Importance of Visualization in Process Improvement

Process Improvement is nicer to talk about as a concept and a ’Vision" thing than when it comes to actual action. I have seen many a company having company-wide, grandiose "Quality Improvement" goals with respect to business processes but failing miserably when it comes to realizing them in practice.

I have seen some companies where the centralized Quality and Process Excellence teams had very nice looking documents detailing KPIs and upper and lower limits for these KPIs but where the business process is executed, they were struggling with data collection or were not doing it at all because they were busy fighting day to day fires rather than do anything about strategic Process Improvement Goals!

In places where the situation is somewhat better, lots of information is being collected, albeit in spreadsheets. This is where there is a gap in obtaining actionable intelligence out of all these data vs. just lots and lots of data in many different databases or spreadsheets!

Stephen Few has written a couple of MOST excellent books, Show Me the Numbers: Designing Tables and Graphs to Enlighten and Information Dashboard Design: The Effective Visual Communication of Data !

The above two books shine a lot of light into turning bits and pieces of data into some thing more actionable! Any amount of staring at Excel Spreadsheets will not provide as much useful Information as a few well chosen graphs and dashboards.

Practical, useful information such as "Is my Average Handle Time Per Agent improving over the past three quarters?" or "Which of my agents need more training in collecting outstanding balances on the phone?" or "How is the Employee Turnover percentages affecting Number of Calls that end up in a sale in a telemarketing business process?" can all be answered with a few well chosen graphs and dashboards.

Dashboards are all the rage these days for Sales and Financial Information but are just catching on for Process Performance also, especially in the context of Outsourced Business Processes.

Information on designing and using select Graphs and Dashboards for highly useful practical actionable intelligence is never more timely!

When it comes to getting things done, we need fewer architects and more bricklayers - Colleen C. Barrett.