Clean sheet review

Within Business Process Management or Business Process Improvement, a clean sheet review reviews the business requirements of the "as-is" organization and reinvents business processes to meet those business requirements. This review works free of the constraints of the existing organization, including the constraints of policy and law, as if there is no "as-is" organization and the review team is creating business processes from scratch to meet the business requirements.

Process

Starting with a scope from senior leadership of the business requirements to be met by the processes the review will create, and a deadline for delivery, the review team starts with a clean sheet of paper and defines their own method and schedule for delivering business processes to meet the requirements of the business. Direction of the team is kept to a minimum to encourage creative solutions unavailable to other methods that are constrained to developing from the "as-is" processes. This method therefore protects the opportunity to capture and exploit the creativity in the team.

For the sake of developing creative solutions, facilitators limit their intervention to helping the team create phases of delivery, inventory the changes to policy and law needed to implement the new processes, and help the team stay out of "as-is" thinking based on how the business has worked in the past to stay focused on how they imagine the business "could be." As opposed to other business improvement systems, a clean sheet review only requires minimal definition of the project constraints of scope, schedule and cost.

Clean Sheet Review Project Constraint Questions

1) Scope: What do you want to accomplish with a clean sheet review? How do you want the organization to look, sound and behave differently from how the organization looks, sounds and behaves now?

2) Schedule: When would you want the clean sheet review to begin and end?

3) Cost: How much money should we allocate for the clean sheet review? Expenses can include a meeting space with "stay dirty" privileges, and travel and per diem costs to represent stakeholders from multiple process sites and for the reviewers to experience business processes directly.

References

Six Sigma methodology: design for Six Sigma at onesixsigma.com