Here is an excerpt from an article written by Brad Power for the Harvard Business Review‘s “The Conversation” series.  To read the complete article, check out the wealth of free resources, and sign up for a subscription to HBR email alerts, please click here.

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Do you have a process improvement program under way that you feel is going well?

In process improvement programs, when things get tough it ALWAYS comes back to money: How do we make money from these process changes? What kind of return can shareholders expect, and when? In this case, the answers were not there, the effort was stopped, and a new management team took over.

What can we learn from this failure? How can you avoid this happening to you?

1. Quickly deliver tangible results.

The leadership got impatient waiting for demonstrated results. The analysis and design phase of a “bet your company” process change needs to be done thoroughly. However, two years without any tangible results will strain any executive team’s patience. To compound this problem, the project team declared victory after having only a process design and an energized work force. Everyone got caught up in the concept of large-scale change before they had realized how hard it was to implement. None of the implementation phases had really begun, let alone delivered any benefits. Their publicity got ahead of reality.

I was once asked to help a large company that had spent two years laying out current and future financial process models. The management team was running short of patience for results and wanted me to help them bring changes to fruition. One process owner had found that the company had many legal entities in each country, each of which required expensive tax processing, many of which were unnecessary. We quickly initiated a program to reduce the number of legal entities, saving tens of thousands in each country, while longer-term process improvements progressed in parallel.

As my consultant friend Chunka Mui proposed in a recent post at Forbes.com, the best way to make a big change is to “think big, start small, fail quickly, and scale fast.” While the design may be grand, leaders must deliver short-term results by starting small and proving the concept (or not). The maximum time to results should be three to six months.

2. Tie process changes to clear financial results.

When executives make large investments, they naturally expect a large payback. The company in our story got so excited by its process blueprints that it forgot to develop a clear financial case. The division head did not “sell” his vision upwards very well, and his boss, who was not a big supporter from the outset, ultimately had him fired “Strategy Maps”  and “Hoshin Kanri” matrices are tools for showing how process improvements drive financial results. Process champions must have them ready for the day when the CEO or CFO effectively says, “Show me the money.”

3. Engage the finance organization.

Finance was on board at the company in our story. But the reengineering team did not push hard on articulating real and measurable benefits and holding people accountable for them.

As I noted in a previous post “Keep Your Operations in Shape by Focusing on Management Processes,”

performance measurement (which is usually managed by finance) is one of four critical management processes for improvement program success. One way to engage the finance function, as practiced by GE and other disciples of Six Sigma, is to build a system tracking the financial benefits of each improvement project. The system must be reviewed and validated by finance.

[Note: It comes as news to me that performance measurement “is usually managed by finance.” However, finance should be included when (a) creating a cross-functional team, (b) selecting metrics, and (c) evaluating performance measurement data.]

In a future post, I will discuss more than 20 ways managers can make process improvement an ingrained part of their organization. But generating benefits, demonstrating where they came from, and getting the support of finance are perhaps the most critical for the survival of an improvement program.

Question: Have you seen cases of catastrophic failures in process improvement programs? What were the key mistakes that caused them to fail?

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Brad Power is a consultant and researcher in process innovation. His current research is on sustaining attention to process management — making improvement and adaptation a habit (even fun?). He is currently conducting research with the Lean Enterprise Institute.