Sourcing Shangri-La

Process and The CEO

Brad Power's latest HBR blog Putting Process On The CEO's Agenda is nicely grounded in C-Level realities - but it reflects today's mainstream thinking, not the rapidly emerging future.

The current orthodoxy sees process improvement as being about projects. That's fine - but in practice the project mentality has significant limitations.  Re-use is minimal: when project teams disband, things are filed away and not maintained (ie lost and have to be re-created by the next team).  Often the handover to the line at the end of the project is poor. And because projects are modular, they may just shift costs around the business rather than truly reduce them. 

Small wonder then that, according to McKinsey, many cost-reduction programs (and let's be honest, many process improvement projects are focussed on cost reduction) are "illusory, short lived, and at times damaging to long-term value creation".  McKinsey's research concluded that only 10% of cost reduction programs show sustained results three years later.

The future belongs to a conception of process improvement that is far wider.  It's about an enterprise culture of continuous excellence (to borrow the term that Nestlé has coined). 

In this perspective, there may be a wide-ranging portfolio of process improvement projects running at any one time. Some will be minor short-term improvement projects arising from operational experience at the grassroots. Some will be major projects involving organizational re-structuring and substantial software implementations to support new global processes.

But they are all linked to an engagement with continuous improvement that runs right through the organization at every level.  And it's this engagement which is the key to the adoption of change and to sustainable gains.

In this context, the CEO and the senior exec team have two crucial leadership roles:

(1) to walk the talk, encouraging and rewarding commitment to an enterprise culture of continuous improvement

(2) to empower and mentor a center of excellence that defines, and manages the evolution of, the methodologies, tools and governance framework that orchestrate continuous improvement across the enterprise and its ecosystem.

Related posts:

01 Nov 2010            Making Work Easier, Faster and More Valuable

29 October 2010      Enterprise 2.0 Needs BPM 2.0

27 May 2010            Sustainable Improvement: Making Cost Cuts Stick

 

 

The Future for Business Analysts: The Process Squad?

Jim Sinur at Gartner has been commenting recently on the rise of the business analyst:

The future will be asking more of business analysts. They will be front and center as a key role in defining and maintaining the processes. This will mean that business analysts will be a key cog in the business of business process improvement.

Evidence from some Nimbus clients suggests that the role change for the BA may be well underway.

The context: organisations are searching for the capability to deliver continuous and sustained business improvement. Changes have to well-designed and deployment has to be synchronised across the enterprise. All the stakeholders - from process owners to the end-user - need to understand their role, and be engaged.

It's almost impossible to achieve this without a global and integrated platform that brings together the end-to-end business processes of the enterprise. This platform provides the governance framework for managing change, and it delivers the end-user experience that drives adoption. 

But a global platform is only half the story. What's the point of plane without the skill-set of a pilot? You can't do much with it except rumble around the airstrip.

Organisations recognise this and are scrambling to build their pilot capabilities. They are developing in-house the multi-layered skills required to leverage the global process management platform - and thereby underpin sustained and continuous performance improvement. 

The client solution: one client is taking a radical approach, in keeping with their dynamic and entrepreneurial culture. They are bringing together people currently engaged in aspects of performance improvement into a new team - 'The Process Squad'.  The team is around 30 people and includes BAs as well as Lean and Six Sigma Practitioners, from across their business.

The mission of 'The Process Squad'?  To enable the business to deliver continuous and sustained business improvement by leveraging its global process management platform.

For many BAs, this kind of initiative will be quite exciting. Working closer to the business, and in a multi-disciplinary team, is usually more much satisfying, and builds skills that are highly marketable.  And it's likely to be more strategic and higher profile work as well. It's one way in which BAs will become 'key cogs in business process improvement', in Jim's words.