Ensuring a government agency’s business processes can support the organization effectively is essential for adapting and responding quickly to customer demand. Lean Six Sigma offers a wide range of tools and methodologies that government agencies can utilize to improve their business processes to maintain operational efficiency, improve organizational performance, and remain sustainable.

Customer service is important to government agencies for both internal and external stakeholders. For external stakeholders, such as citizens, businesses, and visitors, customer service is a critical factor in building trust, satisfaction, and loyalty. Most enterprises take customer service very seriously, monitoring service levels to track their performance and note when improvements need to be made. In most cases, a traditional approach is taken when reviewing and correcting changes in service levels. Agencies should approach customer service assessment from a holistic perspective

There’s no doubt that improvements in technology drive productivity and improve our lives. But in government agencies and enterprises throughout the private sector, managers often look to technology as the silver bullet without realizing the false economy they are often creating.

In economics, a false economy is an action that does save money at the beginning but which, over a longer period of time, results in more money being spent or wasted than being saved. When it comes to technology tools, like CRMs, ERP, Electronic Onboarding, and others, most managers don’t realize they are creating a false economy when they implement a new technology tool.

Research shows 20% – 30% of an organization’s revenue is lost due to inefficient business processes and 26% of every employee’s day is wasted on unnecessary tasks. Further, in 2018, the Federal Inspector General identified $34B in potential savings across the Federal government if process inefficiencies were addressed in multiple agencies.

Lean Six Sigma was originally developed to leverage data for the improvement of manufacturing processes.  In government agencies and service enterprises there may be little or no data regarding business processes that can be used.  This is where Subject Matter Experts provide value.  Trusting the people who are executing your processes daily will be key to evaluating task and streamlining them to create new more efficient processes.

Employees love training, it can provide new tools for better  task execution, certification for advancement, and break from daily work.  But training that is never implemented – Scrap Learning – is often the result of most training initiatives. 

According to Metrics that Matter, scrap learning wastes roughly

Robotic Process Automation (RPA) is a trend in business office software tools. Like assembly line robots, RPAs automate an organization’s routine tasks and standard decision-making based on real-time data and full implementation and execution of process business rules.

In some enterprises, RPAs can significantly automate routine tasks, improving performance, throughput and delivery while reducing costs and enhancing profitability.  If properly integrated, an RPA system can automate an appropriate process and automatically complete its required steps.  An excellent example

The goal of every digital transformation is process improvement – not digital transformation.  Transforming an inefficient manual process into a digital process yields an inefficient digital process.  Thus the mantra: Process Before Tool – improve the process before implementing new digital tool.

CIO Magazine recently published an interesting article that clearly identifies the pitfalls of digital transformation: