You can use a number of different techniques to improve a business process and you should put eliminating red tape at the top of your list. Remember Jack Welch calling bureaucracy the “enemy of productivity”? It seems very appropriate!
In a business process, the bureaucracy requires following a complex series of activities that make the process difficult. We’ve all seen red tape and red tape being continually added to a business process. Red tape does not happen all at once, but incrementally over time. The process can easily become bloated, making it ineffective, inefficient, and inflexible.
You may be wondering, since bureaucracy seems so counterproductive, how can it have defenders? Typically, the cause of bureaucracy can be attributed to a need for excessive control, a fear of making a mistake, a desire to cover our backs in case something goes wrong, or simply something that has grown over time.
Although no one openly admits to supporting bureaucracy, you will encounter resistance as you work to eliminate it due to fear of the unknown and human nature’s inclination to keep doing things the same way.
So how do you go about eliminating red tape? After drawing a current state process map, guide the project team through the activity map by activity and ask if there is red tape at each step. If it exists, use a blue highlighter to color the box on the map to indicate the bureaucracy. You should progress slowly through this step. If everyone says right away that there is no red tape in one step and you think there is, you may need to force the project team to feel uncomfortable. Dude. Don’t say anything for a few minutes. You’ll start to see the project team squirm, but eventually someone will speak up. You must possess good facilitation skills to feel comfortable challenging a group, but you must if you want to improve the process.
Consider the case where a process requires multiple levels of approval. They are needed? Could you reduce the number of approvals by fifty percent? If one of your goals is to reduce the time a process takes, then you should question the number of approvals required because this will shorten the cycle time (the time required to complete a process from the first to the last step). Ask simple questions like, what if the company dropped some levels of approvals, the world would fall apart, a particular employee is incompetent, or the next level of approval would not catch any possible errors?
Another filter you can use to eliminate red tape is to assess whether an activity meets a legal, audit, legal, or tax requirement. If you do, then you may have to stay. However, you need to show a little caution with “auditing” because sometimes we audit too often. Validate the reason for the audit to determine if it should continue. If it persists, still ask if you can use an “immediate” audit, instead of a full audit, where you only examine a subset of the data.
Bill Gates wrote in his book Business at the Speed of Thought: Succeeding in the Digital Economy that “a general rule of thumb is that a lousy process will consume ten times as many hours as the actual job requires.”
Eliminating red tape is one of the steps in improving a business process so that you can make it more effective, efficient, and adaptable.
Copyright 2011 Susan Page