You can use a number of different techniques to improve a business process, and you should put eliminating bureaucracy at the top of the list. Remember Jack Welch calling bureaucracy the “enemy of productivity”? It seems very appropriate!

In a business process, bureaucracy requires following a complex series of activities that make the process difficult. We have all seen bureaucracy and red tape continually added to a business process. Bureaucracy does not happen all at once, but incrementally over time. The process can easily become bloated, making it ineffective, inefficient, and inflexible.

You might be wondering, since bureaucracy seems so self-defeating, how can it have advocates? Normally, the cause of bureaucracy can be attributed to the need for excessive control, the fear of making a mistake, the desire to cover our backs in case something goes wrong, or simply something that grew 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 bureaucracy? After drawing a process map of the current state, walk the project team through the activity-by-activity map and ask if there is any bureaucracy at each step. If it exists, use a blue highlighter to color the box on the map to indicate bureaucracy. You should proceed slowly through this step. If everyone immediately says there is no bureaucracy in a step and you think there is, you may need to force the project team to feel uncomfortable. Doubt. Don’t say anything for a few minutes. You’ll start to see the project team squirming, but eventually someone will speak up. You must have 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 removed some levels of approvals, the world would fall apart, a particular employee is incompetent, or the next level of approval would not catch any potential errors?

Another filter you can use to cut through red tape is to assess whether an activity meets a statutory, audit, statutory, or tax requirement. If you do, then you may have to stay. However, you should show a little caution with “auditing” because sometimes we audit too often. Validate the reason for the audit to determine if you 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 rule of thumb is that a lousy process will consume ten times as many hours as the job itself requires.”

Eliminating bureaucracy is one of the steps in improving a business process so you can make it more effective, efficient, and adaptable.

Copyright 2011 Susan Page