Justifying business process improvement without being a fool

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This year is the fifteenth that I have been working with business process management, document management and business information systems. Or when people ask what I do, "I'm in IT, but I can't fix your PC". Over the years not much has changed. The same business problems are still there. Companies still have an over-reliance on paper or email, because it is just too hard to get started in a process improvement project. Communications with customers are still on paper. Yep, you can get your bank statement online, but that isn't a transaction that results in a business process. Nope, processes are still manually guided by individuals driving a desk and an email account. Am I a fool to think that people want to change this?

In the last two years, I have been focusing more on small and mid-sized businesses. They seem to offer a great opportunity, hanging on through grim economic times, and needing some attention to be able to work better. The problem is that there is never a lot of money or time to spare in small businesses to change the way things are done. Rightfully, people focus on doing what needs to be done right now, trying to grow the business (or just stay afloat). The idea of adding some process rigor, to make it easier to do common repetitive tasks in the future, just doesn't figure. In many cases, a process incorporates a grand total of one employee and a customer. A checklist is a more effective process management tool than a formal workflow, and managing information, data and documents with minimal hassle is a much bigger issue.

Mid-sized businesses have process needs that are reminiscent of the processes I have worked with in giant corporations. Since the multinational monsters are always split into business units and smaller departments, the scale of what needs to be done is often the same as the requirements of a mid-sized company anywhere in the world. Which is great news, as that means I have some great experience to offer these smaller companies from my time spent with the big guys. 

The problem is this: it is far more transparent where the cash comes from to pay for business improvement in a mid-sized company than a multinational corporation -- the owner's bank account. In large corporations, you can make an ROI and justify it two levels above you, and you're still not even in the peripheral vision of the CEO. In a mid-sized company, the ROI has to be real, and offer real results.

So am I just fooling myself trying to work with mid-sized businesses? Or will the lessons of transparent decision-making make me into a better process improvement specialist? My job is no longer in fabricating an ROI for an enterprise software salesman to present to his prospect in the department of a huge company. My job is to recognize that mid-sized businesses have process problems that need fixing, in sensible, justifiable ways. And if you can't justify making a change, things will carry on fine just the way they are. 

Reality is, in 15 years my job hasn't changed. I'm still "in IT, but can't fix your PC". I just have to focus on the real business problems, not the ones that used to make a salesman a fat commission!

A post from the Improving It blog

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Enough is the best

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Is 'Enough' the new 'Best'? That is the question asked by Idris Mootee on Blogging Innovation this morning. I have long been a proponent of "good enough" for business processes, which would be probably taken out of context in a sound bite, so don't quote me quite yet.

Mootee discusses the Muji stores in Japan, the non-brand brand that espouses the idea that as consumers there is stuff we need and want to buy, but why do we have to be forced into believing that one label makes a product better than another? Brands are there to do this, without adding any value to the actual thing that is being bought. 


Unfortunately business improvement strategies have taken the branded non-value add approach. We have branded our business improvement methodologies, Lean and Six-Sigma are two common examples, to add caché. Hell, we even retained the Japanese-named concepts that came out of the manufacturing philosophies that don't always translate well into western thinking, because it makes the approach sound cool. What, after all, is wrong with translating concepts into plain English to make them accessible to a wider audience, rather than forcing people to buy expensive training and textbooks?


Strangely enough, despite maintaining a significant amount of branding to make its concepts sound bigger than sometimes they are, Lean really does follow the concept of 'enough is enough'. Maybe not 'enough is best', but knowing when to stop to avoid wasting effort in removing wasteful activities from your business processes. So, going back to my likely to be quoted out of context quote, "good enough" really has some value. The question is, do you want to spend money making one process that is performed close to perfect when the rest of your business needs some serious fixing? It is like seeing a house with a beautiful kitchen complete with granite and stainless steel, but the stairs leading up to the bedrooms are collapsing. 


Small and medium-sized businesses should be especially sensitive to this pursuit of perfection in their processes. There is typically not spare cash to be invested in business improvement. Surprisingly, sometimes the best way to get bang for the buck is to do several things at once. Make sure you reach a milestone where the work done on a project is useful, but have enough measurable objectives in place to understand which of the simultaneous projects is really going to achieve what you want. Your understanding of what is important changes as your processes improve. 


Like branding, sometimes a single laser-like focus on one project ends up dragging you into a endless cycle of polishing and perfection. Mootee may be right, at least in my view: "Enough" is the new "Best". You can quote me on that.

A post from the Improving It blog

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Onshoring needs supporting too

There is a big push around onshoring - the term applied to pushing out parts of your business operations to locations that are often considered more cost effective, while avoiding the difficulties of locating services overseas. The McKinsey quarterly targets onshoring in the following way:

The advantages of staying onshore are greatest for a company with products that are not labor intensive, have short life cycles and high obsolescence costs, and target very time-sensitive customers.

The reality of onshoring is that it needs the same level of technology support, if not more, as offshoring operations. Of course, there is not the complexity of dealing with the local cultures and politics of a far off nation to deal with, but as McKinsey puts it, the benefit of onshore comes with time-sensitive customers. Only if you can ensure the premium customer service reps, the expert technical support staff or the fashion designers have all the information to hand that they need, and can communicate effectively with the rest of the company, can you ensure that your onshore operations will deliver the real-time, local timezone value that you are aiming for.

One big complexity for organizations is not in sharing their customer data (CRM is normally available) or communicating in an ad-hoc manner (email and phones are pervasive). The issues come typically from assigning work, handling and tracking correspondence received in disparate locations, sharing documents, and keeping visibility of performance. Without some form of work management, business process management, document management, collaboration or case management, it is virtually impossible to ensure that the remote locations (potentially multiple onshore offices and your HQ) are sharing information and tracking work effectively.

Any one solution is not necessarily the right way to go, but it should be a relatively easy task for a business improvement specialist to look at an organization and identify how improvements can be made, both in process and technology. Attempting to use people with only an internal world-view may limit the options presented, just due to the obvious risk that comes with going against the status quo. At the same time, you shouldn't always need a team of McKinsey consultants to tell you that an office in another state needs to communicate with your HQ through a series of fairly easy to identify, and implement ways.

A post from the Improving It blog

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