The PERFECT approach to experience-based process evolution

Improvement game plans-carefully defined, organized and managed sequences of process change activities based on standards, maturity models and best practices-are critical to a company's success. Also critical is the ability to evolve processes in response to precipitous, unpredictable changes to critical business-context factors such as financial goals, customer desires, personnel availability, and available process performance support technology. This chapter describes an approach-PERFECT-to process evolution resulting from many decades of experience in helping companies-of a variety of sizes and in many industry sectors-rationally, rapidly and incrementally evolve their processes, often but not necessarily in the context of an overall improvement game plan. The approach is based on a framework-PEDAL-identifying twelve categories of activities comprising process evolution. Three Case Studies introduce the framework and process evolution approach and show their application across a wide variety of situations to evolving a company's processes through narrowly focused, short, overlapping process evolution exercises each addressing a set of tightly inter-related processes. Several important lessons learned are discussed, followed by a description of a variety of simple techniques and tools allowing process change agents to rationally describe, understand, learn from, plan and manage process evolution exercises. The chapter ends with a discussion of various improvements that should be made to the PERFECT process evolution approach and its underlying PEDAL framework.