Source: www.askacoach.com

The Internal Business Process Perspective

This perspective refers to internal business processes. Metrics based on this perspective allow the leaders of the organisation to know how well their business is running and whether its products and services conform to customer requirements. These processes need to be designed and measured with the customer experience in mind.

For example, how to collect and manage customer feedback is a critical process for any business. This isn’t just about how to address complaints well, but on a bigger scale, outline management responsibility in a measurable way. How does customer feedback influence future strategic direction of the business and the design of its products and services?

In addition to the strategic managment process, two kinds of business processes may be identified: a) mission-oriented processes, and b) support processes. Mission-oriented processes are the special functions related directly to the higher-level and customer-centric strategic objectives of the organisation. The support processes are more repetitive in nature, and hence easier to measure and benchmark using generic metrics.

Examples of support metrics could include on-time delivery of the product, regular internal communications like newsletters being consistently produced as agreed, or responding to all potential/existing client queries within 24 hours.

Coaching Exercises

Here are some questions to ask about your business. There are many more to be asked, so this is just a starting point.

  1. What are your high-level internal business process objectives?
  2. When do they have to be achieved by?
  3. Is there a particular order in which they need to be achieved?
  4. How are you evaluating these as important?
  5. How are you measuring these objectives? In other words, what data and reporting mechanisms do you have in place?
  6. What strategies do you have in place already, or which could be designed, to address each of the objectives? In some cases, there may be more than one strategy required to achieve the desired outocome?
  7. For each strategy, do you have any dates identified to achieve them?
  8. For each strategy, what are the measurement criteria and how specifically are you going to collect the data?
  9. Who is responsible for each strategy? What reporting do you need from them?
  10. For each objective, and for all stakeholders related tot he achievement of that objective, what learning and development objectives must also be met?
  11. For each objective, what customer objectives must also be met? These may link to the financial objectives as well.
  12. If you have already been measuring certain internal business process objectives, and have been able to identify that one or more of them is underperforming, which related financial, customer, internal business process and/or learning and development objectives are also underperforming? This information may help you in identifying root cause of the problem, and from this awareness, you can explore new choices and actions to implement to correct the issue.
  13. If you’re unsure about the objectives, the data, causes of problems or opportunities to improve the situation, whom wihin or outside of your organisation could you be turning to for assistance? This is potentially part of your own learning and development.

As always, if you need any further personal support in response to any of these coaching exercies, please consider using the askacoach.com service.

All the best,

Noel

Noel Posus - Master Coach
www.askacoach.com