Processes and value
Every piece of work is a chain of steps that ends with someone who wanted something. Seeing the chain is where improvement starts.
About 4 minutes to read.
Key idea
A process is simply the way work travels from a request to a result. Somebody wants something, a parcel, a repaired boiler, an approved invoice, and a string of people and systems pass the work along until it arrives. Most of us only ever see our own link in that chain. We are busy, we are good at our part, and the rest of the journey happens somewhere out of sight.
Value is whatever the person at the end would happily pay for, or at least would notice if it vanished. The parcel arriving intact is value. The third person who re-keys the address is not. Improvement begins when a team stops looking at its own desk and follows the work from one end to the other, asking at each step whether the customer would care.
Example: an online order
From click to doorstep
Picture a small homeware shop selling online. A customer clicks Buy at 9pm. The order waits overnight in the web shop, is printed at 8am, carried to the warehouse, picked, packed, labelled and collected by the courier at 4pm. It arrives two days later.
Ask the customer what mattered and the answer is short: the right item, undamaged, quickly. Printing, carrying and waiting for the afternoon collection are invisible to them. Nobody in the shop is idle, yet most of the elapsed time is the order sitting still. That gap between how busy people feel and how slowly the work moves is the first thing a process view reveals.
Warning signs
- Each team measures its own speed, but nobody can say how long the whole journey takes.
- Work is handed over by email with “see below” and a long thread.
- Customers chase, and the person they reach has to go and find out.