I CAN SEE IT FROM HERE

COMPLIANCE OR ENGAGEMENT – YOUR CHOICE

A change control manager who was very long on control, short on change and much less short on manager once worked with me. What she meant when she talked about change control was her controlling the process. Everything had to go through her office and get her approval prior to implementation. It isn’t that the proposed process wouldn’t have worked, it certainly would have. It was brilliantly designed and airtight – when followed.  As I explained to her, it was about putting in place an effective set of controls that would allow us to protect the environment while encouraging engagement by all involved as opposed to merely compliance. This, in turn leads to expediting desired outcomes rather than endeavors to find interesting and clever ways of skirting control processes.

As I’ve written in a previous article, “Unique Me!” you might get extra points for the interesting way you mount and dismount your pony but the bottom line is you are merely getting on and off of a horse. Decide what outcomes you are interested in achieving and put in place just what is needed to make it happen – keep it simple!  I’ve seen wonderfully crafted processes that leverage technology designed to both encourage engagement and expedite a desired outcome.

Note: if you find that folks are skirting a particular process or set of processes, there is something wrong with the process(es). Not that the difficulty level of mere compliance should be used as justification for failing to adhere but, in such cases there is likely a better way.

 THE CONNECTED AGE

Pearson’s law says that when performance (anything) is measured, performance improves. Likewise, Peter Drucker is quoted as saying “What’s measured improves.” Whether one attributes this idea to Mr. Pearson or Mr. Drucker the idea is the same – measurement drives improvement.

We are, however, living in the connected age where technology allows for us to peer into a process across what was once functional boundaries and through the duration of the process flow. Vendors now produce product suites which are tightly integrated and work together seamlessly when implemented and used properly. In addition, business intelligence applications enable us to pull the data from every point across the process flow and analyze it in innumerable ways. Effectively, this allows everyone involved in the process to see who did what and at what point it was executed. Likewise, everyone can see what was not done as well.

The power of this capability is extraordinary. Never in history have we had an ability to dissect our business processes and analyze them in such a deep and correlated fashion and correspondingly, pull the levers required to bring about rapid improvements, accelerating business value realization and improving competitive differentiation.

TRANSPARENCY - THE NEW CONTROL FRAMEWORK

A great example of this is being witnessed as the industrial sector moves to Industry 4.0.  In a global survey of more than 2000 participants from nine major industrial sectors and 26 countries by pwc in 2016 “. . . terms like the industrial internet or digital factory came about and were used to describe coming changes, . . .  soon Industry 4.0 was used as a shorthand to describe a journey industrial companies were taking towards a complete value chain transformation (www.pwc.com/industry40).” The focus of the survey has to do primarily with the digital transformation of a company’s operations and the quantum leap in performance through digitization. However, what is lost in the article (survey) is the benefit of transparency of the operational lifecycle of a company across its critical business processes as a result of digitization.

The digitization draws in everyone involved in every critical business process from employees to enterprise leaders to customers and suppliers. The transparency allows everyone to see and react based on what is visible at each point in the process. This allows everyone to plan and modify their activities proactively throughout the life of the project or delivery of a product or service. Transparency drives, in effect, intelligent and accurate anticipation of one’s required actions based on what can be seen at any point in the flow.

There is nothing quite like knowing you are being watched to drive behavior and conversely, there is nothing like being able to see clearly to improve the veracity and timeliness of your work product. The true value of transparency is that it drives accountability more effectively than controls and measures. The benefits of transparency across the spectrum of business processes are not yet broadly understood as they soon will be, but I can see it from here. Can you?

SOUND OFF!

Before you go! I’d love to hear from you. I’m writing a book related to this and would like to refine how best to articulate the value of digital transformation, Industry 4.0, and organizational transparency. I’d very much appreciate your thoughts, stories, and insight. Respond below or send me a message. Let’s talk!