This is a Guest Post by Mansoon Adenwala – a Green & White enthusiast, and process expert. He is a consultant with Business Beam, a leading consulting firm dealing with CMM and quality improvement processes.
Ask any senior manager of an organization, and the one thing they will tell you is the need to ‘improve the bottom line’ or the balance sheet.  That is eventually what keeps a business in business.  It does not matter how good a product is considered to be by its developer, if it’s not economical and it’s not useful then it’s not a good product.  Most senior managers realize this dilemma and are keen to take steps to resolve it or at the very least, control it.

The question then becomes, how do we give a good product, while still keeping its costs under control.  The answer lies in process improvement.  Process improvement is an activity that seeks to identify and rectify common causes of poor quality by making basic changes to the underlying management processes.

First however we must understand what are management processes.  Management processes are an encapsulation of an organization’s knowledge on how to perform work to deliver quality product in a controlled and consistent manner.  Processes are normally not defined by an outsider, but exist as an entity within an organization.  They may be formalized in the form of documents, or remain informal as information within the memories of the employees, but in all cases, there are processes which make business output possible.

Thus, the quality of the output, the product or service that an organization produces is directly related to quality of the processes utilized to build and deliver that output.  If we tweak these processes in the right manner then we’re able to achieve not only operational excellence but also higher and consistent quality of delivered products.