There's an extraordinary effort expended on new product design in certain areas, with mobile phones and their apps being a prominent example. Every colour, shape, tap and swipe is optimised for user experience (UX), as just being "good" is no longer sufficient to stand out in the market. It's a similar situation in the industrial world, where for successful organisations, the experience of the paying customer is understandably and rightly so, a primary focus.
It's surprising therefore, that little or no "UX" is applied to the internal and back office processes in some organisations, where the "users" are the employees. The design of these hidden processes seems to focus primarily on function and productivity, with little thought being put in to how they would be used in practice. At best, useability becomes the "C" in the MoSCoW rating. (Could have, after everything else)
In any organisation, getting the internal processes between Demand and Supply, to run smoothly is key to high output quality and productivity. Getting it wrong can result in delays, mistakes, workarounds and on-the-fly process redesign. When employees like to use your processes they will invariably do a better job.
Of course, a process has to provide the required outputs but there are often different ways to achieve this, with some being more amenable to its users than others. So when next designing a new process, don't forget to think about the internal users as well as your external customers and ask is there a better way of doing this? It's important to get all your DUX (Design for User eXperience) in a row before releasing it.
Productive Ducks