Applying Leadership
Business process improvement is such a valuable and in-demand skill set for today.No matter who you are, where you work, or what you do, business process improvement can be applied to increase the impact that you can have in your career and in your organization.
Over the last ten years of my career, I’ve built my expertise around mastering the skill set, getting experience and learning lessons that I can share with others like yourself. Before we really dive into the course and start going through the technical aspects, I want to share
who I am and how I got started with business process improvement.I started my career in accounting and once I got into the role and familiar with what I was doing,
I realized there were a whole bunch of inconsistent processes and inconsistent data, and this was frequently leading to producing insights and results I was sharing with other leaders and team members that were inaccurate.
So that was frustrating for me. So what did I do?
I raised my hand and said, We need to fix this, but if you’re like me, no one came to the rescue.No one came to fix your problem.
What I came to realize and what you’re probably realizing is that you have to solve these problems yourself. And that’s what this course is about. Because I started, right?
I started on Google. I started asking people and there just weren’t the right resources and tools out there. That’s what this course is. It’s best practices, it’s experienced, it’s real-life examples and simulations.
So when you’re finished, you don’t have to spend your time frustrated and on Google, as I did, you’re going to start taking this knowledge and applying it to make an impact in your organization and in your career.
Identifying Opportunities Story
Now that we’ve talked a little bit about identifying opportunities, I’d like to share some of my experience and what I look for to find those really juicy opportunities that could sink your teeth into.
For me, one of the best opportunities I’ve worked on was when I worked for a pharmaceutical company, had acquired a smaller firm, and all the work was being done in Costa Rica for the smaller company, but it was coming back to the US.
During this transition phase, we saw a few things that were really interesting. All the processes were really well documented and they’re all being done in Excel and they’re being
done in a very methodical, step-by-step way that once we step back, it didn’t really make sense why it wasn’t being done with some sort of system or with a database.
People were doing things, handing them off to the next person and it just wasn’t really well structured or well thought out or utilizing even the intermediate and advanced features of Excel.
So what we did here is we did some research to say, okay, how can we use Excel better? And we identified a few technologies that we could learn to use to automate and improve the processes. We started with. One, we executed the concept and we proved, wow, we cut down 95% of the time it used to take.
So then we went to the next process and the next process.I did this for my entire role’s responsibility. And then I went to my manager and then the department manager and asked if I could help more people do the same exact thing.
That’s the type of thing we look for, where there are new ways, new tools, and new methodologies to work in a better way, a faster way, a more methodical way. Those are the types of things that have been consistent winners for me and my career over and over. And if you’re looking for opportunities, it’s going to be the same sort of thing. You’re going to look for new ways to do the old type of work that’s always been done.