The Process of Process Improvement

Most organizations come to process improvement through a pain point. Invoices take too long to go out. Reports need hours of manual cleanup. A grant deadline means a week of chasing approvals. There may be pressure to adopt AI, whether that means turning on new features in systems you already use or adding tools to your tech stack.

Whatever the starting point, the path forward looks much the same. It begins with an honest look at how work gets done in your organization.

Brumaire Consulting helps service-based firms and nonprofits find the right fix, whether that is optimizing a tricky workflow, getting more from the tools you already have or implementing a new system that delivers better information.

Process improvement is the practice of examining how work gets done and making it simpler, clearer and more reliable. Our approach draws on Lean, which rests on two ideas. 

The first is continuous improvement, meaning small, steady changes rather than one big overhaul. The second is respect for people. The people doing the work understand it best, and they help shape the improvements that are made.

The ultimate goal of any improvement is to create additional value for the clients and communities you serve and remove the waste that gets in the way: waiting, rework, unnecessary handoffs and steps. 

With this in mind, we also think of process improvement as a way to create better experiences for people, end to end. People are participants in the improvement work; people are the owners and users of processes on an everyday basis; and people are the beneficiaries of any gains that are made. 

In a business or nonprofit that delivers services, people are the organization's largest investment and the most valuable one. Their expertise, judgment and relationships are what clients and communities rely on. When processes break down, that cost lands on them.

It shows up as hours spent chasing approvals, re-entering the same information in two systems, hunting for the latest version of a file or fixing errors that a clearer step would have prevented. It shows up as late nights at month-end, skipped lunches before a deadline and the quiet frustration of doing work that may not have a clear impact.

Process improvement can give that time and energy back. The goal is not to squeeze more out of people, but to allow people to better focus on the work they do best and the work that brought them to the job in the first place. This may result in:

• Fewer frustrations. Less time on workarounds, double entry and searching for information.
• Clearer expectations. Everyone knows who owns each step and what happens next.
• Less firefighting. Problems get caught early, leaving time for fixes and development of ongoing improvements.
• More sustainable workloads. Management of cyclical work and busy seasons become part of the plan.
• Smoother onboarding. New hires learn refined and clear processes.

The people closest to the work are the best source of ideas for improving it. Asking them what gets in the way, and acting on what they say, is the foundation for successful change.

Service-based businesses and nonprofits are heavily reliant on the hours and capacity of their employees. Their work moves through many hands, from intake and staffing to time entry, billing, donor records and grant reporting. Over time, teams build workarounds to established processes to keep work moving when those processes stall. Those workarounds can become so ingrained that nobody notices the time lost to them.

Sometimes organizations feel that dropping in a new piece of software or tool, like AI, might solve these problems. While software or tools may help remove functional limits in existing systems or create automations, they cannot fix an approval that sits in one inbox for a week, a handoff nobody owns or data that was messy long before the switch. Successfully changing your technology really means looking critically at your processes first, before settling on the right solutions for your organization. 

And often, the right fix is not new software at all. Many organizations use only a fraction of what their current systems can do. A workflow may just need clearer roles, fewer handoffs or a backup approver. A tool may need different settings or a connection to another system. 

Looking at process first allows you to determine which fix is the smartest move for your organization, and it might spare you the cost and disruption of an unnecessary switch.

DMAIC is a five-phase framework that helps guide most Lean process improvement work at some level and is useful for understanding what we do. The steps, Define, Measure, Analyze, Improve and Control, help focus on finding causes, proving results and continually ensuring processes are delivering good results. 

1. Define.  We start by identifying the problem in plain terms and agreeing on what a better outcome looks like. We bring in stakeholders from different roles in an organization early, because they see pain points others may miss and will help champion any change later.
2. Measure.  We document how the work happens today in detail by talking with the people closest to the work and mapping processes step by step: who touches them, in what order and where work waits. We gather baseline numbers, even rough ones, like how long it takes to turn completed work into an invoice or a grant report, and look for less obvious data points, such as overtime and turnover in roles that touch challenging processes.
3. Analyze.  We look for root causes instead of symptoms and develop an understanding of why processes break down. We sort what you truly need from your processes, both in steps and final product, versus what you're simply used to, like a report layout nobody would design the same way today.
4. Improve.  We work with you to design solutions matched to the causes found. That might mean simplifying steps, clarifying roles, configuring existing tools differently or, when other technologies make sense, implementing something new. We help you test changes on a small scale first, involve the people who will use them and set a pace that your team can handle.
5. Control.  We document the new process, train the team and track results against the baseline from the Measure phase. We can also help you check in on your existing processes to catch drift early and surface the next opportunity to further refine a process. 

Ideally, process improvement is a cycle, not a one-time project.