Three questions that will change your (process) life

Warning: This paper contains information that might radically impact your view of process, the universe, and everything. In a good way. A very good way.

3 Questions

I don’t mean to trivialize process management and improvement. Of course, there are many more than three questions. There are hundreds, possibly thousands, depending on the context. The problem is we aren’t particularly good at answering hundreds of questions and are hopeless with thousands of them.

Now you might be thinking “Roger, what about AI? It has all the answers!” Yes, it does. And they are often good and useful answers, although some are statistically justifiable nonsense. What it does not have (yet?) is questions, i.e., questions arising without any prompting (your questions). Your AI BFF is a great conversationalist, but you’d sit at the bar together in silence for an awkwardly long time if you didn’t initiate the conversation.

When your AI BFF creates a lot more agency for itself – I’m sorry, Davina, I’m afraid I can’t do that – then we’ll need to rewrite this paper. Until then, read on.

You think there are more than three questions? OK, I agree, answer these three first and then tackle the rest. But maybe these first three aren’t so easy.

Question 1: What are your organization’s 20 most important processes?

Woah! Roger! We have hundreds of important processes. All our processes are important. We are identifying more processes every day. There are probably thousands of them. I have a KPI to identify them all!

Yes, I get it, but here’s the thing. You don’t have enough resources to actively (properly) manage hundreds of processes. You just can’t do it. Resource scarcity means that there will be prioritization, i.e., not every process will be actively managed. Better that this happens mindfully and not randomly.

Active process management can’t be ‘a mile wide and an inch deep’. It must be deep, meaningful, and therefore, focused. Optimizing organizational performance through effective process improvement requires that we first select the right processes to improve. In my experience there is often not enough emphasis on making such wise decisions.

Let’s be clear what I mean by active process management.

For me, active process management is comprehensive and intensive. It must therefore be based on high-impact processes, i.e., those processes where improvement can deliver the most benefit, or processes where failure would have significant direct and indirect effects.

If a process is under active management, we have profound knowledge about its objectives, challenges, interconnectivities, costs, performance (past, current, future), and risk profile.

A process under active management has the following:

• An Enterprise Process Architecture (EPA) from which the process has been mindfully selected.
• A Process Owner to lead, coordinate, and facilitate.
• Well-defined Process KPIs (PKPIs) and related targets and measurement methods.
• Performance data regularly collected and analyzed.
• A Process Stakeholder Group that meets regularly to discuss process performance.
• A Process Management Record (see the youtube video).
• Process Improvement Projects (PIPs) to correct or avoid problems and seize opportunities.

 

Accept the challenge of identifying your organization’s 20 most important processes. Not 21, make it 20. Talk it through, have the arguments. The conversations are as important as the outcome.

Now that you’ve got to 20, what are the top three? Yes, I know, it’s an impossible question, but answer it anyway. In the real world the question must be answered as you are unlikely to start with 20.

Now, just to keep the energy flowing, what is the one most important process? You may not get agreement on that answer, but you’ll learn a lot by trying.

If this process were performing as well as the key stakeholders want it to, what would it be doing and how would we know?

What are your most important processes? This is a challenging question that brings the whole idea of process-based management into focus.

Questions 2: How do you know if your most important processes are working as well as they should be, could be, will be?

All process work must be about organizational performance improvement. Performance assessment must be evidence-based. Selecting a process for improvement and testing to see what improvement was (or was not) delivered must be based on hard data. If you can’t enter process performance information into a spreadsheet, it’s not useful.

The answer to this question is simple enough in theory – set PKPIs and targets. In practice it might be more difficult, but it still needs to be done.

I’ve written and recorded a lot on this topic and won’t repeat it all here. Links below. In brief, the process performance assessment headline points are as follows:

• A PKPI is likely to be different to any other functional KPI you might already have.
• Do not try to map existing KPIs to processes.
• The process performance question, for any process, is always this: If this process were performing as well as the key stakeholders want it to, what would it be doing and how would we know? The answers give you the PKPIs and targets.
• A process must be designed and managed to enable the achievement of its PKPI targets.
• Process performance targets should be real, they should be achievable. Therefore, be careful of perfection targets. 100% of customers rating us 10/10 sounds terrific, but nobody believes it’s possible so it’s not a target; at best it’s a waffly aspiration.

 

Additional references:

Process Pathways paper: Performance – the lifeblood of process management.

Process Insights YouTube channel: A playlist of 19 short videos about process performance

Answering this second question can only be done properly based on the profound knowledge curated by continually answering the first question.

Question 3: What is the business case for analyzing/documenting this business process now? What’s the problem we are trying to solve? (OK, that’s two questions – it’s my paper, get over it!)

I can say with absolute certainty that your organization does not have a business problem called “we don’t have enough process documentation”. No organization does. Lack of documentation may cause a problem. Creating more or better documentation may solve some problems. Process documentation is a tool, not an outcome.

No organization has a business problem called “we don’t have enough process documentation”.

Process documentation is (should be) valuable AND every time anyone starts a documentation exercise that value should be challenged. Why are we modelling/documenting this process? Why now? What is the problem we are trying to fix? How will this documentation help? If the business case is easily made, then fine, get on with it. If not, then…

Haven’t we all been in, even facilitated, too many modelling workshops where the outputs failed to move the dial on any measure of organizational performance?

Shouldn’t we document processes just in time, not just in case?

When it comes to producing process documentation that has no value, we have form. Drives all over the world contain way too much rubbish process documentation and it’s still being generated.

But it doesn’t have to be like that.

Do two things. Firstly, don’t document anything unless there is a positive business case for the investment. Secondly, and in part because of the first item, document fewer processes and significantly raise the quality of the documentation that is created.

Make process documentation a solution, not a new problem.

3 Answers?

How did you go?

Did you answer all three questions completely and with confidence? If so, well done you! Please pass my congratulations on to all involved.

For the rest of us, what are we going to do about that?