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.