Once all of your staff understand the importance process management, benefits of time or waste reduction and improvements around efficiency or customer satisfaction will be realised.

In order to start the journey of continuous improvement, small steps are often required to ensure that a solid foundation is laid to ensure the best chance of seeing sustainable, long-term results. A very high level description of the approach that a business would adopt would include:

• Document processes – until a business has clearly documented processes, that are standardised and repeatable, a business cannot understand what tasks its employees are truly doing and how they are performing them. Not to mention having undocumented processes increases risk to your organisation through having dependency of only a single key-person knowing how to perform a certain task – as is often the case in small-medium businesses.
• Measure processes – once processes are documented and standardised, process measures can be introduced that will allow your business to understand key benchmarks such as process time or error rates. Only with process measures, will a business be able to truly understand what processes are broken and what processes, that if fixed, would deliver the best returns.
• Continuous improvement of processes – once measures are in place and data is available, the continuous improvement cycle can commence with business decisions and resources being targeted on making improvements that deliver the best ‘bang for your buck’ in your business

What are some of the barriers to businesses not managing their processes effectively?

• Time and Resources – Often Business Owners or Business Operations Managers don’t have the time to self-manage an end-to-end improvement project with daily responsibilities of managing or owning a business taking up most, if not all of their work time.
• Cost – Businesses don’t want the expense of long, consultant engagements.
• Unclear Business Strategy – By not having a clearly articulated and understood business roadmap or strategy in place, it is often difficult to establish a viable project scope, which if not clearly defined at a project’s commencement, will lead to failure at implementation – along with lost time and money!

Citcom can work directly with your organisation to develop the most suitable way of working together, including flexibility of hours worked, so that your costs are managed, your time is spent working in your business while Citcom manages the rest!

When is a good time to call Citcom?

• Before looking to implement a new system or technology platform – ensure that you understand your current core business processes as well as have a clearly defined scope for change once a new system has been implemented. You must also ensure that the investment in technology is going to be justified against your core business strategy.
• Before looking to launch new products or services or hire additional staff – generally changes to business processes are required to ensure that the new way of working, is optimally streamlined with existing business processes.
• Before changes to regulations or legislation, specific to your business, commence – make sure that your business understands how to meet the needs of new regulations and embed any changes in process accordingly.
• While reviewing your Business Continuity and Risk plans – ensure that your business critical processes are identified and documented so that in the event of disaster, your business can resume critical business activities quickly.
• When looking to adapt to increased global threats across the business environment eg: data and network breaches, invoice fraud, business email compromise.

How Citcom can work with your business?

Analysis and Design

• Facilitate workshops with key staff to determine the current business problems and identify process improvement opportunities
• Review and document current business processes through Interviews with key staff or review of existing process data or procedure documentation
• Gather requirements to ensure correct scoping and prioritisation of projects
• Ensuring business process improvement opportunities are aligned with your business strategy and core business processes

Implementation

• Identify, recommend and implement changes to internal business processes
• Identify and recommend technology solutions that can be implemented in conjunction with our technology partners
• Define and communicate the expected change impacts to staff and any external stakeholders
• Implement process measures and visibility
• Document future state business processes including procedure manuals
• Provide staff training

Citcom’s Approach?

We can tailor an approach to working with your business depending on the scope of work, your budget and time available. We can be engaged;

• On an hourly basis – as and when needed for small ad-hoc tasks for example; to document procedures.
• On a daily basis – again, as and when needed for completion of mini-projects.
• On a longer term for completion of major process improvement initiatives.

Our approach can be adapted across all types of businesses from small to medium to large as well public, private and not for profit.