A guest post from Elise Olding
In our world of magic bullets and instant results have we short changed the process and value of truly breakthrough design of new processes? From my view, it seems that we have overlooked some other techniques in favor of rushing to get yellow sticky notes on a sheet of paper or capturing a process model in a tool.
Are we perhaps just paving the cow path? I’m beginning to think so. Harkening back to my past, I spent time “living” with my colleagues who were doing the work. This usually went on for several weeks – I shadowed a number of people in different roles. As an example, when I was working on redesigning a sales process at an apparel manufacturer, I went out on sales calls with the sales reps. I asked them lots of questions when we were driving to their customer – what’s hard about your job? I notice you are categorizing notes in your planner – is this something that could be a best practice, put into the “to be design” and be enabled by technology? Are there tools and or information that you need when presenting to customers that your aren’t getting today? Why couldn’t you answer that customer question? Etc.
I don’t see a lot of focus on how to really analyze a current process and how to get inside the heads of those that do the work. Is this a lost art? Are we just focused on getting the group in a room and creating an “as is” model in a couple of sessions?
When put into a room, a group will tend to tell you how they think the work they do is supposed to work. The reality is that it isn’t necessarily the work they are really doing. The danger is that we have redesigned a process that will spawn shadow processes. Another example – when observing employees doing work at an insurance company, I found that several employees were stuffing claims into their desk. Seeing this, I asked what they were doing – turns out these were claims that were complicated and were going to take more than the “allocated” time to address. The supervisor walked around at the end of the shift and wanted to see clean in boxes. That was her measure of completion. The drawer was a convenient solution to this measure! No wonder the cycle time was excessive. That certainly would not have been something that they would have shared in a workshop session.
So don’t forget to think outside the model. Give me some feedback about how you get to the nitty gritty of how things are really working and come up with the best design.
Twitter: http://twitter.com/EliseOlding
5 responses so far ↓
1 Summer Ficarrotta // Jul 23, 2009 at 7:09 pm
I think process workshop sessions are an excellent starting point. When I hold them, I stress the importance of getting a working but very high-level version in front of the end users (the ones that were not in the workshop) as quickly as possible, get feedback, implement a bit more, repeat until done. This helps ferret out discrepancies from the workshop, and since I advocate as minimalist an approach as possible (read: don’t add it unless someone specifically requests it) process bloat is usually reduced. You also gain that all important buy-in from the folks most impacted by what you designed.
In depth, individual interviews with the process players is a wondrous thing, but it is expensive and can still result in missed requirements since individuals tend to see the process from only their own point of view. The group workshop is an enlightening experience for everyone, including me, and I think in may cases it’s not only good enough to get the job done, but can even result in a better solution.
2 Carol Rozwell // Jul 24, 2009 at 6:13 am
Another technique that is quite complementary to process analysis is social network analysis (SNA). Since SNA examines the social relationships and interactions, it can uncover information and knowledge flows that augment what a process analysis shows. The SNA will identify the specific position a person plays in a social network.
What one organization found when they performed an SNA after carefully redesigning their ‘to be’ process model was that their decision making process included many more people than they expected. The process analysis had identified the steps and sequence, but had not given them a view as to the participants.
There is more information on social network analysis in the research report: Social Network Analysis: What a Difference an “A” Makes.
3 Breakthrough Process Design « BPM Focus // Aug 3, 2009 at 4:54 am
[...] are looking for “Breakthrough Performance” rather than mere “Process Improvement”. In her guest post on Jim Sinur’s blog, Elise Olding points out that many rush headlong into implementation looking [...]
4 (Business) Process Analysis, Validation, Optimization | ActionBase's Blog // Aug 3, 2009 at 10:27 am
[...] is probably sub-optimal, but it does work or the business would be failing). Elsie Olding has a good post on this in Jum Sinur’s [...]
5 Jim Sinur // Aug 13, 2009 at 9:24 am
Sara,
I appreciate that you are leaving your first comment. It’s kind of scary putting something out there where a number of folks will see it. The post you selected is by one of our “rock star” analysts, Elise Olding. She knows so much about BPM, I don’t know where to start
Thanks for the readership 
Jim
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