Who cares about your business processes – and why you should care about them!

As change manager, I often find myself in a situation where there are many stakeholders pushing, pulling, wanting a say or ready to veto on any or (most often) every initiative related to change. Quite often I found myself in the thick of conflict resolution issues rather than progressing the change initiative. And once in, it takes a significant amount of effort to pull out of the hurricane.

Let’s admit! Change is hard and evokes strong reactions from the people who are (potentially) affected by it. And hence their reaction! I learnt it the hard way to stay calm in the eye of the hurricane and find the right balance between the competing perspectives.

Any project in an organisation affect people – some directly; some indirectly. It is important to identify the affected groups, group them on the basis of the impact and handle them accordingly. Easier said than done.

Who Cares?

Whatever be their impact on our project, we need to realise at the outset that they care about our business processes. And hence we need to care about them. We have to recognise that we have relationships with

• People outside our organisation
• People inside the organisation who are in the value stream
• People who manage and direct the functions within the value stream
• Peers and associates
• Systems/technologies that orchestrate the work in value stream.

They are often referred to as stakeholders as they have a stake in the outcome of the change initiative. Anyone of them has the potential to cause difficulties and stop progress and prevent success.

Let’s take a closer look at them.

Customers and consumers: those we are in business to serve. This group may not be easy to identify. With multiple routes to market, multiple products and services for different markets, there is significant overlap within this group.

Owners: those who invest in us and direct our activity. This group includes the investors, board and senior executives. As before this group can have multiple sub-levels exercising varying degrees of control.

Staff: those who work on serving and supporting the business and its stakeholders. This group can be external (as in manning those functions that are not affected by your project) or internal.

Suppliers: those who provide products, services and resources to us. These can be further segmented based on what they supply

Community: Those who govern, guide or influence what and how we do what we do. This group includes the the regulators, watch-dogs, influencers and general public.

Competitors: those who fight in our market for our customers.

Enterprise: the organisation itself. We need to consider organisation itself as different from tis staff, owners and customers in its ability to be sustainable and freedom to act in its best interests.

Oddballs: Those who play conflicting roles. There are always a group who do not fit into the above categories as they may be playing multiple roles.

What do they care about?

Roger Burton, author of Business Process Management: Profiting from Process uses the ten principles of BPM to explain what the stakeholders care about. Honestly, the list can be used for any stake analysis. Here’s what he has to say:

• Business change must be performance driven - Performance is on behalf of the external stakeholders such as shareholders and customers.
• Business change must be stakeholder based - Change that does not deliver value to outsiders just adds cost.
• Business change decisions must be traceable to the stakeholder criteria - If we do not know and agree what is of importance to each stakeholder then change becomes a political process.
• The business must be segmented along business process lines to synchronize change - Processes serve stakeholders and are served by them. This is the heart of true cross functional process management.
• Business processes must be managed holistically - Managing the parts without managing the whole delivery of value to outsiders is a sure recipe for sub optimisation.
• Process renewal initiatives must inspire shared insight - The insight must be shared by stakeholders externally and internally and be the basis for design decisions.
• Process renewal initiatives must be conducted from the outside in - Process analysis and design starts and ends with assessments of outside value creation. Lean thinking is built on this concept. Bottom up (inside out) leads to broken processes.
• Process renewal initiatives must be conducted in an iterative, time-boxed approach - Stakeholders and change agents do not know what they do not know. This is the learning and trust building that delivers changes tested and accepted as they are developed.
• Business change is all about people - If all the people, both internal and external stakeholders, do not change, then performance will not either.
• Business change is a journey, not a destination - The management of stakeholder relationships will continue to be required since the destination is a moving target. Trust will have to be constantly assessed and built with all of those who care.

Managing stakeholder relationships
Having tried various options, I am certain that while managing stakeholder relationships, one size DOES NOT fit all. Having said that, there exists a broad framework within which we can develop and nurture the relationships. Key areas to focus on and monitor are:

• Stakeholder expectations and goals. Having an unambiguous idea of stakeholders’ expectations and connecting them to the potential benefits realised ensures that they are aligned to the project objectives from the start. Failure to include the stakeholders in project objectives often results in ‘skewed’ viewpoints about the initiative.

• Stakeholder interaction and exchange. Communications ALWAYS helps. It brings transparency to the project; rallies support and can provide useful insights during crucial phases. A triage like assessment of recent communications also helps in understanding relationship issues and opportunities.

• Knowledge shared. This ties in to the previous point on interactions and exchange. Weekly dash-boards and project status reports are helpful to an extent. However, in a change programme – especially a large initiative spanning across functions, stakeholders often seek more information than dashboards. What will the ‘new’ organisation look like? How do I perform the tasks that I am responsible for? Such questions are natural and should be answered to the best of ability. As the project team gets further insights, the previous answers should be revised and re-communicated. I have found that if you go back to the stakeholders with revised/updated knowledge, it helps to build a lot of confidence in the project, the team and wins you critical support.

• Commitments made. Commitments – very easy to make; difficult to deliver. Be sure to make a note of every commitment that you make to your stakeholders. It can be as small as forwarding an email to sending a detailed report/document which may require several person-days of work. If you are unable to meet the committed time-line, be sure to inform the stakeholders about the delay and indicate a new delivery date.

Relationships are never easy to handle. In a change environment, it becomes more difficult to manage relationship with a large and varied set of stakeholders. In our personal lives most of us are able to manage our relationships fairly well; we fail to use the same rules in the profession environs. Creating and nurturing effective relationships in change projects are critical since without getting them sorted out, our processes simply cannot and will not perform.

Thats my view.  Would be happy to hear what others have to say about this.

Change Management - Revisited!

I tried to keep away from this topic. It's sticky; ambiguous and does no one good. However my fascination to the subject keeps on tugging the ropes.

And I'm back again!

Someone - not so long in the near past asked me the 'A B C of Change'. Well I answered to the best of my understanding. But within an hour, I was tempted to go back and withdraw what I said! Given this choice, I'd have redefined the ABC as "Anything But Change". Strong, isn't it?

I cannot claim to be an expert of change - but I cringe when someone seeks me out for a 'change' role! What I end up doing eventually is "A B C". And I wonder why we carry on the facade of change, if deep down within we do not want anything to change! I am still searching for answers!

Change is challenging; change is painful; change is laborious and expensive. Yet! Change is a MUST. And once we set our (real) intention to it - it is an exhilarating experience in itself.

We experience change in our everyday (out-of-work) life. We are used to it - or at least get used to it fairly soon. But the moment it comes to work (read organisation), the concept of change assumes gigantic proportions! We think of organisational change as something BIG! Something that needs to be handled with extreme care, by specialists. Something that would take months - if not years - to implement and at considerable costs! Large scale changes, enterprise overhaul, enterprise redirection are passe!

Change need not always be out-of-the-world-ish. A simple innovation - if nurtured - can leash enough potential energy to rock an enterprise tectonic plate. But how often their ideas and/or suggestions are given shape? They get lost in the corporate noise or swiftly amputated to preserve the status quo.

I just finished reading the oxymoronically (not sure if there's such a word, but hey, ho! its innovation!) titled book - Borrowing Brilliance by George Carlin. He gives six simple steps to corporate creativity. And to me it makes perfect sense. Here they are:

Step 1: DEFINING: Define the problem you are trying to solve
Step 2: BORROWING: Borrow ideas from places with similar problem
Step 3: COMBINING: Connect and combine these borrowed ideas
Step 4: INCUBATING: Allow the combinations to incubate into a solution
Step 5: JUDGING: Identify the strength and weakness of the solution
Step 6: ENHANCING: Eliminate the weak points while enhancing the strong ones.

While the first five steps are linear and build off each other, the sixth step is more of a haphazard one. It’s more organic, a self-organising process, one in which the process creates itself and is unique to each project. After passing judgment, you return to the problem, reconsider it, perhaps redefine it or decide to solve a completely different one. Your positive/negative judgments will develop your creative intuition and give you greater insight into what to borrow and where.

Once you understand this process, you can then build an innovation program within your organisation to foster this type of thinking. In fact, you can use this process, through collective collaboration, and involve your entire organisation in the creative process.

Corporate Creativity
Never before has the need for innovation and creativity felt more than now. Recession, fledging customer base, tightening regulations, shortest-ever product life cycle and xut-throat competition has led organisations to seek creative solutions to fuel their business growth. New ideas are being market-tested and implemented at more feverish pace than ever. Innovation and creativity now drive the market, replacing scarcity and price as the primary keys to success. It’s a wave that’s just beginning to crest, and you’ll need to ride that wave or else drown in the turbulence of its wake.

Most companies have very formal innovation function. Most often manned by skeletal team and facilitated by outside resources. The great misconceptions that result from formal/assisted innovation sessions are - often - more detrimental to the creative process than anything positive that results from the process itself. The constraints may leave out many important aspects of the creative thinking process. Carlin (again) suggests a simple receipe to incorporate creative thinking process into the daily processes in your organisation: Separate the concept development process into four different meetings, each with a different goal and different set of rules. These are:

1. A problem-definition meeting;
2. A borrowing-ideas meeting;
3. A new-idea meeting; and
4. The judgment of these ideas at a separate time.

The first meeting is essentially a data-dump. You are not interested in the solution, but in the problem itself. The problem needs to be analysed on all dimensions, separate the symptoms from the root cause and arrive at a hierarchy of problems. This step helps you delimit the scope of the problem. Quite often we 'jump' into the problem - only to end up identifying solutions for wrong (at worst) or less important (at best) problems.

Once you have identified your problems, organise them by sorting and grouping them. The next step is to assign different members of your team to different groups and ask them to research competitors, other industries or domains for similarities and the approach they adopted to solve them.

During the second meeting, teams present their research to each other. Essentially, they describe the problem that was assigned to them and explain how the same (or very similar issue) was handled by the competitors, or other companies or companies in other domains.

The third meeting is the idea generation meeting. You evaluate the results from the second meeting into what can work for you and in which way. This is a creative session and invitees should be encouraged to be creative but ready to shoot their ideas. Brainstorming? Yeah! Very close to it. In the initial days, when you are trying to instil the culture of innovation in your company, you are probably better off considering egos, organisation culture etc in mind.

The fourth (and there can be subsequent meetings as well) are about evaluating the shortlist of solutions and prioritising to take them further. You many have more than one good idea which you want to try them. Using a department, small group as a pilot to beta test the idea is always a healthy practice. More important, it wins you some early converts in your change programme.

Change is personal. Each person has a varying degree of adaptability to change. The level of resistance varies with the (perceived) impact on the person experiencing the change process. The 4 steps to corporate creativity helps dispel a lot of fear factor and ensures a wider participation from the organisation. Corporate creativity can work if, and only if, the sponsors understand the nature of creative thought and the process of innovation. Your teams are most effective when you use them to gather materials (remember police asking for citizens' help in search and rescue operation?). However, their search needs to be directed. This requires a leader - someone to coordinate the efforts!

I am a firm believer in the intellectual property residing in an organisation. Unfortunately, we pay outsiders (consultants) to flush them out of our organisation. Most often, once the assignment is over, the outsider walks away with most of the knowledge captured during the process. When have you scanned across the hall to seek a potential consultant in your organisation? What stops you from doing that?