A Guide to Running Process Improvement Workshops

I run a lot of workshops these days – I find that they are the most efficient way of getting to the heart of processes and improving them. I’ve seen people spend months doing depth interviews with staff only to have projects shut down before they’ve even get near to identifying improvements. That’s tragic and very avoidable. What can be accomplished in a well structured workshop can eliminate weeks or even months of unnecessary activity. Here’s how to get it right.

Before You Start

Don’t waste time planning too much. Against my will I was once made to write a 25 page document on how to run some workshops – it delayed the project by 3 months. Workshops aren’t complicated so don’t make them so. Create a spreadsheet with all your workshops, times, rooms booked and attendees. That’s all you need – don’t overbake the cake.

Pick your workshop room carefully. Find the biggest room with the longest walls – you’ll need them!

Identify all staff involved with the
process. It’s really important to get a cross section of staff that are involved end-to-end (that’s the customer experience of the process). You want staff that do the actual work – not managers or
supervisors.

Create a slide pack to guide you through the workshop. It will help you focus on the key stages and will avoid you missing anything and looking like a plumb.

Buy materials. You’ll need lots of 3M super stickies and a big roll of good quality brown paper, some blu-tak and some market pens. A whiteboard and whiteboard pens can also be handy.

Pick the right attendees. It may sound warm and fuzzy to ask the business who they want to attend but chances are they’ll send you people who aren’t busy rather than the staff you really want. What you want are people who know the process but who want to make things better.

Explain to staff what process you are looking at and what you want to achieve. It will make them feel more comfortable. Let them know they’ll be needed as early as possible.

Have a spreadsheet ready to capture the process details and a scribe there to capture them. Your job is to focus on facilitation not typing!

The Day Before

Set up the room by sticking up 3 sheets of brown paper as long as you can along the wall.

Set up chairs so that they all face the brown paper rather than behind desks. This helps to make the session less formal and more interactive. Ensure that your projector screen is set up in a manner which makes it easy for them to pivot around and see.

DO NOT put any processes up on the wall! This limits their thinking!

On the day

Set the scene by talking about the scope of the process. Identify what outcomes the process has (from a customer point of view).

Identify the current process. Give each person a pack of sticky notes and individually ask them to write down their own interpretation of the process (no collaboration!) Merge all the individual processes together to create one agreed end-to-end process.

Probe, ask questions, identify missing tasks until you are comfortable that everything has been identified. Check that nothing has been missed. Get the scribe to document all the steps in the process. Gather task timings so that you can calculate cost per process before and after.

Tear it to shreds – encourage them to question everything and to rework the process with the focus on eliminating activities. If it can’t be eliminated, improve it. Get the scribe to document all potential improvements in an action plan. Coax, cajole, prod, suggest – but never tell them what they should do.

Take plenty of breaks, have a laugh, give them plenty of sugar, make jokes, do a silly dance – push them beyond their current scope of thinking – for that way the land of process innovation
lies.

Cheers,

TPN

Comments

[Trace]

you forgot the key one....allow enough time to have the workshop...they cant be rushed & you cant do 3 workshops in short order & get everything you want...shaving off time to squeeze things in means something WILL get forgotten & then you've blown your chance

[James Lawther]

My favourite trick is in the "tear it to shreds" category.

Get a big fat red marker pen and ask your attendees to put a red splodge on the current process wherever they see an opportunity to make things better.

Your process map will look like it has had a bad attack of the measles and when you bring in senior stakeholders to show them how much opportunity there is it will really hammer the point home.

[Shane Hayes]

I call this the 3m Methodology and Toolset.

Also I would add the following

1 - Use a swimlane as the process mapping method.

2 - Ask the attendees which pieces of the process is the customer actually paying for.

Shane

[The Process Ninja]

Shane - I actually avoid using swimlanes for the as-is analysis for a couple of reasons 1. It can result in finger pointing blame games and needless discussion about who does what. If you are going to redesign the process who is currently doing the work isn't that important (but it is important to be able to calculate hourly staff costs afterwards). It also can make it complicated and messy when the emphasis isn't really on who does what, but the focus is on the actual work that is being performed. Who is doing it currently is largely irrelevant. However, once you have redesigned the process swim lanes can be a valuable means of demonstrating how the new process will work.

James - Prior to tearing it to shreds I do an innovation exercise to get the ideas flowing then we go through step by step crossing off steps that can be eliminated using a big red marker pen (nothing else will do!) Those we can't eliminate we put a tick on. It works really well and as you say is visually very impactful.

Thanks for your comments!