What is process redesign?

Process redesign consulting means working with a team of experienced professionals to analyze every step of your organization’s important processes. Together, we’ll identify where inefficiencies exist and put together a plan to help you improve your problem areas.

While our workflow will depend on your individual needs, we generally approach process redesign in the following way:

• Identify all the processes in an organization and prioritize them in order of redesign urgency
• Build and define process maps that reflect as-is and to-be results
• Integrate information processing work into the real work that produces the information
• Treat geographically-dispersed resources as though they were centralized
• Link parallel activities in the workflow instead of just integrating their results
• Put the decision point where the work is performed, and build control into the process
• Capture information once and at the source
• Organize around the outcomes, not the tasks

How we’ve helped with process design: a client story

The issue

A large university was moving from a decentralized administration environment to a centralized model. In advance of finalizing a new organization structure, senior HR leaders wanted to understand the underlying components of their major HR business processes.

The client asked us to help them identify, define, prioritize, map, and finally redesign the core HR business processes. One of these processes was student hiring. It took approximately 6-8 weeks to hire a student. In many cases, the semester was nearly over before the student started the work.

Our solution

We completed detailed process mapping of most of the core HR processes, discovering that student recruitment followed a similar path as staff recruitment, including hiring committees, background checks, and more. These processes are typically expected when hiring a full-time staff position, but are not essential when hiring a student.

The result

Our team developed a streamlined process for student recruitment that cut the time down for hiring from 6-8 weeks to 3-4 days. Faculty and staff satisfaction greatly improved and students were able to start, and get paid on time for, their efforts.