To remain competitive, success is attributed to a robust governed process end to end. All too often I have seen claims to a governed process but then look puzzled when things go wrong and usually costing money direct to the bottom line, not to mention damaging credibility.

Starting with the actual process itself and going deep performing reviews, gap analysis, BPRs, end to end review, whatever, lots of names for the same task; is the solid foundation to enabling governance. A quick checklist I personally work from:

Triggers

What are all the inputs; internal, external, direct, indirect, system, manual, unplanned, planned. Explore them all.

Rituals

Daily, weekly, monthly tasks to monitor, action and capture. Regularly see daily rituals forgotten and not done. I can’t highlight this one enough. Its very easy to document a process, put the theory in place etc but driving home the mentality of rituals really enforces the adherence of the process by default. Definitely a driver for change.

RACIs

Who is doing what, who needs to know what’s going on, who is accountable, who can provide input. Commonly used in projects but should also be in place within the process itself.

SOPs

Multiple levels of details; high level summary all the way down to low level gritty detail. It directly supports the above in terms of RACI. Documenting processes I know is a complete bore but it is effective in ensuring a consistent approach is followed and supports those dreaded audits.

Activities

By now every single activity should be listed and a method of recording the data associated to each single activity. This is critical for continuous improvement plans. The methodology of data capture depends on volume, complexity and nature of the business for sure. However one critical activity to monitor and capture – exception handling via Event Management.

Next time let’s explore Event Management in the meantime thoughts on the above are welcome!