Process Improvement: Saving time, money and stress.

• Author: Barrett, Katherine
• Position: PERSPECTIVE - Improvement project in Fort Collins, Colorado's Financial Services Division

Until recently, Fort Collins, Colorado, Senior Accounting Coordinator Renee Reeves was frustrated by the amount of time it took her to reconcile the city's credit receipts with its bank records. But after a summer-long improvement project in the city's Financial Services Division, she was able to celebrate a dramatic decrease from an average of 100 hours a month spent on this activity to only 65 hours in October 2022. The goal is to reduce the number of hours even further.

"The primary issue was inconsistent processes, manual processes, and submissions that were often delayed or missed," Reeves said. Having addressed many of these issues, Reeves found herself with more time to get her work done, and "this definitely decreased my stress," she says.

Fort Collins is a prime example of an effort that is taking place in a number of cities and states to improve the smooth flow of their processes. At the state level, the National Association of State Chief Administrators (NASCA) listed operational excellence and process improvement among the top ten core strategies for state chief administrators for fiscal 2023. It held its first summit on the topic last fall.

Current notions of improving and simplifying business and government processes stem from manufacturing innovations in the middle years of the 20th century when the seeds of Lean Process Improvement methods were planted. But the effort to get at the root causes of inefficient approaches to work "has been in existence since the beginning of time," said Sheila Montney, an alderperson in Bloomington, Illinois. Montney used process improvement at State Farm Insurance before retiring in May 2021 and starting a company called Win Together, to help governments "build cultures of performance excellence."

Why the acceleration in activity now? With critical staff shortages, the pressure is on to reduce unnecessary steps that eat up employee time. What's more, as technology becomes central to a growing number of governmental operations, it's important to redesign and improve a process before you try to automate it. Or, as Montney says, "When you automate a process mess, you get an automated mess."

Core principles of continuous improvement

While Lean methods of process improvement currently dominate, governments often borrow from a variety of approaches--sometimes holding with almost religious fervor to the tools and jargon of Lean, although many places avoid the language of any one method. "It's ideal...