Reviewing & auditing business process results

Are you missing a critical step for improving your business processes? In my experience, most companies do leave out the critical step of reviewing and auditing the results of a business process. Without this evaluation of the results, companies miss out on all sorts of ways they could improve their processes!

I was reminded of this when reading The Definitive Guide to Recruiting in Good Times and Bad in the May 2009 issue of the Harvard Business Review. It's a good article on how to hire managerial/executive talent. Step 7 of their 'best practice' (what a loaded term - more on that in another blog post) for hiring managers & executives is to audit and review the results. How well are those new-hires working out? For the ones who are doing well, who was involved in that process? Likewise for those new-hires who are nto working out so well. And oh by the way, if the new-hire isn't working out within a year, part ways with them instead of prolonging the damage.

And for those candidates you chose not to hire, what's happening with them now? This might be more difficult to determine, but it's good to have an idea of what happened to the candidates you decided not to hire. Maybe a competitor hired them and they are stars now. In that case, maybe your hiring process didn't catch something that would have clued you into that?

But even the authors of this article spend just a few short paragraphs on reviewing and auditing the process results. I think this is a very important, often overlooked step that can provide value to companies who are disciplined enough to follow through on it.