The most important aspects of process management: assurance and communication

The meaning of assurance

Assurance means nothing more than making certain. Process management is about all planned and systematic actions that are necessary to give sufficient confidence that a process meets and continues to meet the quality requirements. It matters how you create a process, how you communicate it, and where.

Assurance and communication within process management

Often, organizations start with process management much too fanatical. They immediately start working with tools like Agile, Lean, or Customer Excellence in their organizations. One of the biggest pitfalls with this approach is that you may book quick wins, but that real, deeper organizational improvements do not occur.

Little or no attention to ensuring and communicating those processes is a main reason for the lack of real organizational improvements. Important, but often underestimated aspects of permanent process management. New employees must be able to easily find and share work agreements. Especially when situations suddenly change, your colleagues need something to fall back on. Think of process descriptions, manuals, how-to's or a company knowledge base.

How do you ensure good assurance and communication?

Here are three simple steps for clear and effective assurance and smart communication.

1. Know why you communicate, record and ensure your processes

Once properly set up, process descriptions are of great value in your organization. Provided that they are recorded in a good and convenient manner and communicated throughout the organization. Unnecessary waste is eliminated, work is more standardized, and employees become more attuned to each other. They know why things happen the way they (should) happen and become more involved in their work.

Well-ensured and better communicated processes support your employees in their daily work, with practical steps and clear information. Processing a complex order? Take the process description! Hiring a new employee? View the process description to see what needs to be done.

Process models can also be used to gain an overview of your organization: as if you were flying over your organization in a helicopter and could view all the processes from a distance. What happens when? By whom? And why? How do all these processes connect to each other? Good process descriptions contain this information. They offer support, inspiration and insight.

Whether it concerns handling a complaint, organising an event, organising a recall, performing audits, planning and control: for all these processes it is good to have a clear and inspiring representation of reality. However, it is of no use if you do not know where to find those processes.

2. Involve your employees in the assurance and communication of process descriptions

One of the goals of describing processes is to provide employees with guidance and clarity about what needs to happen in a process. That is why it is so important to work with the employees in the process itself to map out processes and describe them. Do not describe an ideal situation behind your computer, but focus on the current practice, together with each other. This way, you not only create support for process management, but people also feel heard, and content is shared more quickly.

Process descriptions can be visual (the familiar blocks and arrows), but can also be described perfectly well with text (provided it is not too long and written appealingly; also an art in itself). Or what do you think of infographics with clear icons? Or videos? As long as it works and is easy to find, it is fine.

3. Create one place in the organization where employees can find all information

Process descriptions shouldn't be separate pages on your intranet and should certainly not be hidden away in a separate system. They work best in combination with all other relevant management documents and information. Clicking through from a process step to a related document, such as a quote template or work instruction, is a first step.

Links and associated explanations about the responsibilities and risks in a process, any forms that need to be completed or other roles that employees have (such as the RASCI roles) are important as well. Your colleagues won't just have powerful process descriptions at hand at all times, but also supporting information that will help them progress.

This way, everyone knows what the agreements are. Because everyone uses the same source of knowledge, such meetings will be less necessary in the future. There is less noise in the organization, more time for other things and employees have thought about their work themselves.

Of course, writing it down is the first step, but you also have to consider the steps after. Whoever presents a bookcase full of folders as the ‘company knowledge base’ has made all that effort for nothing. The packaging matters, too. And let's be frank: a digital system is way more accessible than a bookcase.