About Process - RightProcess.com

Process Overview

What are Your Goals?

Questions to Ask Yourself

Need a Few Analogies?

"The majority of American managers are busy focusing on managing people rather than on managing process. If these same managers would first and foremost, define and communicate their primary business processes, they would then be more successful at managing their people, holding them accountable to their defined business processes."

Michael Gerber,
The E-Myth Manager

Defined process—what you don’t know
CAN hurt you.

Process Overview

It’s no longer acceptable for IT Professionals to simply manage their employees. To meet the increasing demands associated with compliance, productivity, increased competition, and other influencing factors, organizations not only need to understand what their employees do but more importantly—they need to understand how they are doing it. Simply put, organizations need to start managing their employees to clearly defined processes, policies, and procedures.

But, what exactly is a process? What is a policy? What is a procedure? If you asked a dozen people to define these terms and others, you'd most certainly receive a dozen different answers.

Therefore, at a time when terms like process, policy, procedure, work instruction, standard operating procedure, and internal controls are being used loosely and interchangeably, it’s difficult to make progress unless a standard set of terminology is shared throughout the organization.

View a list of 7 key definitions.

Process
A series of actions, changes, or functions that may be automated or facilitated by an individual and/or teams which bring about a desired result. A process is best defined using workflow diagrams which provide a visual representation of the related activities. The level of detail included in a process workflow should be relatively high as compared to details found in policy statements and specific step-by-step procedures. When process workflows are well defined associated policy statements and step-by-step procedures are easily extracted.

Policy Statement
A two to three sentence description of an individual or team of individuals’ responsibility as it relates to a specific activity corresponding to a defined process.

Step-by-Step Procedures
The detailed steps an individual needs to complete in order to execute an associated policy statement. The greatest level of detail is generally included in step-by-step procedures and are the essential ingredients for ensuring consistency among employees performing similar tasks.

Process-driven Manager
An individual who manages his or her employees to a set of clearly defined processes, policies, and procedures. The process-driven manager not only knows what employees do on a day-to-day basis, but they are also familiar with how they do it. These managers are also more inclined to refine and improve their organizational procedures as opposed to an individual who simply manages his or her employees in the absence of clearly defined policies and procedures.

Process Execution
Once an organization’s policies and procedures have been clearly defined, process execution is the organization's ability to bring life to a defined process—the organization’s ability to implement what’s been defined.

Process Compliance
For those organizations belonging to a regulated industry, process compliance refers to the degree to which their organizational policies and procedures adhere to the defined regulations imposed on their industry.

Employee Compliance
The degree to which employees are adhering to the organization's defined policies and procedures. The highest levels of employee compliance are found in those organizations that effectively track employee accountability.