World’s Worse Excuses to Avoid Business Improvement

by Paul Marrero 20. January 2011 06:21

I recently read an article by Phil Brown, “World’s Worse Excuses to Avoid Business Improvement” which I thought made some good points. In my 30 years in the workforce, I have seen many of these excuses.

I too have always tried to improve processes and efficiency at every position I have held, including writing documentation and actually writing software to improve the processes. Sometimes my efforts were met with resentment or a “waste of time” by my immediate supervisor. Sad.

The excuse I want to focus on in this blog is excuse number three, “We can’t afford the cost of improving.”

If you can’t afford the cost of improving, what is the cost of not improving?

I worked in an organization where there was never enough time to do it right the first time, but there was always time to do it again and again. Is this what US businesses have come to call the norm?

As a consultant and custom software developer, I get to travel and visit other organizations to help them out with, usually, a specific need. While visiting, I observe other inadequacies in the way the conduct their business. The software can be installed, but the lack of adequate policies and procedures to conduct the business properly does not fully address the critical business issue that caused the software to be requested in the first place.

Now my impressions are that our brethren across the pond are much more advanced than us when it comes to process efficiency, process improvement and Business Process Management (BPM). Why do I get that impression? Maybe because most of the articles, seminars, conferences, etc. I come across are from Europe? 

How do we overcome this stigma of complacency? How, as American companies can we “afford” looking for signs of waste (LEAN), improving processes (process improvement) at the enterprise level and, with the right tools (BPMS), put into place a methodology that will at the very least, reduce your cost?

Let me hear your thoughts.

 

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BPM | AuraPortal | Corporate Culture | Customer Experience

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