Before you join a health club for a year, you might want to accept a 30-day trial offer and test it out to make sure it meets your needs. Likewise, before introducing a new, improved business process to an organization, you should test it and work out any bugs before implementing the change on a wide scale. You do this by developing a test plan that outlines:
- Whom you should involve in testing the new business process
- What you should test (e.g., the process itself, newly created tools, potential metrics)
- Where you should conduct the testing (e.g., multiple locations, local versus global sites)
- When you should conduct the testing (e.g., peak times to avoid)
- How you will manage the testing process (e.g., will you use specific scenarios)
This phase of business process improvement (BPI) work is similar to user acceptance testing for large system implementations where a team develops test scripts to guide end users through various scenarios in a test environment. The testers follow the directions and provide feedback on functionality that does not work as expected, which allows the technical team to resolve problems before deploying the system on wide scale.
In BPI work you may be the “technical team” and you want to know what you have to fix before introducing the new process company wide. You may find a technical bug in a tool you created, like a spreadsheet, or you may uncover a usability issue. You should resolve all issues before proceeding with implementation.
Create a test plan that outlines what you need to do, to confirm that everything works as planned, and fix any bugs before introducing the change. Testing the business process evaluates how well it performs, so that you satisfy your project goals whether you want increased productivity, a reduction in errors, or something else.
At the end of this step, you should feel comfortable that the business process and tools work as planned. Testing the business process is the eighth step to improving the effectiveness, efficiency, and adaptability of your business.
Copyright 2010 Susan Page
