Jim SinurHave you ever had to deal with lousy results? The answer is likely a resounding “yes”. The reasons often are broken, uncoordinated and/or clogged processes. I remember one time having to make an emergency landing in Portland Oregon when flying from Seattle to Arizona. Here is how it unraveled into a seven hour delay on a Friday night, after a heavy week, to drop off one injured passenger.
The Pilot came on to announce that we had to divert to Portland to drop off a passenger who was unconscious. The pilot promised about a 60 minute delay and it would be no big deal. Well we landed and pulled up to the gate where folks were awaiting the unfortunate passenger. Folks were speculating a serious problem because the passenger was bleeding from the nose (a common outcome from high blood pressure) as he was wheeled out on an aisle chair. No problems so far.
The problems started snowballing. It turns out that the airplane landed too heavy because of a nearly full set of fuel tanks, so we had to wait until the land gear could be inspected. Since that was an outsourced service that worked scheduled inspections for the most part, we had to wait until the right person could be contacted to contact the outsourced inspectors who used an outsourced transportation service to get to the airplane. After two hours, it took five minutes to verify that the land gear was fine. Then the FAA paperwork had to be filled out by hand. It took another hour to find and use an outsourced transport service to move the paper between the pilot and the remote FAA office. That was pretty grueling, but it gets worse.
The pilot wanted to take on more fuel, so the outsourced fueling company, who also works on a schedule basis had to be tracked down to top off a little fuel. Two hours later it took about 15 minutes to top off the fuel.. Then the FAA paperwork had to be filled out by hand and we played the same paper and people chasing game using the outsourced transportation service. Long story short, we took off and arrived seven hours late. I can’t believe that the FAA doesn’t have paperless processes accessible through mobile devices. Well, maybe I can.
To make matters worse the injured passenger was a prisoner in transit who slammed his face into the back of the seat to avoid getting to his destination. To boot, this was the third flight he pulled this trick on to get off. Tell me some thing is wrong with stand alone processes that do not work well or link to others and I would buy it. I have ideas for the Portland airport, the FAA, the airlines and the police on how to improve their processes.
Tell me one of your process horror stories. They are amusing later but painful while in the midst of them. Speak your onions!
Category: BPM Business Process Improvement Business Rules Green Tags: BPM
6 responses so far ↓
1 Paul Vincent September 21, 2008 at 8:29 pm
Hi Jim – Surely this is not just a case of “broken process”, but broken means of correcting the broken process. Who do you complain to? How could the airline do it better (I guess doing things in parallel)? And who pays the guy responsible in FAA?
Cheers
2 Sue Kerridge September 23, 2008 at 6:31 am
Process horror stories are definitely amusing after the event, but then there are the ‘Process Improvement’ horror stories – where ‘fixing’ it makes it worse. Also funny with the benefit of hindsight!
We’ve all heard the saying, “automate a bad process and you get a really, fast, bad process” (or something along those lines); I can recall one particular example that illustrates this only too well.
A financial services organization (no names, and I have worked at several…) had a manual process for opening savings accounts. The process crossed a number of departments each of which would photocopy and file the application before handing off to another. The process was inevitably inefficient and a prime candidate for automation. This was some time ago, and the phrase Business Process Management was never uttered – but, the process was indeed automated.
The incoming applications were scanned, and the images routed, all very nicely, to the correct department at the correct time. However, each department still felt it had a duty of care to retain a copy of the application (“we must comply with retention policies”) – and so, once their tasks were complete, they would print a copy of the image and file this locally. Every few months, the departments would undertake a house-keeping exercise which meant they extracted all the paper files (remember – these are printed copies of the images), and (still concerned with compliance) dutifully send them to be scanned into the document archive. To prove how compliant (and efficient?) they were, they would even take the time and trouble of counting how many files they extracted and scanned – completing ‘productivity reports’ as evidence.
Five different departments, all printing copies of an image, all filing them carefully, all counting & tracking them manually – and ALL eventually scanning them to the archive store – along with the original image scanned at the point of receipt. Any efficiency that might have been gained was immediately lost through the additional printing, counting, filing, scanning and reporting.
It’s a basic example, but disturbingly common – and to me, really illustrates not only the importance of improving the process before applying an IT solution (whatever that may be), but just as critically the importance of change management, training and communication. The system worked perfectly but only automated a process that existed in its current state as a direct result of it being cross-departmental; no challenge to the departmental boundaries, no attention to the real purpose of the process. On top of this, no-one had paid sufficient attention to ensuring that the process participants understood the new process and trusted the technology.
The same lessons we hear about all the time, but still I see it happening. BPM is not just about the technology – arguably it’s not about the technology at all. Processes are business things, and need careful business design, careful business transformation and change management – and very, very, VERY careful communication.
It’s one to laugh about later, but tears are shed along the way. Perhaps that’s where the onions come in?
3 jsinur September 23, 2008 at 11:56 am
Paul,
I think that niether the FAA nor the airlines are interested in fixing it because, it’s only an exception. The passenger bill of rights movment might force somebody to address it, but I am not hopeful on this one.
Jim
4 Jim Sinur September 29, 2008 at 6:16 pm
Sue,
You are observing the stove pipe mentality that everyone in a functional organization gets to see. I agree that a common agreement would be the way to go up front, but I would also consider a process center of excellence or a good audit might look at things afterwards in a post audit fashion.
Jim
5 Another Broken Process: Will it Never End? July 13, 2009 at 6:59 pm
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6 The Saga of Broken Processes Continues September 21, 2009 at 3:48 pm
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