Business processes lie at the heart of every initiative, repeatable task, or project cycle you’ll undertake. Organizations rely on these clearly defined steps to get work done. But you’ll rarely find a process that can’t be improved as your team grows, changes, and adapts to new challenges in the market.
Analyzing your processes and finding opportunities for change will help you save time, reduce waste, align your team, and create a better customer experience. In this article, we’ll:
- Break down five of the most popular process improvement strategies, with notes on the unique features and benefits of each one
- Show you four steps to develop and implement a project improvement plan for your organization
- Explain why continuous process improvement is so important for business growth
- Introduce some great tools for building and tracking process improvements with our work management software, Wrike
5 process improvement methodologies and their benefits
Process improvement is fundamentally about analyzing and optimizing your existing systems to make sure they’re performing at their best. But although this is the end goal for everyone, you’ll find several “schools of thought” about how to get there.
These approaches differ in terms of the number and order of the steps they suggest. You’ll also see variety in the way they prioritize areas for improvement and their methods of measuring success.
Compare the methodologies below to find a process improvement technique that could suit your team’s size and capacity, the problem with your current strategy, and the scope you have to make changes:
1. PDCA: A thorough approach to big changes
Sometimes called the Deming cycle, PDCA stands for Plan, Do, Check, Act. This approach breaks process improvement into four distinct phases.
- Plan is the fact-finding, data-gathering phase. It defines the current problems and sets goals for the process improvement initiative.
- Do is the execution phase. You implement the process changes, document your approach, and collect data to measure your progress.
- Check is a second analysis phase. Here, you analyze the data to see if the changes have had the result you expected.
- Act is the opportunity to rework your new process with additional or alternative solutions if there are still areas to improve.
When to use PDCA for process improvement
PDCA principles balance the goal of increasing efficiency with the risk of making big changes to your organization’s current processes and workflow management. These principles can be helpful if you’ll have to overhaul your approach to get the results you want.
For example, suppose your IT team will have to migrate across to a new ticketing system to keep up with demand. In that case, the PDCA approach can build several safety nets into the potentially complex transition. As well as two phases of analysis and evaluation during “planning” and “checking,” the “doing” phase expects you to include time for training your team, and the entire process is documented so you can make informed decisions to manage the change.
2. Lean: Maximizing value and minimizing waste
The principle of Lean project management focuses on giving your team what they need, when they need it, with the minimum resources. The main goal is efficiency: meeting growth, productivity, and profitability targets by eliminating waste.
Lean project managers will often start implementing changes when they identify one of three types of “waste” in their existing process:
- Work that uses up resources without providing value
- Work that overuses equipment or team members
- Work that decreases efficiency and productivity in the long term
Note: In Japanese, these are called Muda, Muri, and Mura, which is why this approach is sometimes referred to as the 3M method.
When a process is causing frustration, Lean process improvement efforts focus on correcting the current approach by removing the waste. For example, if a team finds a step in their approval workflow that just creates busywork for the reviewer, process improvement could be as simple as removing this step from the workflow.
When to start with a Lean approach to process improvement
It can be helpful to look at your work from the Lean perspective when your goal is to do more with less. If you can eliminate or adjust the processes that are stretching you thin, you can scale up without adding more people to your team.
If you suspect there are ways to automate your business processes, Lean can also help you find the manual tasks that could be eliminated and decide which parts of the workflow to automate first.
Read more: What is Lean project management?
3. Six Sigma: Finding long-term solutions
Often used in conjunction with Lean, Six Sigma is a strategy for finding the root cause of a complex issue. This helps managers choose process improvements that will be effective in the long term rather than a series of band-aids for surface-level problems.
With Six Sigma, teams:
- Define the problems that need to be addressed
- Measure the current situation by gathering data and breaking the problem into its component parts
- Analyze the data they collected to develop a strategy
- Improve their process by solving the problem
- Control the process for the future by implementing strategies to monitor the progress they’ve made
The acronym for these steps — DMAIC — is frequently used in Lean project management. DMAIC gives teams a template for approaching the bottlenecks or redundancies in their process.
When to use the Six Sigma method for process improvement
It’s worth noting that Six Sigma started as a Lean manufacturing tool. It’s well suited to practical processes like supply chains, where several moving parts have to come together to deliver a product on time. However, Six Sigma can be useful for any team with a complex or interconnected process.
For example, while a development team might not have to wait for a certain component to be delivered before they can start work, they might be held up by communication problems because of internal issues like file or backlog management. It’s easier to find an effective fix for these issues when you work through the layers to find the weakness that really needs to be addressed.
Read more: What is Six Sigma in project management?
4. Kaizen: Creating a culture of continuous improvement
In Japanese, Kaizen literally means “continuous improvement.” It’s become shorthand for maximizing productivity, but a true Kaizen approach is about achieving efficiency through long-term collaboration and innovation.
Kaizen identifies process improvement opportunities — and chooses solutions — based on four philosophies:
- Continuous improvement: Identifying places to apply small changes incrementally
- Waste reduction: Reducing defects, overproduction, wasted time, and unnecessary work
- Standardization: Eliminating variability and creating a consistently high-quality output
- Empowerment: Engaging the whole team to suggest solutions
When to apply Kaizen philosophies to process improvement
Kaizen is a process improvement strategy focused on creating a sustainable, adaptable culture of work. It’s an option for teams that want to work more productively but who also recognize that cost cutting and increased output aren’t the only metrics to measure success.
Because Kaizen also uses customer satisfaction as a vital KPI, it can be well suited to businesses that already focus on their users in different aspects of their product development and marketing, or who want to take a more customer-centered approach in the future.
5. TQM: Process improvement to help the rubber meet the road
TQM stands for Total Quality Management. This process improvement method has eight principles in total. In summary, it’s a method of improving processes by shifting the focus away from the manager. Instead, the insights that drive the changes come from:
- The value that can be added for the customer, who ultimately judges the quality of the product
- The wisdom that can be gathered from the team members involved in the production process, who can best identify the weaknesses and inefficiencies hampering their work
A TQM improvement project then focuses on the best ways to act on these insights and create a better experience for the customer and the team.
Read more: The ultimate guide to total quality management
When to choose a TQM approach for process improvement
The TQM approach is a good place to start when your main concern is improving your product. In this case, a more efficient process can help deliver a higher-quality product faster, which gives your customer a better experience and boosts employee engagement within your team.
How to create a process improvement plan for your organization
Whichever mix of business process improvement techniques appeals to you, the first step is to come up with a strategic plan for your project. Process improvement roadmaps generally start with three tasks.
1. Map the current process
Process mapping gives you a bird’s-eye overview of the way you’re working now. This is important for every element of business process management (BPM), but it’s vital for process improvement. Without a process map that makes sense for the work you’re completing, you can’t identify the areas that need attention.
Linear processes can be mapped with flowcharts. Cross-departmental tasks can use swimlane diagrams to show overlapping responsibilities. Value stream mapping can show how your time and resources are used at every stage of your process. Whichever visualization you choose, it’ll be critical for the decisions you make in the next step.
2. Assess the current process
With the process laid out in detail, you should be able to identify where you’re running into problems. During this phase, you should analyze the process stages before your roadblock and uncover the reasons behind the problem. This makes it less abstract.
So, for example, rather than just seeing a repeatedly missed milestone, you’d focus on the delay in approving initial creative briefs that’s forcing everyone to play catchup.
3. Rebuild the process
Rebuilding a business process might mean editing your workflow to combine steps, adding quality control, or clearly defining the handover between team members. Sometimes, it involves choosing a new software tool and onboarding the team to guarantee its adoption.
During this phase, it’s important to track decisions and gather data when you switch to the new process. This allows you to prove the new process contributes to business goals.
After these three tasks, it’s time to assign roles and resources.
4. Assigning roles and resources
The initial steps will give you a structured, deliberate way to analyze your current setup and choose areas for improvement. Regardless of the process improvement methodology you choose, the following steps will help you:
- Consider your existing process in its entirety so you can keep what works and address what doesn’t
- Ensure your team’s feedback is included so you can consider the problem from more angles and promote transparency in your organization
- Leave plenty of time to transition to your new approach so the change is as smooth as possible
- Document the process for future reference and for any retrospectives you hold as you evaluate the new method
However, one of the most important aspects of BPM — no matter which school of thought you follow — is continuous process improvement.
How to build a culture of continuous process improvement
Continuous process improvement recognizes that business processes are repeatable, but they take place in a changing environment. Whether it’s fresh team members, opportunities from new technology, or external pressures on your business, processes need to be continually honed and updated if your organization is going to stay at the top of its game.
Every worthwhile business process improvement strategy should also include a plan for continuous improvement. Without this crucial final element, process improvements are often patches rather than steps towards a more adaptable and sustainable way of working.
To continue to improve and adapt your business processes, you need four things:
- Transparency within the team
- Communication to encourage idea sharing and detailed feedback
- Work management tools to track and complete work more efficiently
- Data to drive decision making and responsive process improvement
With these in place, it’s easier to shift to a mindset of continuous process improvement. And one of the best ways to access the information and solutions you need is to manage your work in Wrike.
Use Wrike’s process improvement features to grow your business
Wrike is a work management platform that centralizes all the work and communications associated with your business processes. With Wrike, you have a total overview of your systems and comprehensive, intelligent insights to help you focus your improvement efforts. 
Real-time overviews of your business processes
Wrike includes customizable dashboards and reports to give you a detailed, up-to-the-minute overview of the way your business processes are running.
From tables tailored to the project work your team has on their plate to custom weekly reports summarizing your progress, Wrike helps you set up the overview you need to make data-driven decisions and keep your work on track.
Plus, because dashboards and reports are generated from the same task cards your team is working on, it’s incredibly simple to drill down into the figures to view the communication around the task, the work that’s gone into it so far, and the people involved.
Neal McCoy, the Senior Director of Professional Services, praises Wrike’s reporting and snapshot features as a way to plan and understand the costs across the organization. He also explains how custom reports inform their improvement strategy: “My customized project phase duration report shows me how long project phases take on average. Then I can use that data to understand what our longest phase is, why a phase is delayed, and how a new process impacted turnaround times.”
By consolidating so many of its processes in Wrike, BigCommerce hopes to leverage more integrations to streamline its systems even more in the future.
Wrike improves our time to value and customer satisfaction by creating greater efficiency with the project manager, which makes them more effective with their customers.
Neal McCoy, Senior Director of Professional Services
Automated communication for easy collaboration
Wrike’s communication features help you create a team environment of collaboration and visibility. With our notification system, it’s easy to replace internal emails, check-ins, and progress meetings.
Whenever a task changes status, for example, you can set Wrike to notify managers, reviewers, or the next team that needs to take the ball and run. You can also set up automatic notifications for a host of custom conditions — like automatically offering support to task owners when the due date is approaching.
Our communication tools can also help your team share ideas in real time. You can see this in action with our proofing and review software, where tagged comments directly on the work instantly notify the people responsible for the requested changes.
Design Coordinator Johan Alm told us how “time efficient” Wrike has made Electrolux’s processes: “We have built our processes in blueprints and we make our choice depending on how big the project is, with different tasks and different timelines. Ella Rudebeck, Global Packaging Manager, added: “We have everything connected because we ask people to put it in Wrike.”
Overall, the functions of Wrike are helping our team. It’s such an easy and efficient tool for us.
Johan Alm, Design Coordinator
Detailed process tracking to document and inform your decisions
Whenever you complete a task in Wrike, we’ll save and centralize the data so you can refer back to it later. Tools like project folders, comment threads, and time tracking help you pool a wealth of data and draw conclusions you can count on.
Wrike’s industry-leading Work Intelligence® features also include smart risk management, so you can identify bottlenecks and delays in your process before your process gets off track.
Wrike helped us centralize our Continuous Improvement team into one place, create one version of the truth, improve our ways of working, and eliminate non-value-adding work.
Francis Lalonde, Vice President of Transportation
Intelligent workflow automation to speed up work and reduce waste
Many of the process improvement strategies we discussed at the top of this article can help organizations do more with less. These days, one of the easiest ways to make this happen is by automating your workflows, removing manual tasks from your team’s to-do list, and reducing human error in the process.
Wrike’s workflow automations are powerful and intuitive. From setting up when/then rules to share items, file documents, and move tasks across a shared Kanban board, to AI content generation, Wrike includes hundreds of productivity boosters to ensure your processes run smoothly. We’ll even suggest new workflow automations tailored to your team.
Smoother process improvement and effortless BPM with Wrike
When it comes to process improvement, reducing inefficiency and promoting collaboration is the name of the game. When you take a systematic approach with Wrike, the results speak for themselves:
- BigCommerce reduced its reporting time by 50% and increased its adoption rate by 102% by providing a better way to work.
- Electrolux spends 30% less time per project and sends 50% fewer emails to the design team.
- Walmart Canada now has instant project approval, and has created more time during calls to focus on strategy.
The process improvement plan you put together will vary based on your team’s skills, your organizational goals, the tools you have available, and the pressure you’re up against. But whatever plan you put in place to analyze, evaluate, and improve on your current systems, Wrike is the easiest way to set yourself up for continuous, sustainable, and intelligent process improvement.
Ready to see Wrike in action? Find out how our software can help your team do their best work. Get in touch, and we’ll respond within 24 hours.
