The Best Questions to Assess Workflow Efficiency

 Below are 14 questions to ask yourselves to begin to assess the efficiency of your workflow

1. Are there too many actors?
2. Does someone own the process?
3. Are there too many handoffs?
4. Are there non-value-added steps?
5. Are there non-critical steps holding up the main flow?
6. Is there an obvious bottleneck?
7. Are mistakes caught early in the process?
8. Do problems get all the attention while the majority of the work waits?
9. Is the process “one size fits all” wherein there is one complex process with lots of decisions, exceptions or complexity to cover all situations?
10. Is there one role that coordinates other roles or tasks? (often a symptom of a poor process)
11. Is the process undocumented, leading to each individual or work group doing it their own way?
12. Are roles undefined, leading to confusion about who is responsible for what?
13. Are cause and effect, or work and inspection, separated? This introduces delay and the doers don’t learn what they are doing wrong.
14. Is there poor collaboration across organizational boundaries, as in “We’re working at cross purposes”? This often results from local or internal measures as opposed to process-oriented or customer-oriented measures that focus on outcomes, not tasks. 

See our blog discussing workflow and five other enablers of efficiency.

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