The PERFECT Approach to Experience-Based Process Evolution

Abstract 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.