Posts Tagged “Business Process Management”

Earlier this month, I had the opportunity to speak to a business process management organization and a human resources organization about leading transformational change. The groups share three attributes:

1. They both help design the organization’s future,
2. They both see somebody else as responsible and accountable for implementing those changes.
3. The press that covers these groups is frequently discussing the question, “Why don’t we have a seat at the CXO table.”

A Facilitator Ran This Road Crew

Many I spoke to saw their role as facilitators. I absolutely believe in the value of a good facilitator. Unfortunately, facilitators, by definition, are more focused on the process than the outcome. People at the CXO table care about outcomes. I didn’t share my story about a particularly frank CFO adapting an adage about lawyers. When confronted with a huge problem and an army of consultants, he turned to his team and said, “First, let’s shoot all the facilitators.”

Stewardship has many definitions. In biblical times, the steward was a servant that managed the master’s household affairs. It was a position of honor and earned through trust. Today, stewardship refers to a mindset where a person takes responsibility for something that the person does not own. Environmentalists use the term to refer to the appropriate usage of the earth’s resources. Stewardship is a proactive mindset that says, “Count on me to do the right thing.” Anybody can be a steward.

I turn off the lights when I leave a room in my home, and in hotel rooms. I’m a mini-steward of the environment. I try to teach my children to take responsibility for things they don’t directly control. With basketball season upon us, my comment became, “Instead of criticizing her for missing free throws and the fact that you have to run more, invite her to work out with you and show her how to shoot better shots.”

Think about the working world. There are people you work with that regularly stand up and say, “I can make sure that happens.” The task at hand has nothing to do with the person’s job description. They make things happen by influence, not force. (The best thing about those people is that they frequently don’t say a thing; they just do it.)

The next time you want to see change happen, don’t say, “I can’t do anything because I don’t control the situation.” Ask yourself, “What is the number one thing can I influence?” One light in one hotel room won’t stop global warming, or lower my price on the next visit, but it did make a difference. My daughter has yet to realize that the coach is going to make the team run and she will never get to avoid it. She might as well have a teammate who can shoot.

I’m sure you will find you can influence at least one thing in a positive direction. The best part of stewardship is that practice it makes you better at it. The more you act as the steward, the more you will want to, and the more others will want you to. You can influence a tremendous amount just by ignoring your job description and saying, “count on me to do the right thing.”

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.

Stefan Stern has written a great piece in Financial Times on transformational change and uses two examples to buttress his claims. The success story is the opening of a new terminal for the cross-Channel Eurostar train service. The failure story is the opening of the new British Airways terminal at Heathrow airport. The highlights of the Heathrow story are provided below:

“consider the horrors of the launch of Heathrow’s T5 in March. Sure, as far as the construction of the site was concerned, it was a triumph, a £4.3bn project completed on budget, on time and in full. But in spite of BA running a three-year change programme, called “Fit for 5″, we all know what happened come opening day.

Baggage handlers tried to warn their bosses about the problems they could foresee. The site is huge. Employees, who had not had enough training, simply did not know where they were supposed to go. More time had to be allowed to get staff from their locker rooms to the arrival and departure gates. And, as for the lockers - the new ones were not big enough to hold all the baggage-handlers’ clothing and belongings, including bulky wet-weather gear. Parking space, also far from the terminal building, was inadequate.

Managers were told about all these things. And BA chief executive Willie Walsh did not appear to know how grave the problems were. (He later told MPs that he had taken a “calculated risk” pressing ahead with the launch date.) But the clock ticking down to the March 27 opening had kept ticking, and apparently it could on no account be stopped.

Managers sometimes complain that their people “hate change”. That is just not true. People hate stupid change, change that they have no influence over, change that is simply imposed on them.
To err is human. We all do it, even - you will just have to believe me here - journalists. But looking back at the T5 fiasco, it seems clear that a bit of honest, straight talk (and action) at the right time could have helped avoid much of the subsequent aggro.

How hard is it really for managers to recognise these basic truths: that staff (including managers) need to be trained properly to do their jobs well, that employees on the ground may have useful things to tell you about the reality of the work they are doing, and that large-scale, difficult changes need to be prepared for thoroughly?

So much in the world of management seems ultimately to be a matter of common sense, of basic human decency, in fact. You could almost believe that most management foul-ups would be avoided if only people did a bit of serious thinking first. Employees could then get on with their work calmly and productively. Life would go serenely on. And, in this blissful world of efficiency and success, there would certainly be no need for management columnists.”

There would be a whole lot less need for management consultants as well!

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.”