Maybe Process Management Isn't Enough

For the past five or six years I've been evangelising about moving from a Process Improvement culture to one of Process Management. I've written about it in these blogs, I've spoken about it at conferences, and I've tried to encourage and promote the adoption of the concepts and principles in the workplace. I generally find my arguments are well accepted:

• Process Improvement activities tend to be short term, project based endeavours which peak in the run up to an appraisal or audit and then fizzle out
• Improvement teams spend much of their time recreating processes in their own image rather than building on existing processes to actually improve them
• Process improvement activities are often top down and more aligned to compliance than aimed at the generation of added business value
• We think in terms of Quality Management which encompasses planning and control, assurance, compliance and improvement, but only talk about process improvement

So when I talk about Process Management I'm thinking about a truly operational activity which is a defined and managed function that works holistically across the business and is aimed at generating improved business performance at all levels.

But I'm now having my doubts about whether this goes far enough, and reading a post earlier this week has encouraged me to write this entry. Chris Taylor published an article on BPM For Real entitled "Has process lost its meaning?"

Now I don't necessarily agree with Chris' views in this particular instance (although I totally agree about that fact that management speak and jargon has completed clouded our use of vocabulary and have written about that before!) he said enough to make me step back and think about my experiences over the past few years.

• Some organisations simply did not have effective processes in place which was preventing them from achieving the levels of performance they could have expected from their people
• Many organisations wasted their "improvement dollars" fixing perceived issues rather than genuine failures, often because they believed their process experts rather than listening to the process users
• Too many managers simply didn't understand what they were really doing and initiated improvement activities aimed at doing the wrong things better
• Lots of teams were involved in Continuous Tinkering rather than focused improvements
• Business value was not being realised because it wasn't even part of the dialogue for consideration
• Arbitrary quality targets were set and improvement activities were channelled into meeting these
• Reactive quality compliance had higher management priority than proactive prevention of future quality issues

Some of these are genuine process issues which could be addressed by more rigorous process management. But fixing some of these problems requires more than new or improved processes. They need better understanding of business and management realities than many managers have. They need better trained and educated managers. They need process experts who have a better understanding of core business activities and values and who operate in the real world of the people who execute the processes (commonly called workers!).

My biggest problem is that I don't have a convenient label for what this discipline really is. It could be Performance Management, but that's already been hijacked by HR in the guise of personnel reviews. In the old days, it could have come under the moniker of Quality Management, but that's been hijacked by Testing and the compliance police.

Maybe I should just invent a word - Proformance perhaps. It's got a big red line under it as I'm writing this, so it doesn't appear to exist yet. Yes, I like that...

Business Proformance Management - the act of ensuring the right things are being done properly across an organisation, with the aim of improving business value and outcomes for all stakeholders including the people doing the work.

I shall reflect on this further and let you know how I get on. I'd welcome your thoughts on Proformance Management.

.

Acting Under Pressure - Free Thinking or Conditioning

I've been having some pretty restless nights since I came back from Switzerland and last night was no exception. I woke up at 04:45 clutching at some snippets of a rather bizarre dream, but sadly wasn't conscious enough to jot them down. The gist of it was that I was in a war zone with some close friends from both work and personal life and I was questioning some of the decisions that were being taken, both tactical and strategic.

In those immediate moments after waking I realised that I had been thinking about was the difference between doing the right things and doing things right (regardless of whether they were the right things to do). As I rubbed the sleep out of my eyes, my mind started darting around all over the place. I started thinking about Verification and Validation process areas in CMMI (as you do!); I thought about jobs I had left because I had had tried to do what I thought was the right thing whilst all around me people were doing what they'd always done and still failing; and I thought about all the projects I've been involved in which might have succeeded if leaders had focused on doing the right things rather than doing the wrong things righter. It's sad to say that far too many of us have worked in organisations and projects that have resembled war zones and how much of our office language reflects conflict, with our war rooms, death marches, and battle plans.

Finally I started wondering how much of our behaviour changes when we're under pressure and we start to behave according to our genetic ancestry (fight and flight) or our social or workplace conditioning (command and control in most cases). I even wondered whether there is a genetic disposition that make some people behave like leaders and others act like sheep, particularly when the going gets tough.

Many of you will have seen coverage of the terrible events in Italy this week involving the cruse ship Costa Concordia. We'd all like to think that if we ever found ourselves in such a situation that we'd behave with dignity and calmness and make sure that we did the right thing in that context. The tragedy is that when we're faced with the reality of such a disaster, very few people live up to their ideals. It's much easier to do what you're told (rightly or wrongly) and to follow the majority. To do something that goes against the grain, to think differently, to take a different course of action that might go against all common sense is much harder.

But in an organisational context or a project context the pressures that we are up against are not life threatening. We not only have the opportunity to think or react differently to everyone else - we have an obligation to do so. And managers and leaders have an equal obligation to listen and make decisions accordingly based on analysis of what is being said and not against received wisdom or ingrained ideals of what is right.

Projects and organisations fail most often because they allow themselves to be persuaded by convention without thinking about the real consequences. Far too many decisions drive the types of behaviour which lead to people focusing on doing the wrong things, and trying to get better at doing them rather than simply doing the right thing because it's different.

UPDATE : Just before I went to post this entry I discovered someone else thinking similar thoughts today as I saw this on my Twitter feed...

flowchainsenseiAlways, always the toughest decision I have to make as a coach; whether to behave as management expects OR to coach teams effectively.

I fully empathise with this dilemma. In the end my heart usually rules my head and after towing the line for a while I'll edge towards trying to do what's right. Sometimes I'll end up paying the price, but at least my conscience is clear, and there are always some folk around who thank me for trying!
.

Continuous Tinkering is not Continuous Improvement

If you take the time to read any of the standards, frameworks, models or manifestos associated with organisational maturity such as CMMI, Lean Software Development, ISO 9000, or Agile it won’t take you long to find a reference to Continuous Improvement. This is the “Holy Grail” of process improvement and the quest for organizational excellence and maturity, where the business finally reaches a state where it is stable enough to make small, effective and seamless  improvements on an almost daily basis.

I’ve worked in and with lots of organisations who believe they have continuous improvement embedded in their operations. Many of them have been appraised at CMMI Level 3, many of them are ISO 9000 certified, and lots of them have improvement programmes and projects in place which testify to the fact that continuous improvement is standard practice.

But dig below the surface and it doesn’t take long to realise that, in the majority of these organisations, continuous improvement is an illusion. Despite continuous improvement processes and on-going improvement programmes, what really happens is continuous tinkering.

There is a world of difference between continuous improvement and continuous tinkering. The most important is that to establish the bedrock for continuous improvement requires an awful lot of hard work and an inherent desire at all levels of the organisation to make it happen. All the appraisals and certifications in the world won’t help if that desire and commitment is missing at any point in the organisational structure.

Continuous tinkering, on the other hand, is really easy. Lots of managers do it every day. Lots of executives do it on a regular basis. Far too many process improvement and quality “experts” spend all their time doing it. Politicians devote their lives to it. Given the self fulfilling adage that the only constant is change, tinkering is a natural behaviour of many people in many organisations. Tinkering allows people to be seen to be doing something “useful” and to help establish themselves in their working environments. Following organisational restructuring or management succession for whatever reason, there is inevitably a spate of tinkering as new department heads and their new appointees strive to make their mark.

Most people would agree that tinkering is probably not a very good idea. This is confirmed by my dictionary[1] definition “do random, unplanned work or activities” and accentuated by an earlier definition from 1658 “to keep busy in a useless way”. This of course begs the question that if you think (or even know) it is a bad thing to engage in why do you do it?

But let’s first establish a shared understanding of why tinkering is a bad thing especially in an organisational context. (These are just a few reasons which spring to mind that I’ve had direct experience of. I’m sure you have plenty more of your own!)

1. It rarely adds genuine value to anyone although it may add perceived value to the perpetrator
2. It is generally disruptive and has a knock on effect of curtailing normal operations
3. Changes are rarely managed properly and lack an articulated and shared vision, inadequate impact or cost analysis and no defined measures of success
4. Tinkering rarely offers sustainable change as the next person will engage in their own tinkering activities to undo the current change
5. It is usually top-down and staff rarely have any say or buy-in in the implementation
6. Good practices may be lost in the change
7. Effective teams are often split up in needless organisational tinkering
8. Tinkering to address the “not invented here” syndrome is unlikely to be cost effective or gain much support from staff
9. It really annoys staff

Now let’s think about continuous improvement when it is done properly:

1. Changes are considered before being implemented, in other words they are scoped, planned, discussed, and staff have the chance to buy-in
2. Continuous improvement is usually initiated bottom-up by the people closest to the problem being addressed
3. Impacts in terms of cost, effort, time and expected behaviours are considered
4. Impacts on existing processes, practices and organisational elements are considered
5. Impacts on other parts of the organisation are considered, changes are holistic rather than sub-optimal
6. Changes that do not add value to multiple stakeholders would not normally be undertaken
7. Changes are managed and measures put in place to understand the success of the change (not targets and arbitrary metrics)
8. Staff embrace the changes as being of value

It is quite clear from these basic differences that a different mindset is required to undertake continuous improvement as opposed to continuous tinkering. In the 25+ years I’ve been working I’ve only occasionally been exposed to an environment that is committed to genuine continuous improvement. Those very rare occasions share one thing in common –leaders who understand the difference between tinkering and improving. Sadly, those few environments have only been transitory and an organisational restructure or two later they have been consigned to memories of what could have been if that understanding had gone higher up the executive chain.

Sadly, our much of our legacy seems built around the fact that the only constant is worthless change, and change for the sake of change rather than for the sake of the pursuit of excellence.

---

[1] Wordbook XL for iPad

The Sleepwalkers Have Taken Over the Asylum

There's an English Bookshop on the main shopping street in the centre of Zurich. It's quintessentially English and apart from books you can purchase such goodies as Marmite and Coleman's English Mustard. I always wander in to browse whenever I'm in town with a few minutes to spare even though the prices here are astronomical so I have to demonstrate a huge amount of self-constraint. There isn't a great selection of "business" books, but there's usually something that catches my eye. Yesterday was no exception, and I was drawn to a title called "The Art of Non-Conformity" by Chris Guillebeau. Having spent most of the past 49 years being "different" you may ask why I need a book on the subject, but I did purchase it, along with a baby jar of Bovril for gravy making, and started reading it on the tram home.

The first chapter is entitled "Sleepwalkers and the Living World" and it got me thinking about some of the organisations that I've worked in, and how so many of them appear to have been organised by Sleepwalkers and are now managed along the same lines. In truth, some of them may even have employed the Living Dead rather than Sleepwalkers.

How many organisations have you been involved with that pride themselves of values like "People are our most valuable asset", "Employer of Choice", "People are our key differentiator against our competition", and of course "We Cherish and Promote Diversity"? Behind the self serving glossy brochure mission statement and value statements, most of these companies treat their people like idiots, stifle genuine efforts of bottom up improvements, and most importantly still deploy basic command and control organisational structures which lead to vast amounts of work being performed which adds no value to any of the real stakeholders, namely the customers and the staff performing the work.
Multiple governance structures, which are rarely joined up, create industrial strength status reporting and a plethora of obstacles which need to be overcome before real work can be performed. Chicken and egg scenarios are common place;  body A needs a form to be completed which needs body B to approve it but only when it is accompanied by another document which can't be approved until body A has approved the first form. You get the picture. And despite projects being reviewed to death by all and sundry, major issues are still rarely picked up until it's too late and corrective action is required because the preventative action was not taken in the first place. Status boards never take responsibility for their failure to spot the problem, it's always the project team that takes the flack.

But why the reference to the Sleepwalkers I hear you asking? The common factor in all these organisations is that they follow perceived wisdom, like Sleepwalkers, without thinking or questioning the logic or consequences of their actions. It's always been done this way, therefore it must be right. Well, the evidence doesn't really support that in my opinion. Projects still fail, budgets still overrun, products still have fatal flaws, and people who do the real work are still at the bottom of the food chain.

Far too many managers do Sleepwalk their way through their lives. It's time that organisations stood back a little way and started to look at the lumbering monstrosities of bureaucracy they have created. It's time that people in charge started to look at being non-conformist, and being genuinely different. History has given us precedents. Toyota, Apple, Amazon, Google and Facebook changed the rulebook in many ways, although some of them may have used questionable alternatives, and some may be losing their way a little. Agile methods (when used according to the original principles) have shown that traditional project management techniques are not the only way. Lean (again when used properly) has shown how much non-productive work really goes on in the workplace, and Systems Thinking has shown us how flawed many of the internal processes companies traditionally use really are.

So here are a few ideas on how to be a bit more non-conforming in your organisation.

• Dump the multitude of status reports and status reviews up the organisational hierarchy and get project teams to review each other. The people who do the work are much better placed to really see what's going on then a group of managers five levels up the line. Real project managers (not the people who call themselves project managers but are really line managers or team leads) have much more objective and subjective understanding of what's going on in a project. Of course, to do this you need to rethink much of the reliance on traditional project management KPIs and target setting, but that's probably a good thing as well.
• Lose the process owners who haven't used "their" processes in real life for the last 20 years, and put ownership back into the collectives that do use them.
• Question the role of line management which often doesn't understand what their reports actually do in the system, and which interferes in project because they happen to work at a particular level of hierarchical seniority.
• Question the role of HR and a recruiting process that prefers inexperienced graduates over street wise project managers, engineers and internal consultants with proven track records of delivering.
• Challenge the wisdom of hiring outrageously expensive external consultants (I'm cheap by the way!) who deliver little value, which is unsustainable after they leave, especially when some of that expertise may already be in-house, but you haven't been bothered to look for it
• Think carefully about your next reorganisation and how it will affect the people who do the work. If you are going to disrupt your workforce, which are, after all, your most valuable asset, do it in such a way that they get the benefit not just the pain.

In any event, before you make any changes in your organisation, perhaps you could actually consult the workforce before the event, and get them involved throughout the change, maybe they could even lead it. Because there's a pretty good chance that they are only people in your organisation who are still awake!