Capturing Business Processes
A few weeks ago, I was lucky enough to attend an excellent lecture by Sir Terry Leahy, the CEO of Tesco, at the Saïd Business School. Amoung his many observations, the one that particularly struck me is the assertion that there are two reasons that Tesco have been able to maintain high profit margins compared to its competitors. These are Moore’s law and though a drive to increase productivity by simpliflying business processes because, he proposed, companies can only make their services better and cheaper by making them simpler.
Inspired by this, I’ve been thinking about how I can take this lesson and apply it to my own work. One things I’ve tried is sketching flow diagrams to capture different aspects of my job, which has been a real revelation. I found that even tasks which should be simple had many steps associated with them and so as I’ve recorded what I’ve done in the past, I’ve immediately been able to spot potential productivity improvements and shortcuts.
There are a few obvious ways forward from my current position, all of which I intend to follow through with: I can share the processes that I have captured with colleagues to turn my experience from being individual to institutional knowledge. Secondly, I can start to automate some of the tasks, either by producing standard forms and templates which I can handle more easily or by writing little programmes to do some of the more tedious actions automatically. However, before I make this investment in time in writing these programmes, seeing the whole process in front of me will allow me to pick off low hanging fruit before deciding whether to tackle the harder parts. In the past, I’ve often found that it’s easy to add some automation but very difficult to make something completely automatic.
On a final note, Sir Terry said that it was a failure to capture processes in this matter that was a major cause of the NHS’s problems with IT. As someone who likes to dive into the technology, the reminder to think strategically was a timely one.
