"Process centring is not a project, it is a way of life."
Dr. M. Hammer
Processes v Tasks
- A discussion document by Trans.Form Project Director Carl Jones
The following represents the basic argument about why a process centric approach is so vital in generating improvements in business performance. From this clarity with regards to the importance of true and effective process ownership should simply fall out. I think that it is useful to refer to original argument on this as a start. The following is a synopsis of the opening chapter of Beyond Reengineering by Michael Hammer, the generally accepted leading advocate of reengineering and process centring (minor word changes have been made to aid clarity and improve flow between points): -
"The problems that afflict modern organisations are NOT task problems, they are process problems. The reason we are slow to deliver is, in the most, not that our people are performing their tasks slowly and inefficiently; fifty years of time-and-motion studies and automation have seen to that.
In reality we are often slow because people are performing tasks that need not be done at all to achieve the desired result and because we encounter delays in getting the work from the person who does one task to the person who does the next one. Results are not full of errors because people perform their tasks inaccurately, but because people misunderstand their supervisor’s instructions and so do the wrong things, or they misinterpret information coming from co-workers.We are inflexible not because individuals are locked into fixed ways of operating, but because no one has an understanding of how individual tasks combine to create a result, an understanding absolutely necessary for changing how results are created.
We do not provide unsatisfactory service because our employees are hostile to customers, but because no employee has the information and the perspective needed to explain to customers the status of the process whose results they await. We suffer from high costs not because our individual tasks are expensive, but because we employ people to ensure that the results of tasks are combined into a form that can be delivered to customers.
In short, our problems lie not in the performance of individual tasks and activities, the units of work, but in the processes, i.e. how the units fit together into a whole. For decades organisations have been beating the hell out of task problems but have not laid a glove on the processes.
Not surprisingly it took a long time to recognise the mistake. Processes were not on the business radar screen, although central to the business most managers were unaware of them, never thought about them, never measured them and never considered improving them.
Organisation structures for 200 years have been based on tasks, the fundamental building block of the corporation was the functional department, people performing a common task. Tasks were measured and improved, people trained and developed, managers assigned to oversee and all the while the processes were spinning out of control.
Unfortunately, however, process-centred improvement techniques saved companies by destroying them. By bringing processes to the fore the foundations of the organisation were undermined. A disregard for processes had been built into the structure and culture of traditional organisations whose founding premise, Adam Smith’s ideas of specialisation of labour, was a rejection of process. This premise argued that success was based on fragmenting processes into simple tasks and then resolutely focusing on them.Whereas attention to process created stresses that could not be papered over such as who would have control over the newly recognised processes consisting of diverse tasks crossing organisational boundaries which imperilled the protected domains of functional managers. The change to process centring is not primarily a structural one. It is not announced by issuing a new organisation chart, or
management titles. Process centring is a shift in perspective, a reversal of foreground and background in which primary (tasks) and secondary (processes) exchange places. More than anything else this means that people, all people, in the organisation recognise and focus on their processes. This apparently modest and simple shift has endless ramifications for the operation of businesses and for the lives of the people who work in them.
Companies moving to process centring do not create or invent their processes, they have always been there, producing the outputs. It is just that people were unaware of their processes, and most senior managers too removed from the fray to appreciate processes. Processes have always existed, but in a fragmented, invisible, unnamed and unmanaged state. Most managers are blind to the performance of their processes. Everybody is watching for task performance but no one has been watching to see that the tasks, together, produce the results they are supposed to. The question has always been, "Did you do your job?" so the warehouse maximises inventory turns, shipping focuses on shipping costs, the credit department assures that credit standards are met but no one asks "Did the customer get what was ordered, where it was wanted and when we promised it?". So long as workers did their job the result, it was assumed, would take care of itself. Nothing, of course, could have been more wrong.
The single most important word in the definition of process is "customer." A process perspective on a business is the customer’s perspective. To a customer, processes are the essence of a company. The customer does not see or care about the company’s organisational structure or its management philosophies, or its detailed tasks. The customer sees only the company’s products and services, all of which are produced by its processes.A process perspective requires that we start with customers and what they want from us, and work backward from there.
To be serious about its processes, a company must do four things:
Firstly, recognise and name its processes. Every organisation has its own unique set. This is a critical first step but not one to be taken casually. It requires rigorous care to ensure that real processes are being identified. Many organisations fool themselves by simply re-labelling their existing functional units as processes, true identification requires an ability to look horizontally across the organisation, as if from the outside, rather than from the top down.
Secondly, ensure everyone is aware of the processes and their importance. The key word is "everyone", moving to a process focus does not immediately change the tasks that people perform, but it does change people’s mind-sets. Process work is big-picture work.
Thirdly, process measurement. If we are to be serious about our processes, we must know how well they are performing, and that means having a yardstick. Whatever measures are employed, they must reflect the process as a whole and must be communicated to and used by everyone working on the process.
The fourth step in becoming serious about processes is process management. Process centring is a revolution that must be permanent. An organisation must continue to focus on its processes so that they stay attuned to the needs of the changing business environment. A process centred organisation must strive for ongoing process improvement. To accomplish this, the organisation must actively manage its processes. Indeed, the heart of managing a business is managing its processes, assuring that they are performing up to their potential, looking for opportunities to make them better, and translating these opportunities into realities.
Attending to processes is management’s primary ongoing responsibility.
An Example
An imaginary example and a completely exaggerated situation but deliberately so to provide clarity of the point:
A toy manufacturer is sited across a river from his main customer. He has no means of crossing the river, which is normally waist deep, apart from manual labour. He has two delivery departments, Hard Ground Delivery and Water Delivery. The Hard Ground Delivery Department is responsible for taking the boxed goods from the factory to the river and, once across, from the river to the customer. The Water Delivery Department is responsible for taking the boxed goods from one bank of the river to the other.
Ground Delivery set up its task by each labourer simply carrying a box from the factory to the river and then returning for the next. It used the same task design on the other side to take the box from the river to the customer. The Water Delivery Department, seeing the design used elsewhere, copied the same approach. This was OK until some months into the operation when, after many customer complaints it was realised that 30% of the boxes delivered to one side of the river never reached the other. Both departments were charged with ensuring that the customer received their full orders.
The Water Department realised they had a major problem. The bed of the river was quite rocky and one in three of the trips across the river by labourers led to a trip or fall where the carried box was lost in the water, hence the discrepancy. To address the demand placed on them by the Managing Director the water department changed the way they tackled the crossing. Rather than each labourer walking across they used a human chain to simply pass each box across the river, avoiding the treacherous walk and reducing the lost boxes dramatically. A success for continuous improvement!
One month later heads of both departments were called in by the Managing Director who demanded an explanation as to why the customer was still failing to receive all of his orders. Both looked at each other perplexed. The water department head explained what he had done in response to the earlier crisis. The ground department head also explained what he had done. Since 30% of boxes seemed to be going missing, and it clearly wasn’t down to them, they needed to increase the delivered boxes by 30% to compensate. However, the number of labourers was fixed and no overtime was available. They had then come up with the idea of doubling the size of the boxes which, due to the nature of the product packaging, actually allowed twice as many goods plus 30% to be packed into the larger boxes. They then assigned two labourers to each box hence increasing the goods delivery by 30% to compensate for the problem. Neither could understand what had gone wrong.Exasperated the Managing Director demoted both his department heads (or was it promoted?) and asked his product department head to have a look at the situation (he seemed to be a nice guy and had a reputation of reading business books!).
The product department head didn’t take long to discover a new problem. To better support the human chain approach the Water Department now used they ran a three shift system to limit exposure to the cold water and the labourers had been divided by size, hence one shift was mainly made up of the smallest set of labourers. One or two in the smallest shift were very small indeed and simply could not handle the larger boxes, which they had not been told about, dropping every one in the river when it reached their point in the chain.This was reported back to the Managing Director who asked the product department head what he thought should be done. To this the Product Department Head scratched his chin and looked confused. He went on to state: - "I really don’t understand how this all came about. I wish the delivery departments had talked to me about their problems. This customer, who sells on guaranteed quality, is actually only buying the top of the range model motor boat off us and has been trying, ever since placing the contract, to get us to test every individual boat before delivery. I have refused, even though they are more than willing to pay extra for the tests, because I didn’t have the capacity or resource to carry out the tests. If I had known about the delivery issue we could have increased the revenue from the contract and reduced the cost of the delivery by combining the requested tests with the need to get the goods across the water. Unfortunately I have just heard that the customer has cancelled his contract …!"
CONCLUSION
Need I really say any more?
To get to grips with your major business problems you simply must get to grips with your key business processes and, as importantly, look at them from the customer’s viewpoint.
It is only through this end to end approach that you will recognise the major contributing factors to any problem and, hence, the potential ways forward, covering quick fixes and major change.
This will all be keyed by the existence of genuine process ownership armed with the correct responsibility and power to really make changes across the whole organisation in support of the effective deployment of the processes in question.
