Your processes: Are they PROMPT?
Sometimes processes resemble a spaghetti plant
Process improvement is not new. It started as ”principles of scientific management” in the early 1900s. Now it is rebadged as ”re-engineering, quality, value for money, efficiency and lean”. An organisation is seen as a collection of processes that can be measured, compared and improved. Successsful processes are PROMPT.
Priorities
Processes should reflect priorities. Think compass and clock. I once worked with a car sales force who only spent 20% of their time on selling cars.
Resources
Processes are only one part of work, organisation, management and behaviours. (WOMB).
Outcomes
View processes as a customer. Go and look. Take service, safety, risk also into account.
Measure
Understand current processes. But the point is to change, rather than map them. So look for bottlenecks, silo working, complexity, information and waste. But remember ACED.
Processes
Processes should be joined together across departments and partners to avoid the ”weakest link”.
Technology
Technology should be a servant, not a master. Aim to do things differently, not just automate.
Picture by Lukadian
Mike, what caught my eye was the second P – which mentionned partners. I still continue to see organisations who outsource some of their business process to a third party divesting themselves of involvement in the understanding and management of the processes in the outsource partner. This I believe comes from a mind-set which believes (erroneously) that an outsourced process is no longer part of the organisation. As long as the outsource provider meets their SLAs and their processes and IT systems integrate successfully with their own organisation then all is fine. Nothing could be further form the truth. As far as a customer is concerned it does not mater who is providing the service – whether it is an “own” employee” or an “outsourced partner employee” both are seen to be the responsibility of the company whose brand is on the product or service. Both the employees within an outsourced partner, and the processes within an outsourced partner need to be understood and pro-actively managed as if they were in-sourced.
enstra
July 20, 2011 at 9:17 am
Thanks Peter for an interesting comment. I originally used the words, “across oursourced suppliers and supply chain” and then removed them to save space. I agree that organisations remain responsible, regardless of whether anything is outsourced. And I agree on the need for pro-active management. And also the risk cannot be totally outsourced.
Mike Barnato
July 21, 2011 at 9:54 am
Judith Wainwright writes elsewhere:
I could not agree more with Peter’s comment about managing partners’ contributions to processes. A current example is insurance. Some members may have consulting experience in this sector. Some with the misfortune to claim, as I did last year, may have experienced this as customers. The results – for me stress, frustration, time wasted going over the accident again and again with different people, never knowing who was responsible, numerous stupid phone calls trying to make me say I had been injured, rage – and ultimately a determination to change my insurer at renewal time. For HSBC – they and their partners being on the receiving end of the aforementioned (:-)), the expense of extra work generated by making a simple claim complicated, the expense of having my business for the one year in the last 20 when I was an expensive customer then promptly losing it when it is likely (I hope!) to be profitable.
Thanks also Judith for an interesting comment. I take the general point. It’s also obviously also influenced by what sounds like a tedious insurance claim process with multiple partners. My impression is that anything which crosses boundaries or is not claim centre straightforward has become complex. I have found that on occasion it helps to put it in writing to all parties at once. And then to mention that the regulator/MP/press might find the case interesting…
Mike Barnato
August 4, 2011 at 5:36 pm
Gareth Bunn writes elsewhere:
There is of course the issue of risk transfer and the fact – recognised in government departments in the main, but not always by their client side advisors during procurement – that risk can rarely be transferred in full, rather it is shared. But the other aspect alluded to is what happens to an outsourced service? Whether it is an internal back office service or an external customer service, problems seem to arise from the nature of the contract or SLA. The terms often standardise on the process to make it amenable to measurement. As part of this, management (or customer service agents’) judgement and the ability to deal with exceptions appears to be excluded. To coin a phrase “The computer says No”. And then of course there is the issue of moving out into the outsourcing partner the real understanding of the business process, making the operation of “an intelligent customer” function (old parlance I know) very difficult to exercise by the commissioning entity.
Some may remember when Sea Containers won the first franchise for GNER. They established through a passenger survey that the things that really mattered to them were cleanliness and catering. So GNER in-sourced these two and chose to outsource other aspects of the business. The result was high customer satisfaction. But they lost the re-tender (to NEG) presumably based upon a financial best price competition. And then NEG could not make the operation proftable and relinquished the contract…. so the franchise is now effectively run by the Public Sector.
There is a moral in this story – I will quote from Willaim James who said about the US in the early 1900s:- “The exclusive worship of the bitch-goddess success – that and the squalid cash interpretation put on the word success – is our national disease”. I think there is an easy translation to the errors in procurement, to the attitudes of companies to cost reduction, and to the decisions about and approach to outsourcing.
Mike Barnato • Thanks Gareth. You make several interesting points. I agree that risk is in reality seldom transferred in full. This is in part because of SAD tools (a previous post) in my view.I also agree that exceptions management is a key test. And that what get measured and rewarded is what gets done. I think your Sea Containers /GNER example is a good illustration of this. It’s a problem about how to set meaningful targets.
Going back to processes in general. Is the outsourcing merely accentuatting the problems or is it causing them?
Mike Barnato
August 4, 2011 at 5:37 pm
I have to agree with the above comments. My experience is of trying to manage an outsourced service on behalf of the Ministry of Justice. The service was electronic monitoring – the “tagging” of offenders released early from prison on licence.
My role was to manage the delivery of the service within budget and as the volume of activity increased dramatically within one year, with no corresponding increase in budget, my only way of meeting the requirement was to understand the process delivered by the provider, its costs and cost drivers and to negotiate a service reduction to enable the budget to be achieved. To do this I had to ask questions about the process not previously asked by the commissioning department, much to my surprise. Presumably in the current environment Government departments are approaching suppliers of outsourced services to request similar savings and I hope will be adopting a similar approach, although my experience of their understanding of cost management gives me little confidence that they will do so.
David Gleadhill
August 16, 2011 at 1:21 pm
Thanks David for this comment. It’s been noticeable that most of the comments received have concerned outsourced services. You are right to imply that organisations still need to understand the processes even when they are outsourced.The other thing is that whilst we have the twin trends of outsourcing and offshoring, the basics of process management are often neglected. Things like logging customer messages and taking action as a result.
Mike Barnato
August 16, 2011 at 5:49 pm
Martin Wilson • I totally agree The whole BPM area is acronym rich but the key one is JFDI. Make changes fast and then refine them as a matter of day to day routine. PROMPT is a good basis but act now,
Unfortunately the organisations that most need such changes, government and large enterprises, use large scale IT systems that take for ever to implement and are not capable of the iterative refinement by process users/owners. In fact in many (most?) cases they simply replace people cost with system costs.
It needs small innovative companies with the right tools to design, automate and refine processes fast. It is not my field but I have seen the problems of large scale systems close up, and all too often. I guess as a starting point one could look at the case studies on, say, http://www.encircle.co.uk, or similar companies.
The secret is to start making changes; do what you can now and then constantly refine the processes.
mpw1950rtin Wilson
August 25, 2011 at 1:22 pm
Thanks Martin. I have a lot of sympathy with the iterative, rather than big bang, approach to IT systems. And making small changes fast and then refining them. Unless they are below the water level.
Mike Barnato
August 28, 2011 at 1:04 pm
Peter Dougherty writes elsewhere:
Agree totally, today’s world means that we are becoming slaves to technology, when it should be the other way around. Have also seen the statement that JFDI is a valid concept, it isn’t, if we have to employ JFDI means we have not planned, not taken into account all the dependencies, or are not really very good at our job, JFDI is the last resort, and belongs in the dark ages
Mike Barnato
August 28, 2011 at 1:16 pm
Thanks peter. I agree that techology should be a tool, not a trap.
Mike Barnato
August 28, 2011 at 1:17 pm