Why?

The purpose of the Understand phase (Figure 16.1) is for the project team members and the business to gain sufficient understanding of the current business processes to enable the Innovate phase to commence. This will include the collection of appropriate metrics to gain further understanding, establishing prioritization for innovation/redesign, and baselining the current status. This baseline will enable a comparison with future innovation process scenarios, which will be determined in the next phase (Innovate) when simulation and activity-based costing steps may be completed.

Figure 16.1: Understand phase.

The project team must also understand what the business wishes to achieve from this phase. The process models created may be used for more than input into the Innovate phase, as the business may wish to use the models for documentation and training purposes while the innovation and implementation is taking place.

The Understand phase will also validate the current process reality within the organization and define improvement priorities within the project scope. It will assist in determining changes, if indeed changes to process(es) are necessary at all.

The crucial point here is that the project team and business are seeking to understand the current processes not to document them in excruciating detail. Once a process is clearly understood and documented, stop: this is enough detail. If it has been agreed with the business that the process models may be used for documentation and training purposes, then be sure also to agree the level of detail to...