Posts Tagged “BPM”

On November 12, I will be speaking at the IT and Business Alignment Forum at the Red Rock Resort in Las Vegas. The Forum is actually three conferences in one: Enterprise Architecture, Business Process Management & Enterprise Web, and Portals & Collaborative Technologies. In short, these conferences are designed for the people who design and implement processes and technologies to improve the way people work. Our focus is on the people side of implementation.

In similar previous conferences there has been a lot of conversation along the lines of: “We have designed something great, but nobody wants it.” As it turns out, people are usually resisting the changes - not the new technology. In short, if people are not aware of change well in advance, understand the rationale for the change, and participate in creating the change - the risk of resistance will remain high. The much easier path is to actively lead the change process and help impacted people accept change along the way.

I’ll be posting my materials from the conference in mid-November. If by chance you are interested in attending and would like discounted admission, feel free to use discount code SPKRITBIZSR.

Best practice says business process and organization design are linked. This reorganization team’s charter was to focus on organization design and filling jobs. Senior management viewed business process as something that would “figure itself out pretty quickly.” Because business process and organization design weren’t linked, the organization was designed without understanding how it would work.

As the new organization was rolled out, business process did not “figure itself out.” Here is an example: Mary used to perform roles A and B. After the reorganization, she performed roles A and B, plus an additional role, C – but only for business unit #1. She had no idea who to give A and B work to for business units #2 and #3 – and this work fell apart for those units. Mary also was struggling with the new work in role C. She could not get help from her new boss because her new boss was relocating from the home city of unit #2 to the city of unit #1. To make matters worse, the person who used to perform role C was let go in the reorganization. Mary’s productivity was in a perfect storm, and her storm was just one of hundreds.

The team’s recommendation: “We strenuously recommend respecting the critical link between business process and organization design throughout the change effort.”