Too Much or Too Little Process Controls?

Ever hear the axiom, “if you can’t measure it you can’t improve it”. I believe this to a point. As a process management practitioner I have always adapted to what the client has in place so as to “hit the ground running” and leverage the scope, budget and schedule to complete projects on time.

What obstacles, trappings, lack of documented policies, procedures and methods are holding your organization back? Each of us is faced our own obstacles more or less appropriate for our level within an organization; however, the blame for not achieving objectives goes straight to the C-suite. The C-suite should be asking is it process that is killing the opportunity?

Our workers are a function of the best processes we can design, or not. Workers obviously know better than leaders how to get work done, and they often do this in spite of processes, procedures, methods and tools put in place for them. If you can agree with this generality, then hopefully you can also agree that servant leadership at the C-suite comes with developing the vision and the processes to achieve it. The greatest sin of these is manpower. Money is the whipping boy of progress. Money is headcount. Have you taken the time to examine the increase in profit or meeting objectives against the cost of hiring more people?

Faulty Reasoning…

I joined a venture start up and was asked to evaluate and make changes to sales and marketing in order to achieve the sales forecast, hence the annual profit forecast. It took me less than 30 days to discover an erroneous sales forecast. I took the top 10% and asked them to use a 6-Sigma tool (Check Sheet) for their daily activities for 2 weeks. Analyzing this information I formulated a sales formula and constructed a table of what the average sales person could achieve. This caused me to re-forecast the sales goals. I met with the CEO and Chairman and walked them through this data. The outcome was they chose a lower forecast over hiring two (2) more sales people - OK, their decision. The positive outcome was that going forward the sales team had data to back up how many calls and conversions could be expected as a requirement of their role and it was data-driven.

A Tale of Failure…

I will illustrate my overly burdensome process point with a failure from the Malcolm Baldrige (MB) craze which swept the U.S. government in the late 80’s. Our CEO decided to pursue quality having just learned that a Florida power company had won the MB award. From the inside it appeared as though our senior most leader decided to chase an award over achieving our value stream. However, the senior leadership had no choice but to embrace the vision imparted to us. We went to school at the Philip Crosby University for Zero Defects for 10 weeks and next developed a process map for improvement and tools to measure everything. Next we quickly rolled this out across a global organization in an effort to “catch up” and in 6 months we failed to hit our KPIs. By the way, the MB award winning Florida power plant was bankrupt in three (3) years.

This abject lesson in failure demonstrated to us just how feckless chasing zero defects can be, when one of our managers blurted out in a meeting that all his people were doing was measuring instead of accomplishing their jobs. Ouch! This was a moment akin to “pulling back the curtain” in the Wizard of Oz. We most certainly all had an Aha moment.

Of course at this point everyone’s job at the senior level was in question so we decided to stop, re-evaluate and begin again. The outcome in 60 days was a simpler approach to reigning in quality and focusing on our day-to-day mission never again to miss our financial targets. Of course in retrospect, the head long approach might have been mitigated with a better change management plan, and the tools and processes were too much for workers, even though it might have been just right for quality practitioners.

The Takeaway…

Our quality implementation disaster lesson is simple - we were better served tailoring a mainstream process to our own organization rather than wholesale adoption of someone else’s answer to quality improvement.

The Rest of the Story…

What prompted me to write about the idea of too much process and too little activity is an email in my In Box today, from one of the many PMO applications I have used. It has all the trappings such as a “STAFFFING” module which requires the imputing of every single team member for each project and requires each of them to log time daily or weekly against the projects they are involved with. With resource and cost constraints many times a single developer or engineer is on a dozen projects simultaneously, with the effect of physically and mentally wearing this rich resource down administratively tracking different projects.

Now the folly of this timekeeping should be self-evident but let me point it out just in case. What other department in your business logs activity time? Does your organization use the PMO application time allotments to improve capacity planning, better plan forecasts and budgets or other elements of effective business planning? If not, then why make engineers or developers keep track of daily time segments? Most organizations I have consulted with have a “Business as Usual” (BAU) category for managers and above who don’t use the time tracking. I won’t name them here, but none of the Fortune 1000 organizations I served did anything useful with time tracking. Kudos if you do though.

While the enterprise project portfolio management process or center of excellence does a reasonable job dealing with competing priorities, a more robust process to evaluate risk which adequately evaluates the cost, benefit analysis is needed.

Further, I am reminded often that processes like the Project Management Institute? PMP PMBOK methodology is better suited for academia. In the business world, fast-moving companies may have structure and processes but avoid overindulgence in saying they are doing something when it isn’t really lean at all. I personally have found no one uses the clunky methodologies but have adapted their own brand of getting to the end as quickly as possible. Isn’t time money?

Matter of fact, take the newest kid on the block, SAFe? agilist methodology, or even the adult in the methodology game, 6-Sigma all carry a heavy price of adherence. ?The question in your organization for leadership is how do we leverage human capacity, maintain a quality of life balance and achieve the value stream we project?

So today I am again reminded of how easy it is for leaders to wrap themselves in a vision without careful risk evaluation against the backdrop of capacity planning, change management and other programs that could help leaders evaluate the scope, time and money required to complete any objective or initiative. Do you believe in KISS? Keeping it simple, streamlining and lean don’t have to be a process and controls which slow down workers. I say this because an advertisement that hit my inbox today makes claims for value stream management and the first page I reviewed has the following snipit:

Drive business outcomes

? Have everyone measuring business value flow

? Track technology’s impact on business results

? Continuously experiment to improve flow

How does one complete the work if everyone is measuring everything all the time? I already have one these huge failures in my past and I like to believe I learn from my mistakes, so can you? My point is we can’t focus all our efforts measuring everything all the time because our work will falter and planned increments will fail, and profits will fall.

So agree or not, I recommend companies tailor their improvement initiatives to processes that already exist and follow your organizational hierarchy. Lean head counts typify agile companies who invest decision making authority and responsibility at the lowest levels. Workers derive personal worth and self-satisfaction of being part of activities (not always projects or programs) that drive the company forward and deliver customer value.

So what’s it going to be for you and your organization? One, lean responsible work forces; or two, cumbersome processes which control and demoralize workers?

I look forward to your feedback on this issue in the comments or you can email me at [email protected].