Smart people document outcomes by @ecgstudio

W H I T E P A P E R
SMART PEOPLE
DOCUMENT OUTCOMES
C -S U IT E E X E CU T IV E S C A RE M O RE A BO U T BU S IN E SS
O U T CO M E S T H A N TR A DIT IO N A L PR O CE S S M A PP ING
we create understanding

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ecgstudio.com | Copyright © 2012 All Rights Reserved
“The culprits (of bad performance) are a variety of
organizational ‘ills,’ including lack of clear directions and
goals, sub-optimized processes, excessive paperwork
and reporting requirements, unproductive meetings,
inappropriate systems and tools, etc”
~ Tor Dahl, former president of the World Confederation of
Productivity Science and a member of the Board of Directors for the
American Productivity and Quality Center

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Outcome-oriented processes can help
your organization become more focused
and agile in several ways:
Increase Productivity: In today’s economy you need
to do more with fewer resources. Focusing on process
outcomes helps your organization increase its
productivity.
Speed to Market: When a new idea or product
comes along, effective processes helps you be one of
the leaders, not one of the followers who were too late
to take advantage of the new market.
Reach Global Markets: Outcome oriented
processes can help you streamline your supply chain
operations, so you can take advantage of opportunities
no matter where they may exist,
Achieve Compliance: Keeping up with complex
compliance, regulatory, and corporate governance
requirements can be very costly and time-consuming.
Using outcome-oriented processes helps you keep
these costs under control.
Accelerate Innovation: You need a business
environment where innovation isn’t only encouraged but
also where innovation is a normal part of daily operation.
Here, too, outcome-oriented processes can help make
that possible.
outcome oriented processes can help | outcome oriented process benefits your organization | changing to outcome-oriented process now makes sense | ecgstudio can help

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Understanding How Outcome Oriented
Processes Benefits Your Organization
The basic value proposition of outcome-oriented processes is
the ability to deliver what matters most with more precision
and higher quality.
Business processes are pervasive in any organization.
These processes represent all the activities that
organizations in all industries undertake. Some processes
are highly structured, such as high-volume
manufacturing processes, while others, such as medical
care that must be tailored to specific patients’ needs, are
more unstructured.
You may not think of the activities performed within
your organization as business processes, but that’s
exactly what they are. As you try to improve your
operations, you’re engaging in a process improvement
project. Clearly, you want to leverage advanced
methodologies and technologies to deliver consistent,
repeatable, and more efficient outcomes as you work on
this improvement project. Outcome-oriented processes
help you define and manage your business processes
so you can reach your desired goals.

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Making faster decisions
Speed and agility are very important to the success
of any business. Developing outcome-based
processes requires eliciting requirements and
attributes from process stakeholders. Process
stakeholders are those that contribute to and
depend on the process. Adding “outcomes” to the
traditional input-proces-output model results in
processes that flow smoother, with greater emphasis
on assuring the right information is delivered to the
right resource, at the right time, in the right manner.
Process-outcomes are constructed from
conversations with stakeholders. They are the meta
(or attribute) data that represents not just what is to
be delivered (output) but how (outcome).
Processes defined based on outcomes, creates
highly repeatable workflows and systems that
highlights both the activity as well as the outcome
(or value add). Distinguishing the elements in this
way, allows business leader to gain the right level of
process-visibility that enables them to make
systematic decisions more quickly, diagnose
breakdowns by activity, workflow or outcome
quality as well as system or resource.

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Only 59% of work time is productive
Check out what gets in the way of higher productivity:
§Inufficient planning and control (43%)
§Inadequate management (23%)
§ Poor working morale
systems and tools, etc”

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Making better decisions
Because outcome-oriented processes can help make
sure you know what the process should deliver and
help you diagnosis breakdows faster, you are able to
make better business decisions. Furthermore, having a
process-outcome-only view of the workflow, puts you in
position to quickly gauge the impact of proposed
changes in a much more consistent and reliable manner.
And most business leaders find that improtant.
Making financially sound decisions
In addition to fast, better decisions, outcome-oriented
processes are measurable. That means they can be
quantified in financial terms. Decisions can be made
to help maximize the financial returns by minimizing
time spent, maximizing the use of resources, and
reducing waste to an absolute minimum.
The bottom line is that outcome-oriented processes
can help improve your workflow, group focus and
decision-making process by making outcomes visible,
more intelligent, and better financial performers.
How do your processes measure up? Consider the
outcomes of bad processes and note, those that apply
to your team.

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10 Outcomes of Bad Processes + 1 More
April 2012, Gartner Research predicts poor business
process management practices will “topple” 10 Global
2000 companies by 2014, while improved BPM
techniques will improve margins for countless others.
Bad processes lead to:
1. unhappy customers
2. bad product (returned, rejected, rework)
3. demoralized teams (underperformance,
disengagement, vocale discontent)
4. waste and variation (everyone does it differently)
5. unmeasurable workflows (limited or no measures)
6. acceptable mediocrity (underperforming culture)
7. frustrated stakeholders (people tend to work
around your area when they can)
8. slow onboarding (consider cost of covering
position while vacant, finding a replacement, then
getting them up to speed)
9. institutional knowledge loss
10. lack of respect from or support by supervision
11. slower revenue growth

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Most organizations are operating with
a 5% to 10% productivity loss that
better leadership practices
could eliminate

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Why Changing to Outcome-Oriented
Processes Now Makes Sense
Traditional documentation methods focus on activities
and outputs. Outcome-oriented processes focus on
the result of the process and its value proposition to its
consumer. The savings link directly to the bottome line.
Consider the benefits:
• Team focus shifts to delivering desirable-
outcomes crucial to internal/external customers.
• Elimination of process variation and inconsistency
• Targeted improvements that provide the largest
financial return on effort and can be measured
by increased profit, revenue and customer
satisfaction
• Far-reaching shifts in organizational behavior
• Visibility into processes and workflows needed to
make improvements in quality and velocity
At its core, outcome-oriented processes takes rigid,
independent processes and transforms them into
flexible, choreographed business services that work
together to create substantial business value. This
transformation can help the organization to adapt to
an ever faster changing business climate and global
economic challenge.

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It’s a tough market out there
Most enterprises are facing ever-increasing challenges
just trying to hold onto their market share. In fact, in
most cases organizations are dealing with more and
more competition every day.
You simply can’t afford to sit still and hope for the best.
If you take this approach, you risk being replaced by
technology, competitors or those that accept every
process must have a value proposition that can be
clearly articulated, measured and improved.
What to do to be competitive in
tough markets?
Here are a few very important ideas:
Improve productivity: To compete and win, you
need to be profitable. One of the best ways to improve
profitability is by improving your productivity. If you can
improve your productivity so your product, service or
workflow costs less to deliver, it’s much easier to
compete against competitors and mediocrity.
Improve decision-making: Automating the
decision-making process leads to faster, better, and
more fiscally responsible decisions based on business
rules. Of course, automating the decision-making
process also has positive effects on productivity.

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Improve flexibility: Market demands seem to change
almost overnight making flexibility and agility one of the
primary keys to success today. If you can’t consistently
deliver what the internal / external customers want, in
the way they want it, as often as they want it, in the
format they want it, at the cost they want it and with the
quality they want it – requests for you to do so
inevitably will shrink,
Waitingwon’timprove things
Waiting for improvement to happen on its own is almost
a sure path to failure. There’s no better time than when
conditions are challenging to make positive
improvements in your business processes. It shows you
have a handle on the big picture and you are interested
in helping others deliver the best work.
After all, the people within your organization are almost
certainly aware of the current business conditions, and
they know your processes need to impove for you (and
them) to remain competitive and in some cases, viable.
Remember, The most successful changes in
organizations have one important thing in common - the
people who have a stake in the outcome see the need
to change. As people’s understanding of a need for a
change went down, the failure rate went up. Take the
short 6-question quiz to pinpoint areas for you to
examine closer and share it with your team.

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These six
questions
reflect main
business
process
technologies
and best
practices
implemented
today.
Every
“disagree”
and/or
“strongle
disgree”
identifies a
systemic
process
improvement
opportunity.
Take the quiz:
1. Have you eliminated all rekeying of duplicated data?
strongly
disagree
disagree agree
strongly
agree
☐ ☐ ☐ ☐

2. Does your project/program/delivery lead times
reflect available capacity?
strongly
disagree
disagree agree
strongly
agree
☐ ☐ ☐ ☐

3. Does your key metrics measure process performance?
strongly
disagree
disagree agree
strongly
agree
☐ ☐ ☐ ☐

4. If a key process/project breaks (or stalls), does the
responisbile manager discover it that day?
strongly
disagree
disagree agree
strongly
agree
☐ ☐ ☐ ☐

5. Do you reinvent your processes every there is a new
project/campaign?
strongly
disagree
disagree agree
strongly
agree
☐ ☐ ☐ ☐

6. The sequence of document origination and closure has
been mapped for your most important workflows.
strongly
disagree
disagree agree
strongly
agree
☐ ☐ ☐ ☐


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Did You Know?
You can win back
those disengaged people with
better leadership practices and better,
more effective processes.

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How ecgstudio can help
ECG Studio works with business leaders in many
industries helping them compete on process as well as
good products and services. We combine collaborative
consulting, social media technology and information
design with business process rengineering, to develop
technically proficient, visual communications that makes
presenting and digesting lots of complex information
easier and more desirable.
Business leaders turn to ECG Studio to document
processes and workflows, establish visual process
libraries, implement process and performance
governance systems and train/coach/advise internal
project teams.
Contact Us
At ECG Studio, our mission is to create understanding.
It’s what makes us different. And better.
You will be proud of the work we do together.
Some of the world’s largest companies have found a
better way to communicate their process-driven
strategies with ECG Studio.
Are you ready for results too? Contact us.

Smart people document outcomes by @ecgstudio

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Smart people document outcomes by @ecgstudio