A Process Can Be Efficient and Still Be Wrong

Efficiency is usually seen as a sign that a process is working well. Tasks are completed quickly, costs are controlled, people know what to do. There are few delays, and the numbers look good.

But efficiency tells us how well a process performs. It does not tell us whether the process should exist in its current form. A team can become very good at doing something that adds little value.

Think about a report that takes several hours to prepare every month. Over time, the team improves it. They create templates, automate some calculations, and reduce the preparation time from four hours to one. That is a real improvement.

But there is another question worth asking: who actually uses the report? Perhaps it was created years ago for a manager who has since left. Maybe it contains twenty measures, but only three are used for decisions. Or people receive it every month because nobody has ever asked whether they still need it. The process has become more efficient, but the work itself may no longer make sense, and this happens more often than we think.

We improve approval flows without asking whether all the approvals are needed. We automate data entry without asking why the same information is entered twice. We make meetings shorter without asking whether the meeting still has a purpose. We focus on doing the work better before checking whether we are doing the right work.

Lean thinking is useful here because efficiency is only part of the picture. We also need to understand value. Value is not simply that an activity produces something. A report can produce information. An approval can produce a signature. A meeting can produce minutes. The important question is whether that output helps someone make a decision, serve a customer, reduce risk, meet a real requirement, or move the work forward. If it does not, improving the activity may only help us waste less time on it.

There is another reason these processes survive. Once something becomes part of normal work, people stop questioning why it exists. The monthly report is on the calendar. The approval is built into the workflow. The meeting happens every Tuesday. Everyone knows their role, so the process feels stable. Stability can make unnecessary work difficult to see.

People may even protect the process because they have invested time in making it work well. They know its problems, have created solutions, and can complete it quickly. Asking whether the process is still needed can feel strange after so much effort has gone into improving it. This is why process improvement should sometimes begin before we start measuring time, cost, or productivity.

First, understand the purpose. Who needs the output? What do they do with it? What would happen if this activity stopped tomorrow? Is there a legal, customer, risk, or business reason for keeping it? Could the same need be met in a simpler way? These questions can change the direction of an improvement project.

Instead of reducing a ten-step process to seven steps, we may discover that only three are needed. Instead of automating a report, we may decide to stop producing it. Instead of speeding up an approval, we may remove an approval level that adds no useful control.

This does not mean efficiency is unimportant. Once we know an activity creates value or serves a real purpose, making it easier and faster makes sense. The order matters.

Before improving how something is done, understand why it is being done at all. A fast process can still produce something nobody needs. A well-organized process can still contain unnecessary work. And a process with excellent performance measures can still be solving yesterday’s problem.

Efficiency helps us do things well. Good process improvement also asks whether those are the right things to be doing.