Here's how you can align process design projects with organizational goals as a project manager.

The one and only goal of every business worldwide is to rapidly grow sustainable profit. Regardless of what your client says their goal is, you must design all solutions including processes in ways that can be mathematically proven to increase overall profit, not just a return on the investment of their intervention.

At a bank, we trained all managers to facilitate SIP meetings & develop SIP plans. SIP stood for Service Improvement Process. The meetings included front-line workers who mapped out an existing process to improve. The Service Delivery Maps represented the service flow. Successive meetings focused on identifying service breakdowns and service improvement opportunities. The first meetings were long, but they got shorter. The output of every meeting was an updated map and assignments mainly for management to remove obstacles from service delivery. Things identified via the process included the option to print a receipt at an ATM to save paper and printing and returning ATM cards before dispensing money. Small things add up.

The best feedback comes from front-line workers. Unfortunately, most of them don't have time to stop working and submit performance improvement feedback and then forget their epiphanies before they can be shared. To fix that, I invented a system that would enable workers to receive verbal, step-by-step work instructions, hands-free, as it captured the time workers spend on each step along with their continuous improvement feedback. Workers can now provide their feedback hands-free as they work, without stopping work and there's no writing involved -just speech. The ideas are compiled into a database where they can be prioritized, tested, and before being rejected or implemented.

Like it or not, in the US success is measured in dollars and cents and anything else is considered fluff. When measuring the success of any intervention whether a training program, new equipment purchase, process, etc., then the measure is how much time or money the improvement made or saved, how much waste was reduced, and the cost of lost opportunities. Time, waste, and lost opportunities can all be easily converted to money and used to financially measure success. Financially successful interventions measurably enable work and worker systems to perform, assure the perfect performance of the work and worker systems, and continuously improve performance across both systems.