What is the Process approach?

The fourth Quality Management Principle is the Process approach. And unlike the case with some of the other principles, I have already written a fair bit about it, here and elsewhere. In fact, by a curious synchronicity, I just finished an article for publication explaining the process approach in some detail. If it finally sees the light of day, I'll make sure to post a link in this blogroll, just as I have for other articles I have published in the wider world. 

So instead of laying out the elements of the process approach yet again, I want to take a few minutes to explain why it is so ubiquitous. After all, no sooner do you start working in Quality than you hear about processes. They seem to be everywhere. I have seen companies unironically publish a process on how to write processes.

Why is this? Has everyone just gone crazy?

No, not quite. It turns out that the process approach is a remarkably useful and powerful tool for describing work.

Work can be confusing when you look at it on a large scale, because there are so many people doing so many different things. It can look as crowded and confusing as … well, let's say a county fair.

But look at the same fair through the lens of the process approach, and it all begins to make sense. Everyone is there for a reason. And mostly, everyone's activities can be described with a process.

• The hot dog vendors are there to sell hot dogs. Their process runs something like this: Take an order; prepare the hot dog; give the hot dog to the customer; collect the money. Repeat.
• The cotton candy vendors are there to sell cotton candy. Their process is almost exactly the same.
• The cheese curd vendors are doing the same thing again.
• The team in charge of the Ferris Wheel are selling tickets on the Ferris Wheel, much like the other vendors. But their process interacts with a second process that turns the switch so the Ferris Wheel rotates.
• The 4-H Club is there to show off their animals. They have a different process, but it is still a process that they cycle through several times during the day.
• Even the vacationers, who are visiting just to see the sights, are following a kind of process of their own, though their process has room in it for a little more variation. But roughly it goes something like this: Drive to the fair; park the car; walk down the Midway; go to the first exhibit; go to the second exhibit; get some food; go to the third exhibit; get some more food; go to the fourth and fifth exhibits; walk back to the car; drive home.  

And all of a sudden, this huge, confusing swarm of people makes sense! All you have to do is to look at it as a collection of interacting processes, and the chaos becomes order. This is because the process approach gives us two kinds of information about the activities of every participant: purpose and predictability. That is to say: when you describe everyone's work as part of one process or another, you tell us what they are going to do and also why they are doing it.

If you want to understand work on the large scale—whether you are describing a county fair or a factory building airplanes—there is simply no intellectual tool more effective than the process approach. It's ubiquitous—nay, universal—because it works.

On top of all that, there's another benefit to the process approach. Let's say you've been put in charge of a huge, teeming swarm of work: maybe an aircraft factory (just for example). And let's say you've been told you have to make the operation more efficient. Where do you start?

You start by studying the processes. After all, if you want to make the work more efficient, that means making George's work more efficient, and Sam's work, and Fred's work, and Max's work. You can't do that unless you know what they do. But reading their processes tells you what they do, and it also lets you look for optimizations. 

"Hey Max, why do you walk clear across the plant twice, every single day? Wouldn't it be easier if you rearranged the steps in your job so you didn't have to do that?"

Ask that question a thousand times, and you cut in half the man-hours it takes to produce your airplanes. But you'll never know to ask the question even once until you read the processes. 

These are the benefits of the process approach.

But what are the elements of the process approach?

There are several. I've written about most of them before.

If you want further discussion of what processes can do and can't do, check out this post and this one.

If you want to implement the process approach in your own organization, consider this series of posts on:

• writing processes;
• owning processes;
• and measuring processes. (Consider also this post on how measuring can go wrong.)

When it's time to follow up on your process implementation, the tool for that is management review. I mention that several times; but my most important advice is in this post and this one.

Also (according to ISO 9001:2015, clause 0.1, paragraph 6) the process approach includes two other tools that I would probably have listed separately. But who am I to argue with the ISO? These tools are:

• the Plan-Do-Check-Act (PDCA) cycle, which I discuss at a high-level in this post, and then in excruciating detail (although without using the PDCA acronym, but this is definitely what it looks like in practice) in this post;
• Risk-based thinking, which largely refers to what used to be called "preventive actions" or "lessons learned" (see especially this post here and this post here). I've recently written another article for publication in the outside world on the subject of risk-based thinking. So if it sees the light of day any time soon, I'll link it here as well.