There are several different types of processes in every business, all of which can be grouped within three main categories. Those main process categories are: Management, Core, and Support. All three of these process systems are incredibly important, and must work together to be effective.
Each type has its own set of sub-processes that can be identified through rigorous analysis or simply with practice. In this article, I will highlight the three main process categories and many of the process groups that fall under them.
Management Processes: Helping Develop Strategies
In order for a business to achieve its goals and deliver customer value, leadership and management levels of the organization need to develop key strategies to execute against. However, strategies are not just developed just by having discussions in meetings. They need to be developed through a structured process. These are what I refer to as “strategic processes”.
Strategic Processes: A Structured Approach to Strategic Planning
Each organization will develop their own way of building a strategic process, my only advice to businesses is to make sure you do develop one. Having a structured strategy process allows you to focus on the business's higher-level functions, such as: planning, sourcing, marketing, and sales - all critical components of an organization that require a strategy. Having strategies around these functions help your company achieve its goals by improving efficiency and effectiveness across the organization.
Example of a Strategic Process: P&G
Don’t have a strategic planning process in place and looking for a place to start? Check out the book Playing to Win, where authors AG Lafley and Roger Martin thoroughly describe consumer products giant P&G’s structured process for developing strategy.
In the book, the authors break down P&G’s reverse engineering process for identifying, designing, and testing strategic initiatives. This structured management process helped P&G turn Oil of Olay from a market lagger to market leader in short order. Oil of Olay is just one product example in the book, but other strategic processes discussed in the book include understanding when to sunset products and exploring mergers and acquisitions. For P&G, all of these activities require following a specific strategic process.
Example of Maintaining a Strategic Process: EOS Traction
Building and executing management processes, like strategy development, is one thing, but maintaining and monitoring your progress requires a whole different system. One of the best and most popular systems for organizations to use to stay on track with their strategic operations is EOS Traction.
EOS Traction is a process that follows an annual cycle for businesses to follow to stay connected to their goals and stay on track to complete those goals.
To learn more about Traction, check out my EOS Traction page and read some of the articles that go more in-depth about how the system works.
Core Processes: Helping Deliver on Strategies
While Management Processes help organizations follow a structure to develop key strategies, those strategies are useless if they are not executed. That is where Core Processes come in.
Core processes are the lifeblood of an organization. These are the processes that deliver the value you provide to customers. Below are three areas of your organization that house key processes to deliver that value.
Customer Processes
These are processes that focus on satisfying customers' needs and wants by delivering excellent products and services, through business processes and business models. Any process that touches your customer experience falls under this critical category. Customer support (how a customer contacts your business, how their concern is handled, processed, and resolved) is a very important example of a customer process. Another example would be how your customer orders your product or service. Without customers, your business fails to exist, so keeping a close eye on your customer processes is incredibly important.
There are several tools on the market that can help you layout your processes related to customer support. One of those tools is Creately. Check out this blog post by Creately about how visualizations can help you improve your customer support processes.
Technical Processes
Some sources on the web might place technical processes under the “Support” category, but I choose to have it under “Core” because I believe that any technology that runs through your business most likely touches critical functions that deliver customer value.
Technical processes are related to developing, maintaining and improving business technology for business operations. The design of business processes must take into consideration the capabilities of the supporting technologies.
Support Processes: Supporting the Delivery of Value
Support processes provide support for core business processes with particular attention to effective communication across teams, departments, and with external business partners such as suppliers, vendors, and agencies. There are a few different sub-groups of processes that fall under the Support Process category.
Administrative Processes
These processes include activities related to helping manage the business that may not be directly related to customer interactions but are still important for a business's success. For example, business travel may be required for employees to conduct business activities, so having an end-to-end travel process is important to make sure employees get where they need to go as effectively and efficiently as possible.
Service Delivery Processes
Service Delivery Processes support business tasks related to finding, accessing, and delivering business information throughout the organization. Internal communications would be an example of service delivery because the department that is responsible for internal communications is giving employees important information they may need to do their jobs better or keep everyone on the same page in regards to company initiatives.
Operational Processes
Operational Processes focus on the business's basic functions such as human resources, accounting, and finance just to name a few. All of these functions have processes that are required to keep the organization running smoothly. For example, your organization most likely has a process for hiring and onboarding new employees. This is a very important process for growing companies, therefore it needs to be a process that is properly managed and improved as the organization changes and grows.
Two Ways to Get Started Organizing Your Business Processes
If you're not sure where to start, there are a number of resources available to help you.
The first step is to identify the areas where you want to improve efficiency and effectiveness. Once you've done that, you can begin to look for ways to streamline those processes. There are two ways to get help.
One way to do this is to use process mapping software. This type of software allows you to visually represent your company's processes, so you can see where bottlenecks occur and how they can be eliminated. You can check out an in-depth article I wrote about process mapping where I provided some insights on using process mapping software.
Another option is to hire a consultant who specializes in process improvement. This person can help you assess your current processes and make recommendations for improvements. I am certified in Process Improvement and Lean Six Sigma and would be happy to help. Please feel free to contact me and I would be happy to have a discovery conversation to see where I might be able to help you.
Regardless of which approach you take, the important thing is to get started. By improving your management, core, and support processes, you can take your company to the next level of success.
