It’s The Organizational Change, Stupid...

October 22, 2007 from gantthead.com – “We’ve seen an inexorable effort to define, to document, to map and to generally improve our processes. Numerous consultants have attempted to argue that their way of representing processes by drawing boxes and arrows was new, proprietary and, most importantly, better. Literally thousands of them have simply bypassed that debate, and have spent hundreds of hours, days, weeks and months drawing lines and boxes on paper as they define and chart their customers’ “current state” and “future state”. The problem with all of this is that boxes, lines and arrows are just so much ink, Post-it notes and flipchart paper. They aren’t the processes, they’re simply the representation of the processes. Processes are how people work, collaborate, communicate, expedite, stall, obfuscate and in general do the work that they want to do while avoiding the work that they don’t…

What human beings bring to the table that process doesn’t is judgment. We have the ability to engage in critical thinking and reasoning. We are able to respond situationally, and recognize that the most appropriate course of action may be “it depends”. We can recognize a customer service challenge, and make the individual call that the customer needs a discount, or free shipping, or a compliment, in order to salvage the situation and keep them as a customer.

All of this completely defies the logic and rigid guidelines of normal business processes. I have never seen a process map with a box on it saying “apply judgment here”. I think it would be pretty awesome if there was, but so far this has been an elusive source of satisfaction for me…"

180 View – The author, Mark Mullaly, of this article challenges some of the current thinking about business process improvement. We think the problem Mark discusses is not in the process mapping but in the level of detail. If improvement is the objective of the process maps, then the level of detail should be only sufficient to identify a weakness or a control. By keeping the process maps at a higher level, the time to do them is significantly reduced and it avoids the “rigid guidelines” discussed in the article.

We agree with Mark’s closing paragraph which reads “Improvement isn’t simply about a faster way through the process. Although that can be part of the solution, it isn’t the whole solution. Improvement is about finding ways for people to better engage with their customers, helping them to enjoy their jobs more and allowing them to feel engaged and challenged by their work. If we want better processes, we need to leave the space and capacity for judgment, for critical thought and for mixing it up a little. That’s where people create the most value.”

Our biggest gripe with the article is in the title. It’s cute but appears not relevant until the very end, but even then it’s not just organizational change that is the issue. It’s also about the other drivers of business process improvement including motivation, empowerment, skills and environment.