So, where do you start? All your operations involve business processes, and they\u2019ve all got to work reliably and efficiently for the business to succeed.<\/p>\n
But your operations are more than just your processes.<\/strong> All of those processes must work together, like a smoothly running machine, in support of your business model and goals. That way, you\u2019re profitable, your customers are satisfied, your staffers are happy and motivated to do their best work, and you\u2019re coming up with the innovations that will keep you ahead of the competitive curve.<\/p>\n Ensuring that the entire organization \u2014 including its processes \u2014 is running smoothly is the purpose of an operational and capability assessment<\/strong>.<\/p>\n A process assessment<\/strong> makes sure any individual process is working the way it should.<\/p>\n While the two are separate, they\u2019re also related \u2014 actually, they complement each other. In this article, we\u2019ll define both types of assessments, why you need them, and how to get them started.<\/p>\n Let\u2019s take a big-picture view of both assessment types and why they work together. Then, we\u2019ll look at each assessment closer so you can know when either of them is right for you.<\/p>\n The operational and capability assessment evaluates your entire organization\u2019s skills, resources and processes to see if they\u2019re meeting your basic business goals.<\/strong> It looks at all those factors to see how they\u2019re helping or hurting the way your technology and your workforce are performing.<\/p>\n Then it recommends how you can be more efficient, how you can better deploy your resources, and if you should take on new capabilities or functions. The assessment’s goal is making the whole business work in sync to meet its strategic goals instead of having your departments or programs working at cross-purposes. For example, the assessment could determine how well the organization manages supply chains or develops new products.<\/p>\n On the other hand, a process assessment tells you how effective and efficient your specific processes or workflows are, how well or poorly they work, and how they can be improved through approaches such as automation or redesign.<\/strong> A good example is assessing how efficient your customer order fulfillment process is.<\/p>\n Despite their differences, these two assessments are synergistic. Frequently, one assessment will point the way to the other. Here\u2019s what we mean.<\/p>\n Frequently, we\u2019ll get a client at Centric that comes to us with across-the-enterprise problems. They need our help to figure out how to tackle them.<\/p>\n While they won\u2019t want to shoulder the expense of doing process assessments for the whole business, they will want an operational and capability assessment that can help them prioritize the processes that need attention first. Then, they might pick out one of those areas to do a process assessment on a pilot basis, so they can see how it\u2019s done.<\/p>\n Often, we\u2019ll train people to become a business transformation or continuous improvement team so they can handle the process assessments across the board over time. Usually, it\u2019s this same group of people that would do both types of assessments \u2014 operational, capability and process.<\/p>\n The two assessments do share certain characteristics.<\/p>\n Operational and capability assessments and process assessments have three parts:<\/p>\n Inevitably, you will identify \u201cfast path\u201d (or \u201cquick hit\u201d) improvements that you can immediately address to begin delivering incremental business value.<\/p>\n In each case, you can measure the assessment’s value through key performance indicators (KPI) that evaluate the efficiency and effectiveness of operations or processes. The most critical KPI categories are:<\/p>\n Indeed, you can tell that your assessment has improved operations if you can see a quantifiable positive shift in these KPIs after you install changes inspired by the assessment findings.<\/p>\n Among other things, you can determine if you have eliminated or mitigated delays, inefficiencies, or quality issues from any bottlenecks your assessment identified. If you established baseline measurement and tracking before making any changes, you can compare the baseline against post-implementation data to measure the impact of improvements.<\/p>\n If you involved employees in the assessment process, you can see if their understanding of assessment-related issues has grown and how much they have bought in to the proposed changes. Since the assessment should deliver clear, specific recommendations for process improvement, you can track the extent to which those recommended actions have been implemented and how beneficial they have been.<\/strong><\/p>\n If the assessment determines that corrective actions are necessary, it follows that your business must be able to put them into place. That\u2019s where operational readiness comes in.<\/p>\n Basically, operational readiness<\/a> is a process that positions you to spot and confront any issues that might cause problems with your intended improvements, such as failure to provide adequate staff, training, and resources to achieve your goals.<\/p>\n The benefits of operational readiness are considerable:<\/p>\n On a grand scale, an operational and capability assessment can help an organization realize its immediate and downstream objectives and meet the needs of all its stakeholders \u2014 customers, employees, investors, and associated contractors and vendors.<\/strong><\/p>\n Ensuring optimal performance across the enterprise is a constant challenge that requires you to continuously improve your operational efficiency. The way to do that is to perform operational and capability assessments<\/a> and implement the resulting improvement opportunities.<\/p>\n If you can answer the following questions up front, that\u2019ll go a long way toward helping you realize the full potential of an operational and capability assessment.<\/p>\n Two of the typical triggers for an assessment are low employee morale and internal dysfunction. By doing a comprehensive evaluation of all the people, processes and systems in the organization, you can improve employees\u2019 engagement and experience<\/a> by addressing issues that affect their productivity, morale, and job satisfaction.<\/p>\n This also makes it possible to put effective change management strategies in place for easier transitions.<\/strong> And, down the line, bettering your processes \u2014 including more efficient workflows \u2014 will deliver greater employee adoption.<\/p>\n A few big potential obstacles come to mind.<\/p>\n Four building blocks are integral to a successful operational and capability assessment strategy \u2014 risk mitigation, process mapping, collaboration tools, and process documentation.<\/p>\n Performing an operational risk assessment reduces the potential for operational damage. This is a rigorous and systematic process your risk management teams can perform to find, measure, and manage potential threats before they can wreak havoc.<\/p>\n This process helps you develop preventive measures that make it less likely that a risk emerges and corrective steps that can lessen the damage a materialized risk can create.<\/p>\n The chronology of an operational risk assessment is:<\/p>\n It\u2019s a fact of business life: However profitable, visionary, and efficient a business is, no business is immune from process breakdowns. An exhaustive process assessment \u2014 which, in a sense, is a microcosm or the larger-scale operational and capability assessment \u2014 can help you find and eliminate those failures.<\/p>\n While most people who do process mapping are used to the typical swimlane process diagrams, these often are overkill in assessments, especially when capturing current state process details.<\/p>\n A popular alternative to swimlane process diagrams is SIPOC, or suppliers, inputs, process, outputs, and customers<\/a>. This tool gives you a high-level understanding of \u2014 what else \u2014 the suppliers, inputs, process steps, outputs, and customers involved in a particular process without requiring an extensive step-by-step mapping effort.<\/p>\n The SIPOC reveals how the project goals will be realized. It focuses on the inputs and outputs of the process instead of the individual steps that compose the process.<\/p>\n While you might ultimately decide to dive deeper in certain areas, starting with a SIPOC will show you, early on, where your pain points and opportunities exist. Then you can focus on them in greater detail later.<\/strong><\/p>\n Identifying your process mapping needs will then help you determine the type of tools you need to collaborate.<\/p>\n For collaboration, you need one or more tools that not only let you chat and edit documents in real-time but also let you conduct virtual meetings and presentations you can record.<\/p>\n At Centric, we generally use Microsoft Teams<\/a> because it has these capabilities, but companies often choose hybrid options that involve multiple tools, such as Canva, Figma, or Mural. Whatever tool you use must be able to collect and organize existing documentation while letting you share the data with all project team members.<\/p>\n You can begin preparing to assess your actual process by conducting meetings with all your key stakeholders (for about 30 to 60 minutes) to reach a clearly understood agreement on the scope of the effort, both included and excluded.<\/p>\n You can accomplish this by developing either a process inventory and hierarchy, using a SIPOC diagram, or a combination of the two. A process inventory simply lists all the processes involved. You can manipulate this into a hierarchy to ensure you\u2019re looking at everything at the same level of detail. For example, \u201cConduct Accounts Payable\u201d and \u201cEnter the Invoice Amount into the Amount field on the Payables screen\u201d are not equals.<\/p>\n Once you discover a broken process, you need a detailed roadmap for fixing it. That roadmap must be custom-fitted to your own circumstances, because improving a process isn\u2019t a one-size-fits-all approach. You develop that blueprint by asking and answering some basic questions.<\/p>\n Process maturity<\/a> boosts an organization\u2019s teamwork, customer relations outreach, and efficiency to help people and teams be more accountable. For our purposes, process maturity covers all processes within a company, and it is a critical measure of enterprisewide health.<\/p>\n Companies possess significant process maturity when they standardize processes across teams, apply consistent metrics, regularly assess the efficiency and effectiveness of processes, and implant a culture of continuous improvement that adapts processes to company growth and change and always seeks and achieves better outcomes.<\/p>\n Another way to think about process maturity at the operational level \u2014 that is, business processes as a whole \u2014 is that high-level maturity happens when:<\/strong><\/p>\n In this context, an operational risk assessment is no less important than an operational and capability assessment. That’s because any number of factors can interfere with and harm an organization\u2019s operations, processes, and internal systems \u2014 and, consequently, its bottom line and reputation.<\/p>\n Everybody on your team should determine how well-established and effective \u2014 or ineffective \u2014 the process is. In that way, you can find the path to follow for process improvement<\/a>.<\/p>\n Centric has a great process maturity model<\/a> that you can use for this purpose. It ranks maturity level from Level 1 (low) to Level 5 (high).<\/p>\n Many companies that use it rate their current maturity at Level 1, but they want to get to a Level 5 immediately. While that big jump sometimes is possible, it often needs to happen more slowly, in incremental steps, by undertaking interim measures to deliver modest business value at first (and avoid bogging down a project by not delivering any value for an extended period).<\/p>\n If you want to improve a process, what does that look like? Centric has a chart that shows six possible answers \u2014 we call them value drivers<\/a> \u2014 that a company can choose from.<\/p>\n The six value drivers of process excellence: visibility and transparency, financial performance, business agility, scalability, reliability and predictability, customer experience and quality.<\/p><\/div>\n Companies typically say, \u201cI want all of those.\u201d But it\u2019s much better, and more realistic, to select one, two, or a combination of these.<\/p>\n Why? Well, if you go after all of these value drivers, how would you resolve a dispute between sales (customer experience), operations (scalability), finance (financial performance), and audit (reliability)? You need to make this choice upfront, one time, so that you don\u2019t have to make it over and over again throughout the project lifecycle.<\/p>\nOperational Assessment vs. Process Assessment: What\u2019s the Difference?<\/h2>\n
What Do Operational Assessment and Process Assessment Have in Common?<\/h2>\n
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Can You Implement Any Recommended Changes?<\/h3>\n
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The Case for an Operational and Capability Assessment<\/h2>\n
How Will This Affect Employee Engagement and Satisfaction?<\/h3>\n
What Are the Toughest Challenges to Overcome?<\/h3>\n
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Operational Assessment Tools: Process Mapping, SIPOC and More<\/h2>\n
Risk Mitigation Through Comprehensive Process Evaluation<\/h3>\n
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Process Mapping<\/h3>\n
Collaboration Tools<\/h3>\n
Process Documentation<\/h3>\n
Understand Process Assessment: The Key to Business Improvement<\/h2>\n
Evaluating Process Effectiveness: An Introduction to the Process Maturity Model<\/h3>\n
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What Is Your Process Assessment Goal?<\/h2>\n
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<\/a>How Do You Define the Scope and Parameters of Success?<\/h3>\n
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