When you go through a few iterations of this process, the question of “When do I stop improving my process?” inevitably comes up.

In a perfect world, with perfectly unlimited resources for your company, the answer is never. You keep  improving your process until it no longer needs improvement, which probably never happens. The reasons that it never happens is that the competition is  always improving, or at least attempting to, and the business conditions of the world around your business are always changing.

As an example, try being a purely brick-and-mortar book store these days. You find that the world changes and that the model does not work anymore.

Stepping back to the perfect world and unlimited resources concept, there are a  few companies that, during the last decade, acted as though they had unlimited  resources, and those companies are the ones that you hear about in the  bankruptcy news.

The fact is, it is not a perfect world, and your resources are  never unlimited. So, you must use the analysis hierarchy, or a variant there of, to determine when and how much you should change your processes.

The question really comes down to what is the most efficient allocation of your limited  resources right now?

As a process owner and a key contributor to corporate strategy, you must analyze when it makes sense to keep changing your process and when  it makes sense to leave it alone because your limited resources are better spent elsewhere.

In summary, start small, and make sure that you keep the scope reigned in during the initial development of your process metrics. Make sure that any  metrics and reports that you  build for the process actually help you determine whether you are meeting your process goals. After you are in production, use the  analysis hierarchy to determine whether your process needs to change, what  needs to change, and whether it is worth fixing the issue.

When you reach a high confidence level with doing this analysis with one process, begin to apply the  methodology to other processes within the same project/program or value chain.