The Leonardo Blog

I get it. When it comes to process performance improvement, everybody wants quick wins. We want impressive improvement with as little effort as possible, and by Thursday of next week. And we’d like to win the lottery as well. Of course, there are quick wins and we must seize them whenever we can, but, by definition, there won’t be many of them. We get stuck in, sort out the quick wins, and then…and then… then what? That’s it? Job done, everything is perfect and we can get back to business as usual? Seems unlikely. Every organization needs a systematic approach to genuine continuous and measurable performance improvement based on continuous ‘problem finding’. That’s the first hurdle. Surely every organization would be happy to espouse continuous improvement; perhaps not so happy to continuously find and acknowledge problems. When was the last time you went to an office celebration put on because someone found a new problem? The ‘continuous’ part of continuous improvement conflicts with the idea of quick wins; one suggests an ongoing effort and the other assumes a short-lived focus on the obvious and easy-to-fix problems. For many, process improvement doesn’t have a good track record. Frustration with the non-performance, or at least under-performance, of process-improvement projects over many years has understandably led to suggestions for ‘rapid process-improvement’ approaches of various kinds. Strip out the waste from the process of process improvement and get on with delivering real improvements rather than just fancy methodologies and vague promises. The main thrust of these approaches is to make short, focused projects that will deliver change in a fixed timetable, for example, five or twenty days. Such projects that have minimum costs and maximum return are a welcome change from projects that take a long time, cost a lot, and deliver little. However, rapid doesn’t necessarily mean continuous. Focused, effective process-improvement projects are a significant improvement, but they are not, alone, the systematic approach that is required to achieve genuine continuous improvement.

Too many BPM initiatives fail. We’ve got to do better.

Change is changing. The demand for change remains, in many ways such demands are increasing in both scope and frequency, but the nature of organizational change is also mutating. ‘Transformation’ is the increasingly common aspiration of contemporary organizations of all types and sizes. The same idea is also heard in discussions about the development and change of entire nations.

As we model and analyze business processes seeking to improve them, we often look for common failure modes, circumstances where many instances of the process execution show a common problem. Pareto is our friend, and we hope to find just a few causes of many problems. Our focus is on problems and their causes. We focus on what normally happens and put aside the variations. We concentrate on the common and statistically significant, since that’s where we have the most information and understanding, and where we will find the major performance process improvement impacts. That all seems fairly logical doesn’t it? Yes it does, and sometimes it’s also the completely wrong approach; sometimes the focus on the significant and common occurrences blinds us to the powerful insights to be gained from the insignificant and the exceptional. What if, as well as looking at problems and their causes, we also looked for opportunities and their constraints? What if, instead of dismissing the exceptions for lack of statistical significance, we embraced the exceptions because they are exceptional? If we look outside of the ‘normal middle’ of the performance curve, what can we learn from the outliers? In his book of the same name, Malcolm Gladwell1 defines an outlier as “a statistical observation that is markedly different in value from the others in the sample.” He analyzes the circumstances in which people, and groups of people, achieved exceptional success, ie how they became outliers. Covering a very wide canvas – millionaires, communities and law firms to cultures, hockey stars and plane crashes – Gladwell shows that success has a context, and that this context can often be described, analyzed and replicated. From his many examples, he clearly demonstrates that exceptional performance is not an accidental occurrence, and if we study the outliers we can find the cause of the exceptional effect. Gladwell focuses on successful people in his ‘outliers’ thesis. His premise, that success has a context and is not random, can also be applied to business process performance. If, in a particular circumstance, process performance is exceptional (positively or negatively), what can that tell us? Can we learn to avoid the negative and replicate the positive conditions? What arethe “vital behaviors” 2 that cause a process to work really well? (Patterson et al model the circumstances that have caused ‘outlier’ performance in difficult change management contexts. Their work has important implications for business process change – but that’s a subject for another time). If we could isolate those success factors that create the rare exceptions, could we use them to improve performance across all instances?

I believe that the primary focus of every organization should be the understanding, management, and continual improvement of the business processes by which customer value is created, accumulated, and delivered. Not the only focus, of course, but by far the most important. This is the essential message of process-based management and once that message is heard, the need for both process management and process improvement is obvious, urgent, and compelling. Let me explain what I mean by, and why I believe in, the ‘primacy of process`. This blog is deliberately short (if I had been in a hurry I would have written a longer one!) because I would like to find a way to succinctly define the key message of process-based management. Have I achieved that? Please let me know. Process? Why “process”? The simple view of a process is that it is a collection of cross-functional activities that transforms one or more inputs into one or more outputs. I also include all of the resources, people, systems, infrastructure, policies, regulations—everything that is required to execute and manage the process. Processes are important because this is how organizations get work done. Primacy? Why “prime”? Cross-functional business processes are the only way organizations can deliver value to customers and other stakeholders. By themselves, the separate functional areas of an organization cannot deliver value to external parties. An organization`s resources are managed ‘vertically` via the organization chart. Value is created, accumulated, and delivered ‘horizontally` across the organization chart. It follows that an organization executes its strategic intent via its business processes. The sequence from strategy to execution is shown in the breakout box, From Strategy to Execution. The only way an organization is able to exchange value with its customers and the way in which it executes its strategy—sounds prime to me!