BPM – where is your organisation on the process maturity journey?
“Brilliant process management is our strategy. We get brilliant results from average people managing brilliant processes. We observe that our competitors often get average (or worse) results from brilliant people managing broken processes.” Source: a senior Toyota executive
Business process management (BPM) is a systematic approach to making an organisation’s processes and workflows more effective, more efficient and more flexible in a changing business environment. Processes are at the heart of all business activities and ensure that consistency and repeatability can be achieved. Achieving processes excellence improves the way that businesses create and deliver value to customers. The important point here is that processes serve the customer rather than the organisation itself.
The goal of BPM is to reduce human error, process variation and wastage and focus stakeholders on the requirements of their function or role.
Many organisations make the mistake of investing in technology solutions to automate processes and workflows before they really understand the processes themselves. The process understanding must come before the technology, otherwise there is always a risk of just automating the inefficiencies of a manual process.
The Business Process Maturity Model
The concept of a maturity model can be helpful in identifying where your organisation is on its process management journey and the optimum support or solution required. The model below has been adapted from the Capability Maturity Model (CMM) originally developed for use in software engineering.
There are many methods and systems available to consultants and management to improve all aspects of the business process to achieve greater efficiency and leaner cost values. My view is that the methods applied must be appropriate to your culture and management style, and ideally should be designed specifically for your business.
Knowing where you are on the Process Maturity Model will help to guide your thinking on your process management journey and help to identify what your priority areas are.
As technology extends to all areas of the business, automation is no longer enough to differentiate yourself from your competitors. Companies that adopt Business Process Management will increasingly be able to adapt quicker to new opportunities and ensure resources and staff are utilised to the best of their ability.
“Continuous improvement is not about the things you do well – that’s work. Continuous improvement is about removing the things that get in the way of your work. The headaches, the things that slow you down, that’s what continuous improvement is all about. Source: Bruce Hamilton, President GBMP
Like this:
Is Vision, Passion and Action enough?
A while ago (click here), I stated that to be successful a business must have a vision of where it wants to go; it must be passionate about what it does and it must get on and do something about it – i.e. there must be action!
I was reminded of this last night as I reached the half way point of reading Steve Jobs, the biography by Walter Isaacson, which is an excellent read and is definitely to be recommended. When comparing Jobs early years at Apple and his time running NeXT you can can’t disagree that he was a visionary, he was certainly passionate about what he did (some would say too passionate) and there was a huge amount of action. Despite this it wasn’t enough to prevent both Apple and NeXT failing to deliver what they had set out to do.
This doesn’t mean that Vision, Passion and Action are not relevant, on the contrary; what is vital is that the passion and action must be directed towards achieving the Vision. This sounds fairly obvious, but how many leaders or their teams get sidetracked and spent time and energy on things that are not directly related to their vision for the business?
The answer lies in Leadership, but I don’t mean just a charismatic person at the top of the business. Leadership needs to be displayed at all levels in the organisation and in all directions – managing your boss, your colleagues and yourself through the use of personal power and not relying on the authority power given to you by your position in the company.
Going back to Steve Jobs, he certainly was able to use personal power to influence those around him. This power was so strong though it became manipulative and did not always bring out the best in people. He also failed to listen to feedback so did not get the benefit from the talented people around him.
Having said that he was hugely successful and really did change the world. Bear in mind I am only half way through the book so far and this is my opinion just on his early years in business, I am sure it will change over the next few chapters!
To summarise my new mantra for successful business, which I intend to use to help both my own business. Solitaire Consulting and the organisations I help is being extended to:
Vision, Passion, Leadership, Action
Using Technology to drive change
“The number one benefit of information technology is
that it empowers people to do what they want to do.
It lets people be creative. It lets people be
productive. It lets people learn things they didn’t
think they could learn before, and so in a sense it is
all about potential.” Source: Steve Ballmer, Microsoft Corp
Most businesses today invest heavily in Information & Communication Technology (ICT), but often this is only seen as a necessary cost of doing business. Business leaders need to be asking themselves:
What Value do we gain from investment in ICT?
From the perception of the ICT Department this is likely to focus on the nearly 100% uptime, speed and accuracy of transaction processing, or the ability to provide staff with instant access to email and office systems from anywhere they choose to work from.
Whilst this is very important the real value of ICT must go further than this if it is to help enable the business to develop and compete. In order for ICT to provide this next level of value companies need to focus on the use of technology to enable:
• Process optimisation and improvements in efficiency
• Innovation and improved decision-making
• Collaboration and interaction with customers, suppliers and partners
This is not just about the acquisition of new technology, which on its own is not enough to drive meaningful business change. It is about how that technology is deployed and used across all levels of the business.
Technology as an enabler for efficiency
In most businesses technology is embedded in almost every business process. It is at the core of a company’s cost centre, and in particular sectors is inextricably linked to productivity and a company’s core value proposition. But in how many of these companies is this technology being used to its full potential?
ICT implementation projects have a reputation for attempting to deliver too much too quickly, with the inevitable result being the project overruns in both time and cost. Projects are scaled back to deliver minimum functionality and commitments made to deliver the additional value in later phases. How often do these phases get postponed indefinitely? The result is a business which is operating sub-optimally, using short-term workarounds that become part of ‘business as usual’.
The most successful ICT projects aim to deliver 80% of the benefits for 20% of the cost. This can only be achieved with a very strong link between ICT and business people.
Technology to improve decision-making
Businesses generate and store a mass of data. Data needs to be transformed into knowledge to make it useful to decision makers. This value-adding process relies on technology to:
• Aggregate, manipulate and organise data;
• Carry out analysis and evaluation; and
• Report the information in proper context for human use.
A business’s ability to do this better than its competitors gives it a strategic advantage, particularly in the context of innovation and development of new products and services.
Technology to develop strategic relationships
In the global economy the ability of a business to take advantage of new ways of communicating and transacting business can drive value and lower the cost of interactions between a company and its suppliers, partners and clients. Technologies such as social media, open source, cloud etc can challenge the traditional ICT Department and require new ways of working.
Increasing the benefit from investments in technology
In many cases companies already have access to the technology, but there is a lack of co-ordination between the business and ICT, and a lack of innovative thinking to make the most of these opportunities. Left to their own devices staff will serve their needs first and a plethora of mini-systems will evolve across the business. The culture of the company and a disciplined ICT department will ensure systems serve the company and its customers first.
The key to making more use of the technology present within the business is to harness the creativity of the staff that use this technology. They know the frustrations of inefficient processes, they know what data is collected and they know how their own jobs can be improved.
Solitaire Consulting can help unlock this potential within your people and technology systems. Large gains in productivity and process efficiency can often be achieved without having to resort to high cost, high risk IT projects. The aim is to help you achieve 80% benefit from 20% of the investment.
How technology can help with employee engagement
In my last post I described The Lamberhurst Employee Engagement Wheel which recognises that the question ‘are your employees engaged?’ is somewhat meaningless unless you also ask ‘engaged with what?’ The wheel identifies 11 facets of the business and poses the key employee engagement question for each one.
The segment titled ‘IT – intranet, work support systems’ asks ‘do you have effective IT systems that staff can use to the full?’ Whilst IT is now a critical component of nearly all businesses, how can we use IT to help keep out employees engaged? I believe there are several essential elements to this:
Knowledge Management
When employees can easily access the information they need to carry out their job they are more likely to remain engaged.
A well designed intranet portal can be a very effective mechanism for achieving this. However, a poorly designed and out of date intranet will do the opposite. How many of us have worked in organisations where the company intranet acts solely as the homepage, but is largely ignored apart, maybe, from accessing the internal phone list?
A modern intranet, based on Web 2.0 technologies, will not only act as a portal to other business systems, but will provide a number of tools to share company information in an intuitive manner. Knowledge management systems often integrate the storage and search tools of an electronic document management system with the presentation and usability of a website. An intuitive interface, with the ability to allow users to post their own knowledge items, add comments and edit items, creates an internal online ‘wiki’, which is a great way to enable knowledge sharing and keep procedures up to date. This is a far cry from outdated procedure manuals gathering dust on a shelf, which can be demoralising to the person who spent time writing them as well as to the user with a problem who finds the process has been changed since the manual was written!
The deployment of a content rich intranet is just one area where technology can help with employee engagement. I’ll be continuing this theme with other areas of IT supporting an employee engagement strategy in my next couple of posts. In the meantime drop me a line if you want to discuss further or have a look at my thoughts on how technology can be used to drive change.
