Gluu

Gluu Academy

Common process understanding

Process improvement fundamentals

In this lesson, you’ll learn why flow efficiency matters more than keeping people busy, how to reduce the delays that slow customers down, and how to run a simple six-step process improvement routine every month.

Lesson resources

Key learnings

  • Lean is a mindset, not just tools: continuous improvement in the service of customer value, optimising the whole rather than the parts.
  • The efficiency paradox: when everyone is 100% busy, queues grow, lead times explode and the customer waits.
  • Flow efficiency = value-adding time ÷ total lead time × 100%. Shrink delays, don’t just speed up tasks.
  • Seven ways to improve flow: map the value stream, measure lead and cycle time, minimise batch size, empower cross-functional teams, visualise work with WIP limits, focus on customer value, and build a Kaizen culture.
  • A six-step improvement plan: scope, map, add instructions, execute with tasks, capture feedback, review and refine.
  • Run the cycle monthly with the process owner and editors: check lead time, percentage completed and incident trends, then update and republish.

Video transcript

Process improvement is at the core of what we are trying to achieve with business process management. So, everyone should know its fundamentals, and that’s what this lesson is about.

By the end of the lesson, you’ll understand the efficiency paradox and why flow efficiency is more important than keeping people busy. You will learn practical ways to improve flow and how to draft a process improvement plan.

Much of today’s thinking comes from the book This Is Lean: Resolving the Efficiency Paradox, written by Niklas Modig and Pär Åhlström. There’s a link in the notes.

You may know Lean from its tooling. However, Lean isn’t just tools like 5S or Kanban. It’s a philosophy: continuous improvement in the service of creating customer value. The shift is from optimizing parts to optimizing the whole – from departmental efficiency to end-to-end flow efficiency.

Traditional management chases resource efficiency: high utilization of people and machines. And the paradox is that when everyone is 100% busy, queues grow, lead times explode, and the customer waits.

True efficiency is flow efficiency: delivering value quickly and smoothly across the entire process. The more you optimize around resources within the function or department, the more often you harm the flow. So there’s a real trade-off here. I see process thinking, as covered in this Gluu Academy, as a way to win back some power from the hierarchy – in the service of customers and reducing waste.

Resource efficiency maximizes utilization. It tends to create silos, long handoffs and hidden waiting. Flow efficiency, on the other hand, minimizes the time from request to delivery. It encourages cross-functional collaboration, transparency and fewer delays. All of this leads to a better customer experience and less waste.

Flow efficiency asks: of the total time a customer waits, how much is value adding? So the formula is: flow efficiency equals value-adding time divided by total lead time, times 100%.

The value-adding time is the time where you’re actively working on the customer’s request. Total lead time is from the request to fulfillment. So of course this includes all the waiting, the handovers and the rework.

You know how it is if you have been waiting for a form to be handled in some kind of office. Maybe it takes three months, but in reality somebody has worked on it for 30 minutes. Those three months are wasted time; the 30 minutes are what matters. That’s the value-adding time.

Increasing flow efficiency means shrinking delays, not just speeding up tasks. In office work, we see flow killers daily: waiting for approvals, unclear responsibilities, dependency chains, and meetings that don’t enable action. People look busy, but the customer waits.

There are seven ways to reduce flow inefficiencies:

  1. Map the value stream – the process. Map it from request to delivery and list every step. Highlight non-value-adding time: waiting, rework and handoffs.
  2. Measure lead time and cycle time. If you track both, you can attack the waiting times and handoffs first.
  3. Minimize batch size. Go for smaller and more frequent deliveries to accelerate feedback and reduce queuing. This is primarily in production settings, but it can also work in the office environment.
  4. Empower cross-functional teams. Put key roles together to remove the dependency ping-pong, where people throw things over the wall to each other in different departments. When they solve the problem together, you have one less handover.
  5. Visualize work. Use, for instance, Kanban techniques to expose bottlenecks, and set work-in-progress limits to prevent overload.
  6. Focus on customer value. For every step of the process you mapped, ask: does this step add value? If it doesn’t, eliminate it, simplify it, or automate it.
  7. Create a Kaizen culture. Invite small, continuous improvements, and standardize the wins into instructions so that you keep learning from the mistakes you make and build it back into the process.

All of these are areas where you would need to go into more detail. I’m just giving you an overview here.

We want continuous improvement of each process without consuming leadership bandwidth. That means a lightweight, repeatable cycle: a clear process, activities mapped, instructions and tools added, execute with tasks, capture insights, improve and repeat. That’s what we are practicing at Gluu. This is what we’re building the platform for. This is how we are trying to make this operational.

Now I want to share six steps in a simple approach to process improvement:

  1. Scope. Use the process hierarchy to see the overall process landscape, then find out where you want to start.
  2. Map. Clarify roles first – your swimlanes, for instance a support agent, a supervisor and a customer. Then map the activities each role performs. Keep it as-is, not idealized: what is actually happening now is what you want to improve, not the future state. Name each activity with a verb and an object to define its output, and make it actionable, such as “Serve customer” or “Close ticket”.
  3. Add tools and work instructions. Attach the how-to at the activity level: tools, steps and acceptance criteria. Use short videos or screenshots. Keep a standard instruction format so content stays lean and consistent.
  4. Execute with tasks. Turn activities into tasks that people can tick off, such as “Review contract”, “Check SLA” or “Read case history”. Execution produces evidence that the process was followed, and this provides input for your improvement analysis.
  5. Capture ideas and issues. Capture them around each activity as it is executed, and tie the comments to the exact step. Over time you will see patterns: missteps, recurring blockers and unclear instructions. You are documenting it automatically every time it is executed, and that makes the improvement analysis a lot easier.
  6. Review and refine. Do this in a monthly review with the process owner and the editors. Check the flow metrics: what is the lead time, what is the percentage completed, and what are the incident trends? Decide on changes, update the instructions and republish.

So, this is an improvement cycle completed. And that’s the improvement flywheel. Now it’s just about repeating this every month.

End of lesson