Process improvement: Thoughts before going into action

I want to thank all guys who responded to my question in LinkedIn.

As you can see my question “I want to implement a process in a company. What should I start from?” generated a lot of answers, so I am making an assumption that this topic is interesting and it is worth to discuss it.

Also I got some interesting questions from James Smith that I will try to answer. (In my opinion everyone should ask himself these questions before starting how work on any kind of changes, not necessarily related to process implementation)

Why do you want to make a change? (What is the benefit?)
I want to make this change to formalize the way we are working in a company. The main thing is to settle down the flow of information, because it is more like peer-to-peer at the moment. And I think that it can lead into a lot of troubles in future. But I want to note that bureaucracy is not a desirable state for our company. We don’t want to lose common sense.

Why is now the best time? (If it didn’t happen now what would happen?)
This one is easy to answer. The company is growing very fast at the moment (staff, clients and etc). So as the company is changing, the methods and processes have to change also. We just must change/improve our current process, because in other case we will not be able to handle new challenges.

Does anyone else feel the same? (Are you the only one with the issue?)
It’s a very good point. Fortunately I am not alone who tries to implement this idea now, but I had to convince some people that we NEED this change and was the first one who said that loud. I fully understand that it is impossible to make any changes within a company without a support of key staff.

Is there another way? (List your options, get input.)
To be honest I didn’t think about that before. But I don’t think that there are some better approaches to solve the problem I described before.

How far are you willing to go to make it happen? (Commitment is critical!)
Well, I will be doing that till I will succeed or will be fired. 🙂