Business is complicated.
This simple fact is often overlooked when consultants come to you with their process improvement programs. The processes that they offer are well documented, easy to follow and guaranteed to succeed... On paper.
But, in the real world, business is still complicated. Process adoption is complicated by ongoing projects, politics, organizational structure and management buy in.
Often, consultants want you to change the way you work to fit into the prescribed process. To be honest, if you can make this kind of all-at-once change, any new process has a good chance of succeeding. More often than not, competing priorities keep you from adopting the best practices right away. In the end, this can lead the company to abandon the improvement effort because there is simply no way to fit it in.
At Digital Smartworks, we think that process improvement is paramount to the success of any organization.
But, we are realists.
We believe that it is practically impossible to facilitate change from outside of the process. We encourage process improvements that work with your current organization and workflows.