I’ve been thinking about … basketball, butcher shops, and hotels

I’ve been thinking about basketball, butcher shops, and hotels. These thoughts unexpectedly coalesced as I stood in my nephew’s shop in Regina, Saskatchewan, Canada. Butcher’s Best is no ordinary butcher shop as evidenced by the constant stream of customers queued out the door and the energy and enthusiasm with which the three staff work all day to engage, entertain, and serve the customers. A lot like Fish! with meat and without the throwing¹.

If I’m running a hotel, what do I care about how cleverly anyone manufactures widgets?

Paul Harmon has been recently thinking and writing about service processes as opposed to manufacturing processes. You can read his thoughts at the BPTrends website. This difference is important. It can inhibit process thinking for those who are in the business of service delivery and find no resonance in stories about efficient manufacturing processes. If I’m running a hotel, what do I care about how cleverly Toyota makes cars?

In manufacturing processes there is usually fixed content, method, and sequence. You cut the metal to shape, drill holes in it, bend it, and then paint it. It can’t be done in any other sequence. The metal must always be the same type, the hole needs to be precise and accurate, and you can paint it any colour as long as it’s black. Such processes can be relatively easy to model, improve, and manage.

The Harmon thesis usefully points out that this can’t be the same in delivering services. He uses the example of running a hotel. The guest might check in and go to her room or might go straight to her meeting in the restaurant. At mealtimes she might order room service, go the restaurant, or dine away from the hotel. Will concierge services be requested? Will there be laundry? Will check out be early or late? The individual processes are quite well defined, eg Order Room Service, Request Laundry, Check Out, Visit Gym, but you can’t be certain of the sequence. You can identify some patterns of possible sequencing and there are sequences that are not possible (e.g., check out followed by room service). As the day goes by the set of possible sequences narrows and the final process/sequence for the day emerges. You can’t model the process instance until it has been executed. The process is truly emergent ².

At Butcher’s Best I was reminded that there are many environments where both manufacturing and service processes are closely coupled. A customer buying prepared product from the showcase is part of a highly predictable ‘manufacturing’ process. Giving customers the Goldilocks Option³ means that you are out to the cold room to custom cut steaks two inches thick rather than one inch or to season the roast with a little more of this and a little less of that. That’s different to a hotel, isn’t it? Henry Ford certainly wouldn’t have put up with such customer driven anarchy!

I was also thinking about basketball. I know very little about basketball but having watched a bit of Olympic TV coverage I was wondering about how you might model the process Play Game. (Yes, I know – it’s tragic isn’t it!). In the traditional structure of management, operations, and support processes, the on-court activities are the operational processes. Management and support processes are common enough, but the on-court action is much more challenging to capture. There are well defined processes like Receive Ball, Pass Ball, Intercept Throw, Shoot Goal etc. Seems that all(!) you must do is put those together in the right sequence and execute them with precision and accuracy and you’re up there on the podium for the medal and the flowers trying to remember the words of your national anthem.

Successful performance of the Play Game process is about agile (re)sequencing of processes in a context sensitive environment.

If we could introduce basketball ace Lauren Jackson to Frederick Taylor, Frank and Lilian Gilbreth et al would they be able document all her subprocesses leaving the only thing to scratch our heads about being how she chooses so quickly and so well which subprocess to execute next? Putting aside very briefly the extraordinary execution skill required, a great deal of the successful performance of the Play Game process is about agile (re)sequencing of processes in a context sensitive environment.

What questions can we shape, and perhaps start to answer, by comparing the processes Play Game, Run Butcher Shop, and Manage Hotel? We need a better classification system; there’s more to this than ‘manufacturing’ versus ‘service’. I don’t have anything like a complete picture of this but some of the issues, similarities, and differences are highlighted below. I’d love to hear your perspectives on agile resequencing of processes.

• Resequencing velocity: there are significant cycle time differences between basketball, Butcher’s Best, and the hotel. The velocity of resequencing is greater on court than in the shop and greater in the shop than in the hotel (most of the time). Agile process resequencing must happen in seconds on court, but maybe 5 minutes in the shop and, depending on the services involved, even longer in the hotel.
• Competition effects: the basketball resequencing task is more complicated than the hotel and butcher shop equivalents because you have a team of people making real-time decisions alone and in combination against an opposing team doing a similar thing with the intent of counteracting what you’ve just done (and what they forecast you might be about to do). There are important elements of Decision Theory and Game Theory involved.
• Resource flexibility: between the butcher shop and the hotel there is a key difference in the number, type, and flexibility of the resources involved. In my nephew’s shop everyone can do everything that is required by the customer. The hotel systems have more resources, and the room service chef is unlikely to check you in (would you like fries with that room key?!).
• Collaboration demands: another possible classification attribute is around the degree of collaboration involved. In both the hotel and the shop, the various resources are working in a coordinated but reasonably independent way. That can’t work on court.

If we can discover and describe all the (sub)processes involved, then process agility is not about creating new processes per se but rather about the resequencing of existing processes. I’ve suggested four possible attributes of agile resequencing for context-sensitive processes.

What do you think?

1. Lundin, Stephen C., H. Paul and J. Christensen. Fish! A Remarkable Way to Boost Morale & Improve Results. Hyperion 2000.
2. Olivera Marjanovic (Faculty of Business and Economics, University of Sydney) writes interestingly about emergent business processes in a paper, Inside Agile Processes: A Practitioner’s Perspective, to be published in the Proceedings of the Hawaii International Conference on Systems Sciences, HICSS’42, Hawaii, 2009.
3. Goldilocks Option: not too much, not too little, but just right!