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April 11, 2006
Alec Sharp

On April 11th our speaker will be Alec Sharp who will speak on Five Common Errors in Process Improvement and How to Avoid Them.

Recent years have seen a huge resurgence of interest in everything to do with "business process." Unlike the near-hysteria accompanying the Business Process Reengineering bandwagon in the early 1990s, the current interest is much more pragmatic. Initially, it was driven a need to "do more with less" during the economic slowdown, and by disappointing results from expensive technology investments that failed to deliver benefits because business processes weren't adequately considered, Now, the drivers include the "vanilla-ization" of ERP implementations, process offshoring, integrating processes across the extended enterprise, and of course, the ongoing desire to improve organizational performance.

After a quick recap of the basics and the history of "process orientation," we'll turn our attention to some of the problems that accompany process improvement initiatives with depressing regularity. Highlights include:

• What a "business process" really is, and what goes wrong if you don't identify them properly
• The cross-functional minefield, and the issues that have to be addressed
• The basics of workflow mapping, and why simple techniques beat complicated ones
• The potential for overwhelming detail in your workflow maps, and how to avoid it
• The six factors to consider when assessing and improving a process, the two we tend to focus on, and the two that should get more attention

Throughout, the key points will be illustrated with real-life examples.

Presentation handout:
Five Common Errors in Process Improvement (PDF)

Alec Sharp has managed his own consulting and education business, Clariteq Systems Consulting Ltd., for 25 years, serving clients in locations as diverse as Northern Ireland, central Illinois, and Southern India. Alec is the principal author of Workflow Modeling: Tools for Process Improvement and Application Development (Artech House, 2001) which is currently the best-selling book in the process modeling area. Click here to read an excerpt.

Alec's expertise includes facilitation, application requirements specification, data modeling, and of course, business process improvement. His popular workshops and conference presentations on these topics, conducted globally, consistently receive "excellent" ratings. Alec can be contacted at asharp@clariteq.com.