Process Optimization – Taking It to the Next Level

So far on this blog we’ve had a lot of important conversations around getting started — the first 180 days, putting your BPM team together, that first playback, etc. Today I want to focus a little bit more on the optimization piece of the puzzle. What do I mean by optimization? Imagine that you’re already effectively using BPMS and you’re doing pretty well all in all, but you’re not seeing the kinds of fireworks that you did when you got that first process up and running. The question is, essentially, what are some the of the advanced topics that that come to mind in terms of things that companies can do that really optimize and take process excellence to the next level? This will continue to be a theme for me in subsequent blog posts, but I’ll share some initial high level thoughts as well as a few best practices here.

I’ll begin with where I come in as part of our Services group. It often starts with a happy customer telling us that they are slowly starting to stall. That is, they got through those first multiple iterations, but now the question is — where do we go from here, how do we know whether we should add on another process or move to an area that is totally separate?

From an optimization perspective, we are going to go in and do a review and an assessment of what the customer has, what they are doing, and what kind of returns they are seeing. For example, is this process more customer-impacting, is it employee-impacting, and most importantly are we really understanding what the true value proposition is for each?  We decide how and where we want to focus, and determine whether we are doing a good job of tying into strategic objectives within the organization. Ultimately, optimization is all about alignment and realignment, that’s the first take-away.

I’ll use Sprint (my former employer) as an example. A big focus for Sprint is customer satisfaction. But when we started on a key initiative six years ago, when I did my first project using Lombardi Teamworks at Sprint, our goal was not so much about customers as much as it was about the financial impacts and our bottom-line. Over time, through rigorous optimization and continual refocusing, however, we gained major additional benefits on the customer satisfaction piece that proved to be very beneficial. This is what we want companies to start understanding, that they can exponentially grow the value proposition of BPM by evolving their process and/or refocusing processes in certain areas to accomplish adjacent goals. And again, as we align it all back to strategic objectives, the impact is able to spread much further - that’s the key.

Now, to take a step back - what often causes stalling in the first place?  99% of all organizations that I’ve worked with over the last twenty-plus years have broken processes, but the problems really start and end with change management and communication - usually it’s the bigger-picture stuff that is actually the problem.

When it comes to change management and communication, the philosophy that I have is that it is more about keeping it simple and having good representation, so that the people closest to the process are your experts. You need to make sure that you have visibility and buy-in with the upper levels of the organization, I can’t underscore this enough, but at the same time, you don’t need too many additional layers, which can slow the activities down and cause the kind of stalling that I’ve been talking about. After a first successful project, people get excited, and they want to learn, and they want to be exposed to what else is possible, and they want to have more people in the room because they think they can accomplish even more that way, but this isn’t always the case. Nonetheless, how do you toe the line between too much and too little?

One best practice comes to mind in particular in terms of how to maintain visibility and buy-in without subjecting yourself to scope and team creep.  I like to put an elevator speech together, and help a customer to craft a very simple layman’s term message that the team can start sharing with their peers and with other people within their work environment. This helps colleagues and managers and directors not only understand what their project is about and what it’s going to do for the organization, but also what is needed from that group for success, and truly what’s in it for them. This can be particularly helpful if there is a sponsorship change, because the project remains well-represented at many different levels, and you can pick up for the most part right where you left off.  An elevator pitch is typically thought of as something that a start-up CEO seeking venture capital might spend a lot of time crafting - but that entrepreneurial focus can really help spread the BPM message internally throughout an organization as well.  It’s a stake in the ground that forces everyone onto the same page, and provides a guide as to how to think about the project and what the end-game is, even though only a small fraction of those individuals will be in the next playback.

To summarize, stalling is most often caused by bigger-picture issues like change management and communication. Optimizing can fix the stalling, and optimization is all about going back to the drawing board and matching your strategic objectives back to the projects you have on the table and in the hopper. Proactively, you can guard against stalling by evangelizing the project itself, and in so doing make your goals and expectations clear. It sounds simple on paper, but as many of you reading this know, it’s an incredibly challenging thing to actually do.

I’ll be coming back to this topic too in future posts, so if there are certain things that you’d like to see addressed, please let us know in the comments.