Minimum Viable Solution applied to Process Improvement

Incorporating a continuous improvement and an innovation mindset in organizations is a great challenge today. These competencies are essential to keep up with the continuous change businesses have as well as providing quality experiences to customers. We also need to accompany employees to embrace these competencies which represents another important challenge organizations face.

Our client needed to improve efficiency in one of their critical processes in the commercial area. The problems the client had – to name a few - were related to a low clarity in the tasks to be performed, in the responsibilities of the roles involved, in the IT systems used to document the process, in the end to end duration of the process, among others. This situation was negatively impacting the experience of its external customers and fundamentally on a negative internal experience of co-workers involved in the process.

To improve customer satisfaction, we asked employees to identify pain points in the process. To do this, we used our Spiraling Up Framework. Our first step was to understand the context of the problem by mapping the business process. We segmented the pain points into:

• Waste: documents with irrelevant information, rework, duplicate tasks, use of many systems to upload the same documents, complete the same information in several documents, poor communication between areas, etc.

• Value tasks: identify the essential documents for the process, associate each task to a role, identify only the critical information required by the process, define the most suitable system for process management, communication in a timely manner, collaboration between teams, incorporate customer feedback, etc.

• Opportunities for improvement: clarity in the expectations of each role, introduction of KPIs, setting up a, agile team to keep incorporating improvements, changes proposed by the roles involved in the process, feedback-driven approach from customers, etc.

With this information, we were able to co-design the minimum viable solution (MVS) to be implemented that would allow the people involved to incorporate the changes in an incremental way, that is making adjustments to improve the internal and external customer experience as well as embracing and adopting the new way of working. It was essential to work with a cross-functional team to design and build a minimum viable solution to help employees incorporate this new mindset of continuous improvement and innovation in an incremental, gradual and tangible way.

We avoid a Big Bang solution. This Big Bang scenario - disruptive change - saturates people and the organization and makes it more difficult to incorporate new ways of working. Our proposal is to co-design minimum viable solutions that allow people and the organization to absorb the changes of new tasks, knowledge and skills in an evolving way.