When you set new performance goals, consider stress testing the business processes that deliver the goals.

Process Triaging is a good way do this testing.

The triage findings — all generated by your own experts, indicate the types and sizes of improvement proposals your team says it will take to meet your goals.

Process Triaging generates an improvement proposal to address a pain point that inhibits your, and your team’s goals.

Each improvement proposal is triaged to one of four solutions:  ANALYZE if the likely cause is not obvious, DESIGN a best practice that addresses the pain, TRAIN (or learn) an existing best practice , and/or ENFORCE a best practice.

The first two — ANALYZE and DESIGN indicate a process design focus. Unless the process is designed better, additional cycles will just produce more — crap. The profile below shows a triage profile with 88% of the improvement work focused on analyzing pain points (36%) and designing best practices (52%).  Almost half of the improvements Big Now project-size efforts — lots of stressful heavy lifting.  This profile is common to start-ups or established companies who have big-gap growth objectives.

52% Small Now’s, 48% Big Now’s, 36% Analyze’s, 52% Design’s, 12% Train’s, No Enforces

At the other end of the scale, a triage profile with mostly TRAIN & ENFORCE existing best practices indicates the process doesn’t have significant design issues. The focus is mostly people and logistics — right people in right seats.  The profile below is one of a franchise-quality shop. Most of the best practices are in place.  The team’s stresses will be resource management — on-boarding new hires and focused process supervision.

This profile has 94% Train and/or Enforce Best Practices — entirely scalable.

When you reset your strategic objectives, consider ‘stress testing’ your core processes to manage everyone’s expectations and make sure you’re working on the enabling improvements first.

Here’s a deck of a dozen or so Process Triage Profiles

Contact us  or reach out to one of our Certified Process Triage Facilitators for further information.