Is it wise to review process workflow to understand business requirements before embarking on a change? Yes
Are process workflows often misleading when it comes to understanding requirements? Yes
How can this be?
Simple, for several reasons.
1) Process workflows are usually created through interviews with people who do the work. While that’s logical, the problem it’s not their job to describe their job, so people often leave out “obvious” details and use company/industry specific jargon and acronyms.
2) If you go into a department to interview five different people who do the same work and ask them to document the steps involved in the work that they do, the odds that you are going to get five identical sets of steps are very, very low.
3) Most importantly, process is a depiction of “how” the work is completed today, and the “how” labels often mask the “what” that is being done, the why, the outcome of the work. This is what I call the “how” trap that I talk about extensively in the book Rethink.
And yet process is be vital, but I will get to that in a moment.
This is a diagram of an actual process workflow map from an actual company that creates insurance quotes for its customers. It starts out with a symbol of a fax machine with the label “Receive Fax” and there are other steps such as “Send Fax to Agent” and “Mail Agreement” and when I asked the people who do this work if those are requirements, the people all said “Yes” without hesitation.
But even though I had never set foot in this organization before, and even though I am not an expert in the insurance business, I could tell that it was very unlikely that those are requirements. Why? Because “Fax” and “Mail” are “how” verbs. When someone is sending a fax “what” they are doing is actualy something along the lines of “Communicate Status” or “Confirm Order” – it is vital to separate “what” the work is from “how” it is done so that you can test whether it matters whether a fax machine is used to communicate the status of the insurance quote to the agent (in this case). This company has been creating insurance quotes for over 50 years, and while I am confident they have always communicated the status of quotes to agents, it’s unlikely they have always used the fax machine.
I also often use the example of flight check in. Is it a requirement that we go to the counter and talk with an airline employee to check in for a flight?20 years ago that was the only way to do it, but now we can check in using a kiosk or the web. We are still accomplishing the same outcome, but we have three choices relative to “how” we go about it – it doesn’t matter who does the work, where it happens, or what the technology is as long as it gets done.
That’s where process comes in. Once you have a clear understanding of “what” the work is, the outcome, why you are doing it, then you need to understand how it is being done. That’s when it is so valuable to have those five different process workflows I mentioned above. When you get all of those different views of the people doing the work, that’s where you learn about exception handling and best practices and who is accountable for what. From there, understanding what’s most, and least, valuable and how things are performing, then you are well on your way to having clear and objective prioritization of the problems and opportunities that you face.
In the 10,000 plus hours I have spent helping organizations rethink their work, I have discovered what I call the 20/80 rule. When you sit down with people and ask them what portion of their business is unique in terms of why customers, partners, and even employees want to be associated with them, most people come back with a number around 80% or even 90%. Mapping the “whats” that make up the organization, the business capabilities, results in a business architecture, and when you have that, together with value and performance scoring, what the organization realizes is that the per cent of the organization that is really unique, is closer to 20%, often less. Thus the 20/80 rule. So what? This is great news for everyone.
For executives – instead of focusing their energies and scorecards on 80% of the business, they can be far more focused
For managers and their employees – they can have greater confidence that they have the right metrics and prioritization
For the people in the information technology (IT) department, they now have the ability to have an objective dialogue with the business about requirements, and when it’s clear that something isn’t high value to the business (>80% of the work), there is no need for expensive customizations to software, duplicative work will be unmasked and people can share a common process and software, and as those savings are realized, the business can start to see more clearly where they need to invest in IT for differentiation and innovation.
So process is vital, but it can really hurt you if you use it at the wrong stage in your efforts.
-Ric
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