Burning Platforms
Organizations with low levels of process maturity seem to fall into two camps. In the binge culture, process gets attention only sporadically, driven most often by upcoming audits. More commonly, process is acknowledged as somehow important – but it’s managed in a way that’s both inefficient and ineffective.
A prospective client shared the hidden costs embedded in ‘normal’ process management in their organization. Roughly speaking, it’s upwards of 150 people full-time.
The context is a back-office function of 4k people within a global organization of 100k+ people. It’s changing fast, like most back offices. Its transformation team set up almost 40 major change projects last year – covering offshoring, outsourcing, systems consolidation, shared services, organizational restructuring and Lean initiatives.
Every project started with a process capture phase. Typically 2 FTE take 4 weeks to define the current processes in detail, as the start point for managing change.
That’s roughly 6 FTE full-time employed on capturing As-Is processes. Scale it up across the organization, which is also undergoing substantial change, and that’s around 150 FTE employed full-time in capturing the current processes as the start point for managing change.
Downstream, after the As-Is processes have been defined, there’s significantly more waste – and risk – in how the To-Be processes are designed, analysed and implemented.
But – it’s ‘the way things have always been’. For busy execs, there’s no burning platform. It’s easy to jump to the conclusion that adopting Nimbus as an enterprise process platform looks like ‘additional time and effort, that we don’t have, to achieve a nice-to-have’.
Bring out the hidden costs though and it’s easy to re-frame it, correctly, as an investment of the existing time and effort into building a joined-up, comprehensive and real-time view of the business, and a flame-proof platform for sustainable improvement.
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© Text Michael Gammage 2013
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