees your process experts to be the ones to gather those artifacts and curate them into an efficient process library. They’re the ones that know how to optimize processes and have insights into how intelligent automation can save time, effort and resources. Allow them to take the raw materials captured on the ‘shop floor’ and refine them through specialist tools into something that will serve the vision of continuous improvement in your organization. The benefits are numerous:
Teams can do what they do best
Your employees are freed from extra meetings and unnecessary tasks and can focus on their essential work. It’s in doing that work that they can capture processes and gather the vital process knowledge they have unique insights into. They’re able to be more productive, and accurate process information is gathered at the very grassroots level.
Documentation supports business activity
These processes will make sense because they’re created by the people with the best understanding of your operations. Supporting them with intelligent process tools that can craft process documentation from their inputs means you get all the benefits of their experience captured in a usable format. Your process documentation will be an accurate reflection of the real state of your business operations, which is the perfect starting point.
Process experts create process solutions
When you let your experts play to their strengths, your center of excellence can do what it does best – optimize your business operations through the application of effective process automation and management. They’re the ones best suited to identifying opportunities for continuous improvement, and most familiar with the raft of tools within your process management suite. The optimal use of their time is to improve what exists and increase the value gained from the work being done on the frontlines.
Process tools get used effectively
Process management tools are powerful assets for continuous improvement, but they need to be utilized effectively to make a difference. With so many responsibilities, frontline staff won’t have the time or focus to master them or use them to their full potential. A great process management platform will give them the essentials they need to capture their workflows in an efficient and user-friendly way but also provide the process experts with the automation and management tools they need to take those processes to the next level. By focusing efforts on your teams’ specialties, you ensure the tools you have invested in are being used to their fullest.
As your business plunges into the promise of 2025, consider how you’re making the best use of the people in your organization. While management trends come and go, don’t forget to let your experts do what they do best and build your momentum tow