You can use several different techniques to improve a business process and you should put eliminating bureaucracy at the top of the list. Do you remember Jack Welch calling bureaucracy "productivity's enemy?" Seems very fitting!
In a business process, bureaucracy requires following a complex series of activities that hinder the process. We have all seen bureaucracy and red tape continually added to a business process. Bureaucracy does not happen all at once, but rather incrementally over time. The process can easily become bloated, making it ineffective, inefficient, and inflexible.
You might wonder, because bureaucracy seems so counterproductive, how it can have any advocates. You can normally trace the cause of bureaucracy to either the need for excess control, the fear of making a mistake, the desire to cover our backs in case something goes wrong, or simply something that grew over time.
Even though no one outwardly admits to supporting bureaucracy, you will run into resistance as you work to eliminate it because of the fear of the unknown and the inclination of human nature to just carry on doing things in the same old way.
So, how do you go about eliminating bureaucracy? After drawing a process map of the current state, walk the project team through the map activity-by-activity and ask if bureaucracy exists in each step. If it does exist, use a blue highlighter to color the box on the map to denote bureaucracy. You should move slowly through this step. If everyone immediately says that no bureaucracy exists in a step and you think it does, you may have to force the project team to feel uncomfortable. Hesitate. Do not say anything for a few minutes. You will start to see the project team squirming, but eventually someone will talk. You have to possess good facilitation skills to feel comfortable challenging a group, but you have to do it if you want to improve the process.
Think of the case where a process requires multiple approval levels. Are they needed? Could you reduce the number of approvals by fifty percent? If one of your goals is to reduce the time a process takes, then you should challenge the number of approvals required because this will shorten the cycle time (the time required to complete a process from its first to last step). Ask simple questions like, what would happen if the company eliminated some levels of approvals, would the world fall apart, is a particular employee incompetent, or would the next approval level not catch any possible errors?
Another filter you can use to eliminate bureaucracy is evaluating whether an activity supports a statutory, audit, legal, or tax requirement. If it does, then it may have to stay. You have to show a little caution with "audit" though because sometimes we audit too frequently. Validate the reason for the audit to determine whether it should continue. If it does remain, still ask if you can use a "spot" audit, instead of a full audit, where you only examine a subset of the data.
Bill Gates wrote in his book Business @ the Speed of Thought: Succeeding in the Digital Economy that "A rule of thumb is that a lousy process will consume ten times as many hours as the work itself requires."
Eliminating bureaucracy is one of the steps to improving a business process so that you can make it more effective, efficient, and adaptable.