Design tips for end-to-end processes

Are you really looking after your end-to-end processes? Or just letting them become a disjointed collection of departmental processes with no overall plan or metrics? I give you some tips for getting the processes and metrics under control to improve customer satisfaction.

There’s a lot of talk about end-to-end processes. But there’s not really a standard definition of what that means. For some people, an end-to-end process is a single process model where every activity is directly connected to every other activity in some way. So you have one big graph but unless you’re modeling at a really high level, hopping departmental boundaries, or the boundaries between customer interactions and internal processes, causes discontinuities in the process at the point of those handoffs. And handoffs are always where you get problems. Balls get dropped, customer journeys go off the rails and transactions can end up in a black hole.

Now, the reason we have these disjointed processes or departmental processes they’re there for a good reason, most businesses have functional silos and this is how businesses are more efficient at what they do. There’s a sales department, a credit department fulfillment shipping receivables, and so on. The people in those departments are responsible for making their area work well but they don’t necessarily care about what happens when something leaves their department as long as they get it off their desk successfully. And the different departments can have very conflicting metrics so you could have sales trying to maximize the number of new customers by just shoving every possible prospect into the pipeline but the credit department has to weed out the ones that don’t qualify in order to minimize their bad debt metric. So it turns out that your end-to-end process isn’t really a process, it’s this disjointed set of operations that probably isn’t even meeting your customers expectations.

Here is where Design tips for end-to-end processes come handy.

Watch this short video for more…

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