The Best Questions to Assess Workflow Efficiency
Greg Hessel • July 29, 2022
14 Business Process Analysis Questions
Below are 14 questions to ask yourselves to begin to assess the efficiency of your workflow
- Are there too many actors?
- Does someone own the process?
- Are there too many handoffs?
- Are there non-value-added steps?
- Are there non-critical steps holding up the main flow?
- Is there an obvious bottleneck?
- Are mistakes caught early in the process?
- Do problems get all the attention while the majority of the work waits?
- Is the process “one size fits all” wherein there is one complex process with lots of decisions, exceptions or complexity to cover all situations?
- Is there one role that coordinates other roles or tasks? (often a symptom of a poor process)
- Is the process undocumented, leading to each individual or work group doing it their own way?
- Are roles undefined, leading to confusion about who is responsible for what?
- Are cause and effect, or work and inspection, separated? This introduces delay and the doers don’t learn what they are doing wrong.
- Is there poor collaboration across organizational boundaries, as in “We’re working at cross purposes”? This often results from local or internal measures as opposed to process-oriented or customer-oriented measures that focus on outcomes, not tasks.
See our blog discussing workflow and five other enablers of efficiency.
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