Processes and services for science engineering and R&D professionals

Most professionals are rightly sceptical of the effectiveness of process mapping and outsourcing initiatives that treat them as operators of a fixed, repetitive process.  This approach can too often create rigid helpdesks and request handling routes that are unable to deal effectively with the variety of their needs.  Tessella is experienced in design of workflow systems that respect the intelligence of their users and support them to make appropriate choices.  Our approach to business process analysis captures, from the outset, the flexibility and variety you need, such as the requirement for a first helpdesk point of contact to deal quickly and appropriately with a problem on a specialised instrument or facility that lies on an R&D project critical path.

Popular approaches to industrial performance improvement include Six Sigma™ and “Lean”.  These methodologies, based on the idea of continuous improvement of a reproducible process, can encounter serious problems in parts of the R&D environment that do not fit a ‘factory’ model.  Innovation can mean that each project needs to be different in some way, so that project managers need encouragement not to standardize everything, but rather to tailor each plan in a way that will combine ‘fast failure’ with preserving viable options, despite imperfect information.   In an environment when there may be few hard facts to go on, failure analysis, and effective learning from past experience, require deep understanding of the domain.

Our statistical and SPC experience, together with our many years of support to R&D and technology organizations, bring common sense and pragmatism to business process improvement.