Sourcing Shangri-La

When Process Standardization Backfires

Current orthodoxy is that process standardization is a Good Thing.

People are committing enormous resources to programmes to deliver global processes supported by a common toolset. It's driving business transformation across every industry and region.

Process standardization is a fine idea.  But the heretical truth is that, as in everything, it's the ability to execute that counts.

A standardization program can unlock game-changing efficiency savings and service improvements. But pitfalls abound:

IT-led. IT systems are at the heart of most major programmes. Too often IT takes the wheel, leaving the business stakeholders in the back seat. And so a business transformation morphs into an IT project. 

Out-of-scope impacts are missed.  Costs ‘saved’ in one standardization project re-surface as incremental ‘work-around’ costs in other parts of the organization.

The voice of the customer is muted.  Standardization delivers efficiency savings but at the cost of the customer experience.

Process variants are concreted in. There is a one-time negotiation instead of a framework that enables variants to be continually re-optimized, reflecting developments in global best practices and changes in business units' requirements. 

The benefits aren't sustained. The change doesn't stick. Gartner termed it 'organizational snap-back'. McKinsey published an estimate that only 10% of cost reduction programmes showed sustained results three years later. 

It's time for a reality check.  I can't be the only one who's seeing projects with hidden costs and flaky benefits pedestalized because they are delivering 'standard global processes'? 

Without a platform for effective collaboration among the stakeholders, and a complete understanding of the big picture, there are very significant risks that the benefits of any standardization initiative will be illusory. And without a means to deploy process content in a way that ensures real adoption, the opportunity for ongoing collaborative innovation is missed.

 

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13 Dec 2012    The Universal Business Language: Process

19 Nov 2012    No Other Corporate Asset Is Wasted So Spectacularly

© Text Michael Gammage 2013

 

Process Management and Google Maps

Would you rely on Google Maps if you knew it was incomplete, in different formats, languages and UIs - and that much of it was out-of-date? I don't think so.

But ask the same question in an enterprise context and the answer would oftentimes be 'Yes'.  An extraordinary number of businesses rely upon enterprise process maps that are incomplete, in different formats, languages and UIs - and seriously out-of-date.

Google of course saw the potential in location-based services in a mobile world and continues to invest heavily. But as Google's Mr Maps, Brian McClendon, noted in an interview at the weekend, everything depends upon having a solid map base:

"You need to have the basic structure of the world so you can place the relevant information on top of it. If you don't have an accurate map, everything else is inaccurate".  

So Google provides MapMaker and other tools so that its users can get engaged: in providing feedback, even in real-time editing and extension of its coverage. That user engagement helps to drive high levels of accuracy in Google maps.

Imagine an enterprise process map by Google Maps: a visualization of how the peaks of the operating model link to the valleys of everyday operational reality. With this basic structure of the business accurately mapped, it becomes possible to do much more: 

• to orchestrate business transformation
• to underpin Lean Sigma and continuous improvement
• to connect risk and compliance management with business reality
• to ensure IT alignment and enable business-led systems implementations
• to support front-line people doing real work.

But to do this, an enterprise process map too has to be accurate. It is the base map of the enterprise - the foundation upon which everything else is built. So it has to be properly developed and managed. It has to be comprehensive and integrated, and within a robust governance framework. Critically, it has to be in the language of the business because engagement is the key to its sustainability.

Adopt the language of IT - swimlanes, BPMN symbols - and it's a fatal obstacle to engagement with process stakeholders and users. Engagement requires the language of the business - which is why the adoption of Universal Process Notation (UPN) by virtually every Nimbus client may seem arcane but actually it's very significant.

There's another significant parallel here: the importance of personalization. Users don't want Google Maps as a replacement atlas to browse on their smartphones. They want Google Maps to present them with content that is about their preferences, their location and their time of day.  

It's exactly the same with enterprise process maps.  Users want to be presented with content that is about their role, their KPIs and in their language - that helps them to do their job.  But how many organizations simply create an enterprise atlas and file it on the corporate intranet?

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10 Dec 2012    Sustainable Improvement

17 Dec 2010    The Tube Map: Process Made Easy 

No Corporate Asset Is Wasted So Spectacularly

Another week, another client struggling with process amnesia.

I'm looking at an RFP from a household name with "no process documentation available" with respect to its core financial system and the business processes it enables. Last week, I was involved with a global organisation that had thrown out a well-known SI after wasting (their word, not mine) a considerable sum trying to capture their core processes. Next week, I'm working with a client in the energy sector with a complex and ageing system in urgent need of upgrading, but with almost no understanding of how the system works or how it connects with their business processes (which seem to be largely anecdotal anyway). 

Many organizations - and we're talking big and global, oftentimes - are repeat offenders. They are ATMs for the Big 4. They spend millions on a 'process mapping binge' but the processes are never adopted, and the organizations have only the most feeble mechanisms to maintain them, and so, two years later, a new mapping project kicks off.   

It's true that we too generate waste of a kind. Clients adopting Nimbus generally migrate out of any other process format or tool.  They want a common language, and they want to use UPN to ensure engagement. So that's waste of a sort - one global client ditched man-years of process capture of its European finance operations by one of the Big 4 - but it pays off in adoption and sustainability.

Put to one side the missed opportunities from not taking process excellence more seriously - like avoiding IT project failures, or success in multisourcing, or integrated compliance, or sustainable improvement, for instance.

Just at the very simplest level of avoiding unnecessary costs: Is there any other corporate asset where waste on the scale that is considered normal in 'process management' would be tolerated?  

Things are changing but, really, how did 'process' get such a bad rap? It's the DNA of the organization, for goodness sake. How did we get to a situation where it's considered unremarkable that an organization cannot describe its business processes, or how they are supported by its systems?

There's a doctoral thesis for someone in all this. Not sure whether it's a tragedy or a comedy.

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05 Sep 2012    Translating An Operating Model Into Real Work

28 Aug 2012    The ROI On Process Visualization

Translating An Operating Model Into Real Work

Bringing in a Big 4 firm to create a new target operating model (TOM) has become de rigeur. But how many operating models are ever put to work? Not many. Some are just displayed reverentially on a pedestal in the C-Suite.  Most are 'executed' - by an expensive army of consultants - but with very mixed results.

It’s a big issue. Social, mobile and cloud technologies are driving ever more rapid business model innovation and associated process change. But many organizations are locked into 'a tragic pattern' (as Brad Power has discussed on his HBR Blog): The CEO launches a new change program with great fanfare, only to shelve it a few years later with little to show for great expenditures of time and consulting fees. 

The capability to execute well must be one of the keys to breaking out of this cycle.

Why are so few grand plans well executed?  The swirling fog between the TOM vision and the operational realities, for a start. There is no line of sight between the TOM as a ppt deck and the real business.

The primary mechanism for translating strategy into reality – integrated, holistic perspectives and end-to-end processes – doesn’t exist. Instead there are a myriad process fragments, in multiple tools and formats, ‘managed’ in functional silos within a feeble governance framework. 

So the exec team has a TOM roadmap, steering wheel and dashboard – but only tenuous linkages to the engine, transmission and brakes.

A process management platform provides the multi-dimensional matrix within which an operating model can be executed - reliably, efficiently and, in compliance terms, safely.

It’s the ability to execute that really matters. It's what underlies sustainable improvement. In a complex and fast-moving world, that just can’t be done efficiently any more with ppt and email...

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20 Jun 2012    Process: The Emerging Global Business Language

02 Nov 2011    Toxic Processes: Social, Cloud, Agility - And Risk

 

 

Why Process Improvement Projects Fail

Interesting times. There’s an emerging consensus that Lean, Six Sigma and other process improvement programs are failing, and a myriad explanations why. And yet - I just saw a(nother) Nimbus client video on a remarkable success in sustainable process excellence.

There’s no shortage of doomsayers. In a PEX Network podcast just released, Nigel Clements, who will keynote at the Process Excellence conference in London in April, estimates that up to 70% of process improvement projects fail. In an article in the Wall Street Journal, Professor Sakya Chakravorty estimated that 60% of Six Sigma projects fail. And the PEX Network poll launched last week on ‘the biggest barriers to continuous improvement’ has already attracted 500 voters.

But why? That’s where the divergences start. There may be common agreement on the symptoms, but there are many different diagnoses of the underlying condition.

Nigel Clements, for instance, points to Deming’s 'five deadly diseases' as the root causes: lack of constancy of purpose; emphasis on the short term; compensation that distorts incentives; over-mobility of management; and only using visible figures.

Professor Chakravorty suggests the need for Six Sigma ‘experts’ to be retained on projects for longer; for smaller project teams; and for tying in performance appraisals to adoption of change.

Both though agree on what must be the single over-arching truth here: that success in continuous improvement (CI) is about creating an enterprise-wide culture of engagement and collaboration. And that it is impossible without leadership from the top.

Even Nimbus Control is not, dare I say it, an essential for success in sustainable process excellence. It hugely increases the chances of success in setting up and maintaining any CI program. But, ultimately, it is simply an enabler. Without executive vision and commitment, nothing sustainable can succeed.

The client case study I just saw is on the launch of a global CI program in a Fortune 100 organization. It brings new levels of creativity in how it leverages Nimbus Control. There’s huge attention to graphic design as one of the keys to users engagement. It has real-time metrics that look beyond process performance to cover as well process adherence and popularity. It also extends the standard RACI model in a way that brings a new clarity and productivity in compliance. And subtly, and throughout, it reinforces this organization’s values.

What made it possible? Executive energy plus the adoption of Nimbus Control as the process platform, and UPN as the process language. But it was also the Nimbus methodology: the creativity inherent in live workshops in the discovery phase, facilitated by an experienced Nimbus consultant, to map out new ways of working.

It’s confidential right now – for obvious competitive reasons – but hopefully might make it into the public domain in due course. It’s a sparkling glimpse of the future in a world of CI gloom and angst. And exactly the kind of story that can fire up C-Level imagination and commitment.

Hello Checklists, Goodbye Process?

My little world wobbled as I read Atul Gawande’s bestseller The Checklist Manifesto.

It seemed to challenge head-on my conviction that process matters most because it provides the language that enables effective collaboration amidst complexity.

It’s superbly well written (Dr Gawande is an eminent surgeon but he’s also a staff writer on the New Yorker). It was ravishingly reviewed in the FT, the NY Times and The Economist, whose reviewer described it as ‘a meditation on the growing complexity of the world, and how to cope with it’.

The book sets out the evidence on the value of the humble checklist in saving lives (and much else – injuries, time and costs) in even the most highly complex activities – in the operating theater, on skyscraper construction sites, and on the flight deck. It is utterly compelling.

Why do checklists work? Firstly, because ‘they get people talking’, suggests Dr Gawande. They break down hierarchical barriers and encourage the teamwork that can ensure the best possible outcomes – in surgical teams, among construction engineers, even in due diligence teams working for private equity investors.

Checklists also encourage discipline. They recognize that, in a fast-paced world, we can all too easily forget the obvious. Kitchens in top restaurants use them. Checklists can ‘force reflection’ says Dr Gawande, even in complex and dire situations like the loss of an aircraft engine.

As I read the book, I feared I was hearing the distant rumble of a paradigm shift. It seemed entirely plausible that my approach had been turned upside down, that process had been a wasteful diversion – and that checklists were the new process.

The truth though seems to be more subtle and interesting. Checklists and process may overlap but they are essential, and complementary, in enabling us to deal with our enormously complex world.

Both enable collaboration and ensure compliance. 'Checklists are not comprehensive how-to guides', says Dr Gawande, 'they are quick and simple tools to buttress the skills of expert professionals'. Sometimes a checklist could be easily substituted by an end-to-end process and a Storyboard. In other circumstances, only one of them will work. What’s appropriate will depend entirely upon the context.

Context is one of the exciting themes of the book. The best checklists work because their creators are painstaking in understanding the context in which they will be used. They care about the tiniest details because they know that it matters in effective communication. Those who have advocated ‘publishing’ business processes that are static, generic and described in technical gobbledeegook might want to read and ponder these sections.

It’s also, in an odd way, heartening to read of the widespread resistance to checklists, despite clear evidence of their value. Organizations and individuals, across all industries, often applaud the idea of checklists - but have some reason why they are ‘special’ and should be exempt. They have to be won over – even if they subsequently emerge as the strongest champions of the idea. Inviting us to re-think how we define heroism, Dr Gawande reflects on this inertia:

"…We don’t like checklists. They can be painstaking. They’re not much fun. But I don’t think the issue here is mere laziness. There’s something deeper, more visceral going on when people walk away not only from saving lives but from making money. It somehow feels beneath us to use a checklist, an embarrassment. It runs counter to deeply held beliefs about how the truly great among us – those we aspire to be – handle situations of high stakes and complexity. The truly great are daring. They improvise. They do not have protocol and checklists. Maybe our idea of heroism needs updating." [p.173]

Replace ‘checklist’ with ‘process’ and it’s the journey of most organizations towards process thinking, and towards a recognition of the process platform as an essential enabler for sustainable operational excellence.

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10 Nov 2011 Value Chain or Process? The Costs of Confusion

20 Sep 2011 BPM: The Foundation For Operational Excellence

Value Chain Or Process? The Costs Of Confusion

Here's a conundrum. Listening to Paul Harmon of BP Trends on Becoming A Process-Centric Organization yesterday, I fell to wondering...

How can it be that process maturity is good (which CEO wouldn't want flawless execution and a culture of continuous improvement?) - and yet, by whichever scale we choose, most organizations are pitifully low-scoring, and only a handful of the Fortune 2000 are at, say, CMMI Level 5?

One of the biggest barriers to higher levels of process literacy - and to wider C-Level engagement - must be confusion.  The false distinction between value chain and process perfectly illustrates this.

Let me make a claim which some will consider heretical.   Value chains (and value streams) are the same thing as end-to-end processes.  They have a different provenance, and vocabulary, but their purpose is identical: they provide a framework for collaboration on performance improvement.

I see nothing in Wikipedia's description of value chains that Nimbus clients are not already doing in their business process management programs.  Paul Harmon used the two terms interchangeably in his hour-long discussion - as indeed many others do.  

It's not just that we have two ways for describing the same thing.  If you call it eggplant and I call it aubergine, then it's confusing, and does nothing to help us collaborate in the kitchen, but as long as we are both aware that they are exactly the same thing, there's no harm done.

But we're well beyond simple confusion because all sorts of folks have created 'competing' methodologies and vocabularies. There are Value Chain and Value Stream frameworks and methodologies, with Lean and Six Sigma variants, that seem to be quite separate from everyday process improvement.  Whereas, to all intents and purposes, they are all doing the same thing.  

This confusion matters. It's a fruitless distinction in a world which is often already ridiculously complex. At the C-Level, it sounds like a cacophany of voices competing for mindshare.  Whereas the truth is that all of them are about building capability to manage the enterprise in a new dimension: end-to-end process, or value chain, or value stream - call it what you will.  

Tim Leach, Director of Competitive Excellence at Northrop Grumman, speaking at IP11, described the reality for many organizations when he said (of the situation at Northrop Grumman before adopting Nimbus Control) :

"How could it be that we have 7,000 people trained in Six Sigma and Lean yielding so little in terms of sustainable cost reductions and service improvement?"

If we want wider process literacy, and wider C-Level leadership in building process maturity, we have to fuse the existing disparate and apparently 'competing' approaches.  The start point must be to standardize our vocabulary.

I doubt that the UN or the US Supreme Court is going to take this up and make a definite pronouncement, so it's up to us.  Value chains have a proud heritage - but in reality they are about understanding and optimizing end-to-end processes.  Simplicity demands that we choose one or the other. 

No disrespect to Michael Porter, but I favor the wider adoption of process over value chain, and here's some reasons why.

End-to-end business process...

dovetails with compliance. Risks and controls, quality and compliance, can all be integrated within the business process management platform

can be integrated with real-time performance metrics, so process improvement opportunities can be more immediately identified

is the language of outsourcing and shared services, which are rapidly transforming the back-office of every organization

bridges the IT divide and enables business-led systems implementation

can be integrated with documents, systems and training - and delivered as a personalized intelligent operations manual to every desktop and mobile device.

Even better - there are already proven enterprise process management platforms, which provide a complete collaborative framework and governance to enable top-down process re-engineering as well as bottom-up continuous improvement - and they are becoming more widely adopted.

Process literacy is growing. The idea of process excellence is gaining currency.  Process maturity models such as CMMI are gaining ground, and even becoming mandatory in some public sector procurement. Let's go with process and get far wider engagement, at C-Level and across the enterprise, in performance improvement.  Let's embrace the Global Process Owner role now found in some visionary organizations - and expect that it will increasingly be recognized as a senior management leadership role. 

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02 Nov 2011    Toxic Processes: Social, Cloud, Agility - and Risk

20 Sep 2011    BPM - The Foundation For Operational Excellence

 

Toxic Processes: Social, Cloud, Agility - and Risk

There's a looming crisis that's being driven by the headlong rush into Cloud, Social  and Big Data in pursuit of the Agility agenda. Like the financial crisis, the signs are clearly evident well ahead of the crash.  And just like every actor in that sorry tale was acting rationally within the confines of their silo, so too this time everyone's busy.

At the heart of the financial crash was the accumulation, over many years, of  toxic assets purchased in vast quantities by over-leveraged banks. The risks were not clearly visible or understood.

On the smaller scale, many global enterprises are busy working on their own sub-prime crisis. They are relying on toxic processes. As a result, their risks are not clearly visible or understood.    

Organizations are rapidly building a future that is far more virtual, where an empowered workforce manages service delivery operations that are far more complex, fast-paced, and largely outsourced.

Cloud promises the frictionless enterprise.

Social promises employee engagement and the capability to turn on a sixpence.

Sourcing and supply chain innovation promises low costs and rapid response.

Within each program silo - Cloud, Social, Sourcing - it makes perfect sense. It's the agility that CEOs are looking for. But this new level of agility comes with new levels of risk. Two examples:

The complexity of existing supply chains  makes them vulnerable. Car production was halted in several factories around the world when the Japanese tsunami struck the remote Tohoku region: it turns out that the Renesas plant there produces 40% of the world's microcontrollers. Building resilient global supply chains will require even more complexity. The increasing adoption of outsourced services from multiple suppliers - the growing virtualization of the enterprise - will exacerbate this complexity, and therefore the vulnerability.  

In customer relationship management, IBM's Global CMO Study, out this week, shows CMOs living in a world of high complexity and unpredictable interdependencies. It calls out customer intimacy as a strategic goal for CMOs. But it's to be delivered as rapid response in a world of real-time social media by empowered employees - many of them working for outsourcing partners - dealing with empowered customers, and by complex, rapidly-changing, business rules applied to Big Data.  So much higher levels of complexity and therefore vulnerability.

It's easy to get carried away with the potential benefits in Cloud and Social (and Big Data). But the execution risks are correspondingly high - and largely overlooked. In complex, fast-paced and global organizations, increasing agility correlates with increasing risk. 

Business process management is unglamorous next to Cloud, Social, Big Data and Agility.  But a BPM platform is the essential foundation for success.  The first step in mitigating risk is transparency. (It's also the key to unlocking potential innovation as well, of course).   

Pause please while I step up to my soapbox again. The BPM platform that can leverage Cloud, Social, Big Data fully, while properly managing risk, must have three fundamentals:

Holistic perspective. This means visibility of the enterprise that is complete, integrated, rigorous and realtime.  Transparency here is like the capability to run a three-dimensional CT Scan for the enterprise at any time.

Effective collaboration. That means a common language, across the internal functional silos and the extended enterprise. The only plausible language is end-to-end process - but, and this is critical, in the language of the business, not IT-speak, to ensure shared understanding.  It also requires a governance framework that is robust but practical, otherwise collaborative innovation will stall, or undermine risk management.

Ubiquity. It must connect strategy directly with operational reality across the enterprise. There's a compliance gap if the enterprise process model is simply an abstract managed by IT or the Quality function. It has to support real people in getting real work done.  So it needs to be personalized, and deployed to desktops and mobile devices as easy-to-consume process content.  This ensures the real-world integrity of the process model. It also engages the workforce and so channels Social to where it's most productive: fostering continuous improvement within the process context.      

Some organizations recognize these risks - we are seeing new levels of interest in a BPM platform that can deliver this capability - but most don't yet. Some put their faith in complete and 'perfect' IT process models - but they focus only on what's automated, and are understood only by a handful of people. Most organizations rely on incomplete, duplicated and overlapping process fragments in a variety of tools and formats, and with no governance beyond email.  Either way, IT models or myriad fragments, these are toxic processes.

If we continue our current trajectory, Gartner's prediction earlier this year that ten global companies will be toppled within three years by basic process defects looks safe.

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How Not To Implement Shared Services

A shared services center to deliver HR, finance, procurement, IT and other services for the UK's seven Research Councils. It seemed like a Good Idea when it was announced in 2006. 

Five years on, a review by the UK's National Audit Office (NAO) makes gloomy reading. Overspent £130m against a budget of £79m, and projected savings significantly less than expected. 

How did it happen? The NAO report highlights three fundamental flaws:

Lack of Clarity

"A key factor contributing to escalating costs was the early lack of clarity about how the service would operate. An outline design, known as a target operating model, was not agreed until August 2008, nearly a year after implementation had begun, but it was incomplete and lacked detail. Some elements of design were still ongoing during transition and system launch."

Confused Governance

"Early governance structures were complex. Reviews commissioned at various points during the project showed that responsibilities and accountabilities needed clarification."

Poor Management of Outsourcer

"A contract with Fujitsu to design and build the systems and ICT was "poorly managed".  It was eventually terminated at an additional cost of £13m."

Each of which could, of course, have been avoided, or at the very least mitigated, by the adoption of an appropriate process management platform.

No surprise that developing process maturity is an NAO theme - and runs through the NAO's recommendations in this case: to harmonise processes further, to strengthen end-to-end process management, and to embed continuous improvement.

Hear stories like this one, and other shockers in the Process Hall of Shame, and it's bewildering how organizations can still be in denial about the need for a process management platform at the heart of any shared services project.  As though it was a 'nice-to-have'.

Whereas actually it's the key to clarity at every level; to effective collaboration within a robust governance framework; to IT alignment; to drive process harmonization; to controlling a multisourced environment; to making life easier for the SSC workforce; and to enabling a culture of continuous improvement.

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07 Oct 2011    Accenture: What's Holding Back Shared Services

19 May 2011    Service Integration and Process: In Six Minutes

 

To Be, Or Not To Be...That Is Not The Question.

A frantic call from a managing consultant at a Nimbus partner, asking for help on his way into a client meeting, reminds me of our own little Da Vinci code. Only we, the process cognoscenti, know what Shakespeare really meant. Hamlet's original soliloquy was not merely about the most noble course to follow. It directly addressed the more fundamental issues in process discovery:

'To-Be or As-Is, that is the question...'

My friend's client may be at the bottom of the process maturity curve but they have aspirations, and an urgency (hence my friend's assignment).  But, as is so often the case, they only want to focus on the future.  When your organization is largely dysfunctional and you have finally gathered the energy to act, it's natural to want to focus on the sunlit uplands of process maturity: 'Let's not waste time with the As-Is, let's just focus on the To-Be processes'.

It's fair to say that consultants themselves often disagree on how important it is to capture the As-Is processes.  But none that I know would ignore them.  You can't plan a journey without a startpoint. Transformation plans without an adequate understanding of the As-Is processes are very likely to fail.  So, at the very least, capturing the As-Is processes reduces transition risks. 

But paying attention to the As-Is processes helps in other important ways too. It can expose gaps, overlaps and inconsistencies that were overlooked because the organization's focus has been on heroic fire-fighting. It reveals connections and hidden dependencies. Often it throws up new ideas for the future state, and highlights issues that will be need to be addressed in the transition^*. It grounds the definition of the To-Be processes. Above all, it gets people collaborating across functional silos, using the language of end-to-end process.  

Process maturity is ultimately founded on an organization's cultural mindset.  Jumping straight to the To-Be processes is a quick-fix mindset.  We'll always need to execute quick fixes - but process maturity requires the organization to be able to operate in a more detached and analytical mode as well.

My friend's client of course doesn't see it this way (hence his call for help).  So he will take on 'the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune' and risk arguing that his client needs to do an elementary capture of the As-Is processes, just to reduce transition risk.  And be confident that the client will gradually come to realize that time invested in capture of the As-Is can be consulting budget very well spent.  

Which we all know is pretty much what Hamlet would have advised in the circumstances:

Thus conscience does make cowards of us all,
And thus the native hue of resolution
Is sicklied o'er with the pale cast of thought,
And enterprises of great pith and moment,
With this regard their currents turn awry,
And lose the name of action...

* Nimbus Control is the perfect tool for this because it has several ways to capture these ideas without disrupting the flow of the discovery workshop - and to easily analyse and report on them later. 

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27 Sep 2011    After Nimbus IP11, The Sky's The Limit

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Deloitte Shared Services Insights: Could Do Better

Accenture's report earlier this month did a good job in advancing the debate about shared services. By comparison, Deloitte's latest shared services insights disappoint. It's a commendable report - but it kind of misses the point.

Overlook the waffle and the sloppy thinking: Accenture's report does nail the essential truth - that a service management framework is vital for sustainable success:

There needs to be a “system around the system” that includes the people, discipline in procedures, communications, service expectations, performance measurement and key cross-functional processes, such as continuous improvement and client relationship management. It’s this broader shared services system around the system— which Accenture calls the service management framework—that sets shared services organizations that have achieved high performance apart from those with a sub-optimized centralized service delivery model. The service management framework is the keystone...

I've argued elsewhere that Accenture needs to go further and recognize that the service management framework for shared services, in its best developed and most valuable form, is the business process management platform at the heart of the enterprise. 

But, that qualification aside, the idea of the service management framework is a crucial advance and deserves to be adopted.   It provides the context by which we can understand that Deloitte's latest list of worthy insights - on the importance of change management, IT alignment, governance and enhanced controls - are in fact all inter-related.  And jointly soluble, once we frame this correctly. 

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13 Oct 2011    Placing A Big Bet On Global Shared Services

07 Oct 2011    Accenture: What's Holding Back Shared Services

 

 

Accenture: What's Holding Back Shared Services

Hats off to Accenture for bringing some reality and insights to the debate about what's holding back Shared Services. 

Everybody's doing shared services, everybody thinks it's strategic, yadda yadda yadda. The reality though is often disappointment and missed business cases.  Sustainable success in shared services is still the exception.

The Deloitte Shared Services survey, published in April, highlighted some lessons learned: the importance of governance, a collaborative framework, transparency and change management.   

Governance was also a theme running through the PwC/HfS report on Global Business Services, published in July: it has to be 'ongoing', 'well-integrated, consistent and rigorous' and not just another tool for vendor management.  

Those were useful contributions.  But Accenture's report this week Trends in Shared Services: Unlocking The Full Potential brings a new focus.  It spells out what the leaders are doing, and how they are succeeding. And process excellence is front and center.

Noting how one leader in shared services uses automation and metrics and process improvement specialists, it continues:  

"...while other elements are certainly in place - C-level support, comprehensive change management and a relentless focus on value - it is the organization's continued focus on process excellence that stands out ."

I share the report's enthusiasm that shared services will mature to become ubiquitous. And that we are witnessing the emergence of "a long-envisioned" model of integrated business services.  I agree too that 'managing multisourcing consistently' is a huge challenge for most organizations. And I'm delighted that Accenture highlights the vital need for a service management framework.   

But I have one quibble. Because even Accenture hasn't quite joined up the dots.

What is it, ultimately, that enables process excellence, that provides the collaborative framework for change management, that ensures transparency and IT alignment, that supports Lean and other continuous improvement programs, that provides the governance framework for the effective management of outsourcers, and that allows cloud and social media to be most effectively leveraged?  It's a business process management platform. 

It's not a panacea. It can seem a bit boring. It's an unspectacular answer when your SSC is 'in a complete mess'. But everything points to the business process management platform as the foundation for success in shared services.  It underpins process excellence. It's what enables the service management framework.  And it's the only way to optimize the management of process variants, which, the report notes, is the real problem in process standardization. 

What is the business process management platform that can do all this? I've defined it elsewhere as a platform that uses the universal language of end-to-end business process to enable four capabilities.  The only way I'd improve on that definition now, especially in the light of the Shared Services workshop in London last week, would be to re-iterate the importance of adoption.  If our brilliant process management models don't engage process stakeholders, and help real people to get real work done and to contribute to improving things , then we're missing the biggest trick of all.    

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Optimize 15,000 Business Controls? No Problem.

This is kind of obvious - I'm sure you knew it already - but it had escaped me until I sat in on two client case studies at IP11 this week: Managing variants in global business controls is essentially the same problem as managing variants to global processes.  Except that it's arguably more complex and business critical.

McKinsey has noted that most organizations don't manage global processes well. Many are in denial that there is a problem. They define process variants as an IT issue and talk of 'vanilla' system implementations as solutions. And if variants are addressed, it's in a one-off Inquisition, as though things would stand still thereafter.

The truth is that every global process requires local variants of some sort. But global processes continually evolve, and local circumstances continually change. So what's really needed is the capability to continually re-optimize the mix of global process and local variants. And, of course, to continually re-deploy these changes to the workforce in a way that ensures adoption. 

McKinsey noted that many multinationals don't have the collaborative (and governance) framework in place to pull this off. They suffer a 'globalization penalty'.

It's the same problem for global business controls, except more complex.

Rene Nibbelke from BAE Systems highlighted in his IP11 keynote the value of visualization in enabling a Finance team to transform and deliver 280 processes with 230 business controls. But an investment bank, in a workshop case study, showed 15,000 business controls embedded in its processes in Nimbus Control.  Many were local variants. The bank's problem was to continually re-optimize the mix of global controls and local variants.

As an integrated management platform, Nimbus Control delivers the capability to continually re-optimize the global/local mix for processes and business controls.

It's not just analytical either - it supports real world operations, where some business controls require daily reporting and attestation.  And it can do this at pace. 

In one case study - another investment bank - the client created a single source of truth: an integrated process map, covering its activities in 28 functional areas and across 3 regions of the world, complete with 10,000 business controls embedded in the operational processes - in just six months.

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After Nimbus IP11, The Sky's The Limit

 
It seemed entirely appropriate that an extraordinary first day’s program at Nimbus IP11 closed out this evening with a stunning set from the amazing a cappella vocal group Naturally 7.

It was a day of superlatives. I lost count of the number of people, whom I’d never met before, saying, in the breaks: ’This is amazing!’. 

As one delegate put it, the Nimbus plane took off some time ago, lifted high by client enthusiasm.  And the video message from TIBCO founder and CEO, Vivek Ranadivé, who was keynoting at TUCON in Las Vegas today, confirmed that Nimbus now has an extra large powered-by-TIBCO jet engine strapped under each wing.

As ever, it was Nimbus customers who fizzed with energy. And, as usual, their candor was remarkable: this was real knowledge-sharing among pioneers in an approach to enterprise business process management that will one day be business-as-usual.

My own highlights from the stage, picked out from a packed program, would be...

Tim Leach from Northrop Grumman, on the challenge of bringing together the insights of 23k people (many of them actually rocket scientists, he laughingly pointed out) and aligning them in the cause of continuous improvement. If Northrop Grumman can assemble all the parts for the most advanced aerospace equipment, and keep them aligned so the plane can fly, then why is it such a challenge to get people aligned and flying in formation?  How could it be that having 7k people trained in Six Sigma and Lean was yielding so little in terms of sustainable cost reductions and service improvement? The answer: bring their work together into a single process repository, within a single process architecture, and connect that with how people get real work done. “Our failure”, he said,”was that we tried to build it ourselves. After 18 months we found Nimbus, and that was an immediate 85% of the solution.”

Richard Miller from Marathon Oil, manager of a platform in the Norwegian sector of the North Sea that cost $3bn to build, costs $160m to operate every year – and that pumps $1.6m of oil and gas per day, when everything is working properly. After a Nimbus Control implementation that has successfully enabled a major in-sourcing exercise, and a re-implementation of SAP: "The thing I notice", he said,"is that things are becoming much more predictable. Not just in planning work and the delivery of materials, but right across the business."   

Darren Anderson, Principal Solution Architect for Sony, based in Tokyo, steering Sony's global SAP program (which is his 32nd major SAP implementation), and striving to ensure that process is at its heart. "We had this realization - I knew this but could never vocalize it - that end-to-end process is what we have to focus on." That realization had enabled Sony's European business to reduce the timeline for delivery of an SAP program from two years to just one. "The critical success factor was Nimbus: working around one process. I want the business to be thinking about how to improve the process, not have to think about changes to SAP. Nimbus Control has the potential to accelerate our global program, and to help us win in the marketplace by being One Sony."  

Gregory Reynolds, Head of the BPM Center of Excellence at Nestlé, described as a 'no-brainer' the final decision, after an exhaustive evaluation, to adopt Nimbus Control as Nestlé's global BPM platform. "There's almost unlimited potential", he said,"because continuous improvement is baked into our culture." 

Anne Salétes from Novartis on how Nimbus Control is enabling process improvement in the most challenging regulatory environment by providing end-to-end visibility. "We are all talking about - and challenging - the same perspective on our clinical operations processes. Our people working in clinical trials are, naturally, very precise.  What we are doing is helping them to see the big picture as well. So we can see how we can improve - and show our regulators that we are efficient and managing the risks." 

The funniest moment, for me at least: Richard Parker, co-Founder of Nimbus, talking about the company's evolution within the SAP landscape, and noting that: "We're not just going around helping the victims of SAP implementations any more."  (Images of ambulance-chasing to get to the scene of an implementation and help to restore the vitals of the enterprise fast...)

But I can't neglect to mention the Guide Dogs video, which was hugely inspiring. I happened to meet a delegate from the conference on the train on the way home (as I wrote this - she recognised my conference badge!) - and it was the Guide Dogs, and Naturally 7, that she wanted to talk about.    

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BPM - The Foundation For Operational Excellence

Looking in on rehearsal presentations for Inspiring Performance 2011 next week, it's interesting to see how operational excellence is coming to the fore - and how BPM is central to it. 

Agreed, operational excellence sounds worthy but boring (though execs at UBS might be wishing that they'd paid it more attention).

Agreed too that, while it's a widely used term, there's only a loose consensus on what operational excellence actually means (even the Wikipedia entry includes an appeal for help).

But, however it's defined, or branded within the organization, it's an unqualified good.  Every COO wants it. What's less obvious to many organizations though is how operational excellence is directly linked with Business Process Management.

BPM in its IT incarnation - let's call it 'micro-BPM' - is focussed on automation.  But BPM in its wider sense - 'macro-BPM' - is about operational excellence.  And, in global organizations across every sector, a macro-BPM platform is emerging the essential foundation for operational excellence. 

Talking with clients and colleagues since our first attempt, back in January, to define how you do operational excellence in practice, we've converged on four closely-related capabilities: 

To achieve operational excellence, the enterprise needs the capability...

to understand the whole.  To maintain a complete, holistic and integrated model of the business - including what's automated and what's not, what's outsourced and what's in-house.

to flawlessly execute strategy as end-to-end operational processes. To maintain two-way line of sight between strategy and operating reality.

to continually re-optimize performance by integrating metrics and analytics with end-to-end operational processes and providing the framework for the entire enterprise to collaborate on continuous improvement.

to manage risks, controls, quality and compliance together, within one enterprise-wide and real-time governance framework.

Cue the enterprise-wide BPM platform: the essential enabler for all of these capabilities, and therefore for operational excellence. More on this, after the conference...

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