The Two Axioms explained

mais c'est la loi!
I posted the following last week
There are two axioms that I have found to be true in almost 100% of the places I have visited to work on their processes :
1) There are a large number of process issues that are common amongst most companies, regardless of market sector and line of business.
2) Most people in the company know what their process issues are but don't address them.

I wanted to explain a little more about what I meant, having listened to and read the replies that came forward on this.

1) There are a large number of process issues that are common amongst most companies, regardless of market sector and line of business

By this I mean that using Pareto's rule (80/20) 80% of the process issues that turn up in a company are similar across most organisations. These include items such as Segregation of Duties not being managed appropriately; Authorisations taking to long or being inappropriately routed; Inappropriate reward systems leading to processes being bypassed; Silo behaviour and Inappropriate process ownership. Of course a business that is manufacturing widgets at a rate of 10,000 per hour using automated manufacturing processes is going to have a large number of process issues that lack any commonality with a service company operating a 1000 person call centre. But at a macro level I am willing to bet that there are a lot of process issues that are common amongst both these types of business.

2) Most people in the company know what their process issues are but don't address them

Back when I used to work with the internal audit group of a large American multinational I used to spend two weeks in a specific business function looking at their processes and talking to the people that design, manage and operate them. At the end of the two weeks I would present a report - along with the rest of the audit team - that would identify weaknesses or deficiencies we had identified. In 80% of the cases the reply from management would be some variation of "We already knew that". Of course my reply would be "Well if you already knew that why hasn't it been fixed?" There were always reasons : Time, money, resources, priorities etc. But it didn't remove the fact that this were generally known issues that could have been fixed. The reason many of these were not fixed was because the department didn't realise, or understand, the business impact of not fixing them. It's ironic that it usually takes a major catastrophe that loses the company money to identify why a relatively small change should have been made. (Think of the company that kept it's computer back-ups in an on-site cupboard and lost both the computer room and the storage cupboard in a major fire. Sourcing a back-up computer to run their business on was easy, finding a back-up of their customer and transaction database was less so.

There are, of course, other reasons why these processes were not followed. I am indebted to Stephen Baishya for providing a small list from his own experience


  • Fear of looking bad if the cause of the problem is my responsibility - "blame" culture
  • Fear of reprisal if I make someone else look bad if the cause of the problem is someone else's responsibility - "management by fear" culture
  • Deep-set organisational beliefs that people are always the cause of problems, not processes - often leads to ineffectual productivity drives, training, coaching/performance management, i.e. get people to work harder rather than actually fixing the process
  • Desire for instant gratification - fixing root causes can take time; I need to say I've done something NOW


These are all valid reasons,  but do point, fundamentally, to a cultural issue where the company is not set up to appropriately manage the issues that come with running effective processes.

So, given that you know what the problems usually are, and you have pretty common problems that are not specific to your industry, why are you not addressing these issues already?


Reminder: 'The Perfect Process Project Second Edition' is now available. Don't miss the chance to get this valuable insight into how to make business processes work for you. Click this link and follow the instructions to get this book.


All information is Copyright (C) G Comerford
  See related info below

The two axioms of process management

There are two axioms that I have found to be true in almost 100% of the places I have visited to work on their processes :

1) There are a large number of process issues that are common amongst most companies, regardless of market sector and line of business
2) Most people in the company know what their process issues are but don't address them

Discuss.

(P.S. A more detailed post about this will be forthcoming in the near future. I just wanted readers opinions at this time)


Reminder: 'The Perfect Process Project Second Edition' is now available. Don't miss the chance to get this valuable insight into how to make business processes work for you. Click this link and follow the instructions to get this book.


All information is Copyright (C) G Comerford
See related info below

Silo thinking - It's still bad!

siloThe most popular post on this blog (by a long way) is one entitled "Silo thinking and why it is bad...". It was written back in January of 2010 and appears to consistently get the highest number of views of any post I have written. Obviously I'm looking at it thinking "Why is that?'

Sure, it's a well reasoned, thoroughly researched treatise on the nature of the silo mentality in organisations, along with accurate and incisive commentary on how to get around it. (At least in my own mind it is...) but there's obviously something more than that.

 So what?

I think it's because it hit a nerve with a large number of the readers of this blog (over 4,500 last month - thank you!), and it is apparently something that everyone can identify with.

The first paragraph read:
"When everyone in an organisation is organised and works around the concept of individual functions or departments. This encourages introversion and also decreases efficiency"
I believe this to be as true now as the day it was written. The beauty is that it isn't just a process thing but a company wide thing.

The main thrust of that post relates to how a process is usually optimised to run as well as it can within a single department (or silo) and as such is not optimised to run as well across other departments or silos. I'm sure you've heard the tale of the manufacturing process which created some sort of metal engineering device. At the first department responsible for the manufacturing they put together the main three components of the device - the hub, the sprocket and the flange. They then boxed these up and sent them across to the next step where the electronics were added. The first thing this department did was remove the flange that had been added in the previous step. Then they fitted their electronic wiring & circuits and refitted the flange.

This sounds like an apocryphal tale, but it does illustrate quite graphically the ability of two departments working in the same company and producing the same product to - effectively - be working against each other. The first department had an optimised sub-process that meant it was efficient enough to be able to manufacture and construct the three main parts of the assembly, and - without reference to any further parts of the process - they were able to make themselves as efficient as possible. Across the whole of the process, though, this silo mentality was having an adverse effect.

I was reminded of this recently when working on a guest post for Squawkpoint.com which covered the topic of 'Who owns your processes'. In that post I mentioned that the process owner wants to be
 the person who has the ability to make a change to the process that effects multiple parts of the business. 
It we take the example given above it means that we want to be able to make the first step of the manufacturing process slightly less efficient whilst, at the same time, making the overall process more efficient. Having someone owning the individual parts of the process (silo'd) does not allow that to happen.

The other point I mentioned in the original post was that reward plays a large part in this. It has been proven in survey after survey, and experiment after experiment, that people generally tend to focus on the things that will reward them the best. If I am a department boss and I tell my workers "Your annual review and associated compensation is based on your ability to process 1000 widgets per day come hell or high water" you can bet that my employees will be focused on finding ways to process 1000 widgets per day. If it means that they have a way of doing this which is optimal for their own department but sub-optimal for the rest of the widget manufacturing process then that's not their fault.

This is how silos occur.

The solution is - obviously - to reward and recognise people based not on their own individual performance, but on the company performance as a whole. The correct statement should be "Your annual review and compensation is based on the company as a whole being able to produce 1000 quality widgets per day come hell or high-water". The approach is still the same - the employees how to find a process which works in their best interests - but the end result is different - you finish up with a process optimised for the whole process rather than one which is optimised for individual departments.

It is my opinion that - despite the interest in the original post from nearly two years ago - there still appears to be a large amount of silo thinking happening in organisations.

Am I right?



 .

Reminder: 'The Perfect Process Project Second Edition' is now available. Don't miss the chance to get this valuable insight into how to make business processes work for you. Click this link and follow the instructions to get this book.


All information is Copyright (C) G Comerford
  See related info below

Business Process Management and Common Sense

Gone in colorsThis is a guest post by James Lawther:

In the beginning all businesses start out as small businesses.  They start with one, two or at most a handful of employees with a vision to give customers something new and different, or just better.  They then focus like crazy on those illusive customers, doing everything that they can to find and please them.

If the new, different or just better is truly new, different or just better; then slowly but surely the customers start to materialise, they like what they see and what they are getting and then they start to hand over their hard earned cash so they can have it.

And then the company grows.

If things go well the business won't be a small business any more.  It will have a hundred employees and it will be time to become organised like a big business.  Groups of accountants and IT professionals start to congregate, a sales force is born, a human resources manager is hired, functions develop.

Sensible business owners put dynamic pushy people in charge of these new functions and give them targets to hit, financial targets, cost targets, revenue targets, growth targets.  Now success looks like hitting your targets and those dynamic pushy people start to optimise away like crazy.  They start to focus on the internal mechanisms of their organisations and before you know it you have Sales people who are dragging in sales, Operations people who are slashing costs and Marketing people who are building new markets.

And they all do this with gleeful disregard to one another.  After all no operations guy is going to be rewarded if the accountants hit their target.  

As all this happens the customer who everybody started off obsessing about becomes of secondary importance, and their sales orders, complaints and queries start to fall between the cracks of the SLA’s, targets and departmental objectives.

Then things start to stagnate, accusations are thrown and the functions become more and more retrenched, each striving harder than before to hit their targets.  And so it goes on.

Maybe I have painted a very black picture, maybe a truthful one; either way the solution is not very difficult.  It is remarkably simple.  Get your business to re-focus on the customer and optimise around them not their functions.

And that is all business process management asks you to do.  There is nothing very clever about it, it is just common sense.

Are you using yours?


Author Bio
James Lawther is a middle aged middle manager.

To reach this highly elevated position he has worked for numerous organisations, from supermarkets to tax collectors and has had several operational roles including running the night shift for a frozen pea packing factory and doing operational research for a credit card company.

As you can see from his CV he has either a wealth of experience, or is incapable of holding down a job. If the latter is true his post isn’t worth a minute of your attention.

Unfortunately, the only way to find out is to read it and decide for yourself.

Visit his web site “The Squawk Point” to find out more about service improvement.




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