GUIDE TO PROCESS SUCCESS (4/8)
Appoint your process owners
The Process Owner is essential in ensuring that your processes reflect reality and lead to improvement. Therefore, it is important that colleagues with the skills have a clear mandate and sense of ownership so that they become the real drivers of change. This step is about ensuring that.
Process improvement steps
- Succeed with your process improvement plan
- Prepare your business collaboration tool
- Make a process hierarchy and a process blueprint
- Appoint, nominate and educate process owners
- Present to your colleagues
- Make process flow charts
- Stabilise your processes
- Maintain process improvement focus
Selecting the right people for the process owner role
Now that the process owner’s job description and mandate are clear, it is important to find suitable internal candidates for the job. In small and medium-sized companies, this role is best handled part-time. This provides the proper grounding in everyday life and prevents the process owner from becoming a bureaucrat rather than a change agent. Ideally, a process owner allocates his or her working hours as follows:
- 50% for line function (normal job).
- 25% of their hours working on facilitation, documentation and communication.
- 25% of their time focused on process improvement.
Tip!
It is important that all of your process owners are only responsible for 1-10 processes each (depending on the importance and complexity). So, if you have 20 to 40 processes in scope, you should assign between 5 and 10 process owners (in a company of around 100 employees).
Being a process owner is a professional badge of approval that ideally is given to a person who is knowledgeable about a process – assuming that the person is a good communicator. The role is ideally suited for people who do not have formal management roles but are seen as informal leaders.
STEP 4.1
These are the steps to take:
- Make a list of colleagues who meet the profile that you created.
- Collaborate with HR to assign an owner to each process in the process hierarchy.
- Meet with each candidate the find out if they would be interested in the new role. Use the meeting to clarify the process scope and the process owner’s job description and mandate.
- Assess whether there is a match and offer the process owner role to the right candidates.
- Invite the new process owners for process owner training.
- Complete the training of process owners.
Workshop: Training of process owners
| Outcome | Your process owners understand their role and how they use the platform to be effective as process owners. |
| Participants | Process owners, and key employees. |
| Agenda | – Introduction to Gluu. – Process owner job description, mandate and tasks. – Training in process mapping. – Training in facilitating improvement workshops. |
Select process owners by their energy and enthusiasm – it rubs off on colleagues and creates more improvement. Emphasise the role as something special – in line with a promotion or bonus, to show the importance of it.
You have now created a supplement to your organisational chart (your vertical organisation). Your process hierarchy of processes and their owners now show the horizontal organisation. At this point, you are ready to include a wider group of colleagues.
STEP 4.2
Checklist
- The process owner role is part of your HR setup.
- Each process has a process owner.
- All process owners understand their role and how to do process mapping.
- Process owners have knowledge about how to write effective work instructions.
Next step!
You have just read chapter four of our Complete Guide to Process Success. Where we cover how to effectively use the Gluu platform to improve your business processes, in chapter five, you will learn how best to Present to your colleagues.