10 Steps to Successful Process Governance
Consistency in execution and commitment to high quality of work are key success factors for every services business. Ensuring that all team members meet these standards can be difficult, but enforcing process consistency can make a huge difference.
Process governance is how a company consolidates and standardizes their management, tasks, and services to ensure that each project is executed properly and in accordance with what is expected by both managers and clients. Governance is made possible by implementing standardized practices, processes, and rules across the entire business.
No matter what state your process management initiatives are currently in or what market your business currently serves, the following 10 steps from successful companies will help you improve the performance of your processes for even greater success in the future.
1. Establish a Processes Office – Having a processes office that will coordinate governance initiatives and updates to processes will help departments feel better supported. It will also ensure that these updates are rolled out completely and that team members stick to the regulations.
2. Test Processes Before Mandating – Mandated company-wide processes can seem like the right choice in theory, but these new rules and practices should be tested out by various team members and across all affected departments before being mandated. This testing period can highlight any complications that can arise or where team members may need help in understanding and implementing these new rules within their daily work.
3. Define Roles – A process governance structure should have several key roles to supervise implementation, including a Global Process Board for oversight, an Executive Process Champion to ensure alignment, a Global Process Owner to approve process standards, a Change Manager to take responsibility over the framework of process change, and a Process Architect to ensure process architecture, business strategy, and data architecture are aligned.
4. Use a Wide Variety of Team Members – Companies should assign both business and IT professionals to these governance roles to use their individual areas of expertise regarding the many different aspects of governance.
5. Manage Procedure Updates – After initial implementation, updates to procedures must ultimately rest in the hands of a few individuals. Decide who in your organization, preferably someone with enough experience and familiarity with governance, should be able to review and ultimately approve any updates and suggestions from the team after their review by executives.
6. Document Successes and Shortcomings – Where are your team members succeeding through the implementation of governance? Where are they falling short, either by not implementing processes or because of those processes? Thorough documentation and review can help strengthen governance strategies.
7. Implement Risk Management – A system of risk oversight and internal controls should be in place to anticipate any issues that may arise from governance changes. Forecasting and reacting to risk can help team members better understand, implement, and work within governance rules.
8. Communicate Benefits – Process governance is designed to prevent individual teams from breaking away from the standard practices used by the rest of the company and creating their own way of completing projects. Communicating the benefits of governance and providing detailed information on the positive effects across the company will help encourage compliance.
9. Allow for Feedback – Practices, processes, and rules created by governance should be thoroughly reviewed before implementation, but team members and departments may be impacted by them differently. Allow for feedback regarding new processes to see where changes or allowances should be made so that the entire company can benefit from governance.
10. Pursue Process Maturity – Process governance must continuously evolve after implementation. Typically, governance is first implemented by organizations to solve immediate problems. But as a company becomes more aware of their processes, they will understand that governance must grow and strengthen to produce the highest value from projects with the lowest costs and the shortest amount of time possible. This can only be reached through continued refinement of process governance.\
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