10 things to keep in mind when improving processes

By Scott Lowe

Takeaway: Handled the right way, business process improvement can provide tremendous benefits to your organization. Here are 10 keys to success.

Many organizations want to harness the power of IT to improve existing processes or to solve vexing business problems. In this article, I will outline 10 items you should consider as you undertake business process improvement (BPI) projects in your own company.

1: Start at the top with executive support and good governance

Although organizations might begin a BPI initiative with the intent to correct a single issue, these initiatives can quickly take on a life of their own. Further, because change can be difficult for some, it is in the organization's best interests to ensure that BPI projects be chartered and blessed by its senior leadership. With this kind of visibility, there may still be angst, but the improvement group will have the authority it needs to make changes to the business.

2: Identify the problem(s)

When beginning a BPI project, don't just attack something that looks wrong. Carefully analyze the organization's current pain points — perhaps sales are down, customer satisfaction with support is poor, or costs to handle a certain function have skyrocketed — and then determine which problems deserve the most immediate attention.

3: Don't forget how processes interact — think global while acting local

While many processes stand alone, the chances are good that every process is a part of a bigger whole. As your team begins to consider the process at hand, don't lose sight of how that process integrates with everything else. Plan for it. Make sure that you're not making something else worse in an effort to solve a different problem. This may mean attacking multiple processes at once in some cases. As you plan for improvements, step back and from a high level, try to determine what will happen once proposed changes are made.

4: Look for immediate time savings

In one BPI project I led, in our very first meeting, we did a quick, high-level process mapping to ensure that we have all of the process stakeholders in the room. During that meeting, we discovered that one of the process owners was spending about two days per month creating reports for the next process owner in the chain and had been doing so for years. The catch? The reports were never used. The person received them and simply discarded them. Without a second thought, we nixed that step of the process before we made any other changes. So there was an immediate, tangible benefit resulting from the time we spent simply talking about the process.

This brings up a related point: You might not have to be too formal in your efforts. Sometimes, just a bit of communication can yield huge time savings.

5: Make sure the right people are involved

This is a step that I can't stress enough: Make sure you include everyone who has a stake in the process. If you don't, your efforts will fail. Those excluded will know they've been excluded and will resist any proposed changes. Further, your efforts won't be as complete as they otherwise could be.

Again, another related point: Just because someone is involved doesn't mean that that person will cooperate. I've been involved in BPI efforts with people who were less than cooperative, and it really affects the possible outcomes. In every organization, I believe that people have a responsibility for improving the workplace, which should be included in annual performance reviews. If someone is truly combative just to resist the change, it should be reflected there. That said, if people have valid points and you simply don't agree, don't punish them! The goal here is inclusiveness, not divisiveness.

6: Formally map processes under review

This is another step I consider essential. A visual representation of a process helps everyone understand exactly how the process operates, who operates it at particular points along the line, and where that process intersects with other processes and services.

Visio has great templates for process mapping, but there are also excellent stand-alone tools designed for just this purpose, which may be better for particularly complex or involved processes.

With the process map, it becomes easier to make decisions with everyone on the same page.

7: Spend time on what-if scenarios

Don't just come up with a new process and lock it in. Consider every what-if scenario you can think of to try to break the process. Just like software testing, the goal here is to identify weaknesses so that you can shore things up. The more time you spend testing processes, the better the outcome will be.

8: Figure out your measuring stick

If you can't measure it, you can't fix it. You must identify the metrics by which you will gauge BPI project success. The "pain" metric was probably determined when you figured out which processes to attack first, but the success metric should also be targeted. For example, are you trying to reduce customer on-hold time for support to two minutes or less? Whatever your metric is, define it and measure success against it.

9: Don't assume automation

When people hear "business process improvement," they often just assume that is code for "IT is going to automate the process." That's certainly not always the case, although IT systems will often play a large role in these efforts. It's just as likely that non-IT-focused efforts will play as big a role as — or a bigger role than — IT-based systems.

I include this step so that you don't limit yourself. Think outside the system!

10: Look for common chokepoints between disparate processes

As processes intersect, look for places where many processes tend to break down. This is related to "thinking global" and requires people who can look at the organization from a very high level while at the same time, deep-dive into its guts to see how it ticks.

Effective design principles for web designers: Proximity

By Ryan Boudreaux

Takeaway: Ryan Boudreaux finishes his series on the four basic design principles. Here, he reviews proximity and how it can be used to better please the eye.

This is the final segment in our four-part series on effective web design principles, concluding with the topic of proximity. The previous topics and segments in the effective web design principles series covered Contrast, Repetition, and Alignment. Guiding the user through your website with proper flow, effective use of white space, positioning similar content closer together, and providing clear structure are all facets of the proximity design standard.

Proximity, prox-im-ity, [prok-sim-i-tee] noun, nearness in space or time, order, occurrence, or relation, closeness in a series, vicinity, order.

Spacing and relationships

Proximity for web design purposes means that similar or related elements should be grouped together, while those that are unrelated or dissimilar should be separated. The physical relationships and spaces between web design elements create a level of emphasis, and include other factors such as isolation, similarity, eye movement and direction, continuance, andpersistence of vision.

As elements overlap or touch, the top layer typically gets the primary attention. Did you notice the "Proximity" piece of the puzzle above? Did your eye gravitate to the purple puzzle piece first, and then move up and to the left to scan the remaining pieces? However the overlapping object suddenly becomes overshadowed if the other objects close by are in stark contrast; as objects become closer together the contrasting elements will stand out. Striking a balance between closeness and contrast, and even manipulating the two principles can achieve varied results. Take a look at Figure B below and see where your eye gravitates. Did you first notice the "Repetition" puzzle piece?

Every object or element has a gravitational pole in relation to the other objects that are nearer to its center, and the closer an object is to another also affects its weight. Just as a planet's gravity affects its moon orbit, the positions of elements to each other on a web page can change the weight given to it and other elements on the page.

White space

An additional proximity factor is the effective use of white space on the web page, spacing elements utilizing effective margins, gutters between columns, and padding creates a balance between the content and the space between elements. In general, too much white space and the web page looks irregular and void of content, with no direction. Of course, if your web design requires a level of artistic license to accentuate open space with an undeniable void of content for dramatic effect, then go for it.

Proximity and typography

Above, I talked about the negative effects of too much white space, but too little white space can make the web page appear cluttered and cramped. As a rule of thumb, a balanced white space is generally more attractive and pleasing to the eye. Below are two examples which demonstrate both ends of the white space gamut. Figure C, for example, is too much white space, and Figure Dhas too little.

Figure C

Figure D

An intuitive flow of content reveals a balance of white space and the typographic elements that comprise the textual content. Take the first example of the IT Course List shown below in Figure E, and try to step through the list of courses available.

Figure E

Now, take a look at the same list below, which now has each logical grouping defined with appropriate white space, appropriate headings, and unordered lists as displayed in Figure Fbelow.

Figure F

The second list is easily delivered and provides the reader various sections and sub-sections of the course list; each of the courses is in close proximity to the associated and related sub-section header.

Employing the proximity principle of effective web design helps to organize content elements on the web page utilizing space, order, size, relationships, color, and effective use of white space and sectioning throughout typographic elements.

The future of IT will be reduced to three kinds of jobs

By Jason Hiner

Takeaway: The IT profession and the IT job market are in the midst of seismic changes that are going to shift the focus to three types of jobs.

There's a general anxiety that has settled over much of the IT profession in recent years. It's a stark contrast to the situation just over a decade ago. At the end of the 1990s, IT pros were the belles of the ball. The IT labor shortage regularly made headlines and IT pros were able to command excellent salaries by getting training and certification, job hopping, and, in many cases, being the only qualified candidate for a key position in a thinly-stretched job market. At the time, IT was held up as one of the professions of the future, where more and more of the best jobs would be migrating as computer-automated processes replaced manual ones.

Unfortunately, that idea of the future has disappeared, or at least morphed into something much different.

The glory days when IT pros could name their ticket evaporated when the Y2K crisis passed and then the dot com implosion happened. Suddenly, companies didn't need as many coders on staff. Suddenly, there were a lot fewer startups buying servers and hiring sysadmins to run them.

Around the same time, there was also a general backlash against IT in corporate America. Many companies had been throwing nearly-endless amounts of money at IT projects in the belief that tech was the answer to all problems. Because IT had driven major productivity improvements during the 1990s, a lot of companies over-invested in IT and tried to take it too far too fast. As a result, there were a lot of very large, very expensive IT projects that crashed and burned.

When the recession of 2001 hit, these massively overbuilt IT departments were huge targets for budget cuts and many of them got hit hard. As the recession dragged out in 2002 and 2003, IT pros mostly told each other that they needed to ride out the storm and that things would bounce back. But, a strange thing happened. IT budgets remained flat year after year. The rebound never happened.

Fast forward to 2011. Most IT departments are a shadow of their former selves. They've drastically reduced the number of tech support professionals, or outsourced the help desk entirely. They have a lot fewer administrators running around to manage the network and the servers, or they've outsourced much of the data center altogether. These were the jobs that were at the center of the IT pro boom in 1999. Today, they haven't totally disappeared, but there certainly isn't a shortage of available workers or a high demand for those skill sets.

That's because the IT environment has changed dramatically. More and more of traditional software has moved to the web, or at least to internal servers and served through a web browser. Many technophobic Baby Boomers have left the workforce and been replaced by Millennials who not only don't need as much tech support, but often want to choose their own equipment and view the IT department as an obstacle to productivity. In other words, today's users don't need as much help as they used to. Cynical IT pros will argue this until they are blue in the face, but it's true. Most workers have now been using technology for a decade or more and have become more proficient than they were a decade ago. Plus, the software itself has gotten better. It's still horribly imperfect, but it's better.

So where does that leave today's IT professionals? Where will the IT jobs of the future be?

1. Consultants

Let's face it, all but the largest enterprises would prefer to not to have any IT professionals on staff, or at least as few as possible. It's nothing personal against geeks, it's just that IT pros are expensive and when IT departments get too big and centralized they tend to become experts at saying, "No." They block more progress than they enable. As a result, we're going to see most of traditional IT administration and support functions outsourced to third-party consultants. This includes a wide range from huge multi-national consultancies to the one person consultancy who serves as the rented IT department for local SMBs. I'm also lumping in companies like IBM, HP, Amazon AWS, and Rackspace, who will rent out both data center capacity and IT professionals to help deploy, manage, and troubleshoot solutions. Many of the IT administrators and support professionals who currently work directly for corporations will transition to working for big vendors or consultancies in the future as companies switch to purchasing IT services on an as-needed basis in order to lower costs, get a higher level of expertise, and get 24/7/365 coverage.

2. Project managers

Most of the IT workers that survive and remain as employees in traditional companies will be project managers. They will not be part of a centralized IT department, but will be spread out in the various business units and departments. They will be business analysts who will help the company leaders and managers make good technology decisions. They will gather business requirements and communicate with stakeholders about the technology solutions they need, and will also be proactive in looking for new technologies that can transform the business. These project managers will also serve as the company's point of contact with technology vendors and consultants. If you look closely, you can already see a lot of current IT managers morphing in this direction.

3. Developers

By far, the area where the largest number of IT jobs is going to move is into developer, programmer, and coder jobs. While IT used to be about managing and deploying hardware and software, it's going to increasingly be about web-based applications that will be expected to work smoothly, be self-evident, and require very little training or intervention from tech support. The other piece of the pie will be mobile applications — both native apps and mobile web apps. As I wrote in my article, We're entering the decade of the developer, the current changes in IT are "shifting more of the power in the tech industry away from those who deploy and support apps to those who build them." This trend is already underway and it's only going to accelerate over the next decade.