Process Improvement
Maryrose’s mindset of process improvement was honed from Enterprise Data Management roles early in her career. She quickly realized that an optimized process may mean efficiency and cost-effectiveness for the enterprise, but, administrative pain for the development team. Though she has mostly executed work in development teams, her keen sense of good corporate citizenship has always steered her toward the corporate ‘good’.
Process Improvement is a necessary part of doing any kind of Six Sigma work. It is based on the premise that solutions are hardly perfect when initially implemented. The key is striving for the best possible result and adopting continuous improvement as a way of life gradually moving toward the ‘perfect’ solution.
Maryrose subscribes to KAIZEN, which just means constantly striving for improvement. (This is the cycle of creating process, identifying measures (i.e., the metric to move to make the improvement), brainstorming to identify improvements, implementing improvements). Implementing this process requires executive sponsorship and buy-in to the process, as the perception of having to improve on a process repeatedly may imply previous improvement was ineffective.
Ask to see Maryrose’s ‘recipe’ for process improvement, a process that she evangelizes to cover most process improvement work in organizations.
Prime Therapeutics
The Perceived Problem
What customer called it: INCIDENT MANAGEMENT.
What symptoms demonstrated it: Customer was unhappy. They did not know who to chase when they had issues. There was no clear communication channel. There was no communicated process for handling the issues, including criteria for closing the issue.
Maryrose's Assesment
There was no process owner. There were multiple processes that could be used by folks involved in the resolution process. None of the processes were documented or communicated. Maryrose identified this issue from what was originally a process improvement initiative. This effort was to streamline the service management function for the Information Management group. As they saw it, it was an ‘Incident Management’ issue. After developing a streamlined Incident Management process, she proceeded with expanding to a full Issue Resolution process improvement when it became apparent that the original project name was a misnomer.
Maryrose developed Prime Therapeutics’ Information Management problem intake, communication protocol, problem resolution life cycle complete with stage owners and hand off procedures, reporting and a customer advocacy function.
When complete, she documented a repeatable process for Prime to utilize in future process improvement efforts.