better business blog

Tips and stories to add value to you and your organisation

Process Improvement Tips

7 March 2016

Business is full of processes…sales, production and administration. They all comprise a series of steps that we have to take to reach our end goals and when you have steps you often have waste. Time taken waiting is waste, as is over-complexity and we can help ourselves to get more from our limited time by reducing the important tasks to the bare minimum of added-value items.

So, here are some ways to improve things:

A) Standstill. Pause and notice what is happening around you. Where is time being wasted?

B) Simplify. Where can you remove process steps?

C) Stop. Often things are set in train for reasons that get lost in time, so we can stop them and see what happens. Often we find there are no bad consequences and we can save lots of time without any penalty!

D) Mine our frustrations. A good way to start with process improvement is to write a list of things that annoy us. Within these items will be wasted time and we can use our frustrations to guide us to where changes need to be made.

Take time this week to improve a process and enjoy making better use of your time. It’s often much easier to make improvements than we think!

Next week: Valuing Ourselves