Process Optimization
Key performance indicator
As a person responsible for processes, you want to optimise your processes. To be able to measure your processes, you need suitable KPIs (key performance indicators). In the incident process these could be, for example, the percentage of solved tickets compared to all tickets or the average processing time of the tickets (in a quarter or year). Suitable KPIs must be defined for each process in order to be able to collect meaningful measurement figures. The KPIs can be evaluated by means of (automatically generated) reports.
Kaizen
If a KPI deviates from the set benchmark, the cause of the deviation must be identified and improvement measures must be initiated. This procedure is also known as Deming cycle or PDCA cycle (Plan-Do-Check-Act). After the improvement measure has been planned (Plan) and implemented (Do), further measurement (Check) and, if necessary, a further measure (Act) is initiated. This is a continuous improvement cycle.
In the agile world, continuous improvement is known under the Japanese term “Kaizen”.
Theory of Constraints
In the “Theory of Constraints” the principle of Kaizen is most sustainable. Here, a process is regarded as a workflow in which there are different work stations (comparable to the work stations in a factory). The “Theory of Constraint” now states that the total flow of the workflow is limited by the workstation with the lowest flow – the “bottleneck”.
Maximum Flow
Any optimisation of other workstations is ineffective in terms of the overall flow. To increase this, there is only one way – the throughput of the bottleneck must be increased. In computer science this is known as the “Min Cut – Max Flow” theorem. After the bottleneck workstation has been optimised, there will now be another bottleneck workstation. The improvement starts all over again, the cycle continues steadily.