Process Management

Description

Dictionary.com defines process as “a systematic series of actions directed to some end …​ a continuous action, operation, or series of changes taking place in a definite manner”. We saw the concept of “process” start to emerge in Work Management, as work becomes more specialized and repeatable and our card walls got more complicated.

We have discussed work management, which is an important precursor of process management. Work management is less formalized; a wide variety of activities are handled through flexible Kanban-style boards or “card walls” based on the simplest “process” of:

However, the simple card wall/Kanban board can easily become much more complex, with the addition of swim lanes and additional columns, including holding areas for blocked work. As we discussed in Work Management, when tasks become more routine, repeatable, and specialized, formal process management starts to emerge. Process management starts with the fundamental capability for coordinated work management, and refines it much further.

Process, in terms of “business process”, has been a topic of study and field for professional development for many years. Pioneering BPM authors such as Michael Hammer [Hammer & Champy 2001] and Geary Rummler [Rummler & Brache 1995] have had an immense impact on business operations, with concepts such as Hammer’s Business Process Re-engineering (BPR). BPR initiatives are intended to identify waste and streamline processes, eliminating steps that no longer add value. BPR efforts often require new or enhanced digital systems.

In the Lean world, value stream mapping represents a way of understanding the end-to-end flow of value, typically in a manufacturing or supply chain operational context [Rother & Shook 2003].

The Lean Enterprise Institute defines “value stream” as: “All of the actions, both value-creating and non-value-creating, required to bring a product from concept to launch (also known as the development value stream) and from order to delivery (also known as the operational value stream). These include actions to process information from the customer and actions to transform the product on its way to the customer”.

Making value streams visible helps understand current conditions and identify issues and problems. A Value Stream Map (VSM) is a simple diagram of every step involved in the material and information flows needed to deliver value. The Lean Enterprise Institute indicates that: “Value Stream Maps can be drawn for different points in time as a way to raise consciousness of opportunities for improvement. A current state map follows a product’s path from order to delivery to determine the current conditions. A future state map deploys the opportunities for improvement identified in the current state map to achieve a higher level of performance at some future point”.

Toyota considers a clear process vision, or “target condition”, to be the most fundamental objective for improving operations; see Rother 2010, Chapters 5 and 6. Designing processes, improving them, and using them to improve overall performance is an ongoing activity in most, if not all organizations. VSM is a powerful tool that can help define a clear process vision.

In your company, work has been specializing. A simple card-based Kanban approach is no longer sufficient. You are finding that some work is repetitive, and you need to remember to do certain things in certain orders. For example, a new human resources manager was hired and decided that a sticky note of “hire someone new for us” was not sufficient. As she pointed out to the team, hiring employees was a regulated activity, with legal liability, requiring confidentiality, that needed to follow a defined sequence of tasks:

The sales, marketing, and finance teams have similarly been developing ordered lists of tasks that are consistently executed as end-to-end sequences. And even in the core digital development and operations teams, they are finding that some tasks are repetitive and need documentation so they are performed consistently.

Your entire digital product pipeline may be called a “process”. From initial feature idea through production, you seek a consistent means for identifying and implementing valuable functionality. Sometimes this work requires intensive, iterative collaboration and is unpredictable (e.g., developing a user interface); sometimes, the work is more repeatable (e.g., packaging and releasing tested functionality).

You are hiring more specialized people with specialized backgrounds. Many of them enter your organization and immediately ask process questions:

You have not had these conversations before. What do they mean by these different “processes”? They seem to have some expectation based on their previous employment, and if you say “we do not have one” they tend to be confused. You are becoming concerned that your company may be running some risk, although you also are wary that “process” might mean slowing things down, and you cannot afford that.

However, some team members are cautious of the word “process”. The term “process police” arises in an unhappy way.

“Are we going to have auditors tracking whether we filled out all our forms correctly?”, one team member asks.

“We used to get these “process consultants” at my old company, and they would leave piles of three-ring binders on the shelf that no-one ever looked at,” another person says.

“I cannot write code according to someone’s recipe!” says a third with some passion, and to general agreement from the developers in the room.

The irony is that digital products are based on process automation. The idea that certain tasks can be done repeatably and at scale through digitization is fundamental to all use of computers. The digital service is fundamentally an automated process, one that can be intricate and complicated. That is what computers do. But, process management also spans human activities, and that is where things get more complex.

Processes are how we ensure consistency, repeatability, and quality. You get expected treatment at banks, coffee shops, and dentists because they follow processes. IT systems often enable processes – a mortgage origination system is based on IT software that enforces a consistent process. IT management itself follows certain processes, for all the same reasons as above.

However, processes can cause problems. Like project management, the practice of process management is under scrutiny in the new Lean and Agile-influenced digital world. Processes imply queues, and in digital and other product development-based organizations, this means invisible work-in-process. For every employee you hire who expects you to have processes, another will have bad process experiences at previous employers. Nevertheless, process remains an important tool in your toolkit for organization design.

Process is a broad concept used throughout business operations. The coverage here is primarily about process as applied to the digital organization. There is a bit of a recursive paradox here; in part, we are talking about the process by which business processes are analyzed and sometimes automated. By definition, this overall “process” (you could call it a meta-process) cannot be made too prescriptive or predictable.

The concept of “process” is important and will persist through Digital Transformation. We need a robust set of tools to discuss it. This Competency Area will break the problem into a lifecycle of:

Although we do not preface these topics with “Agile” or “Lean”, bringing these together with related perspectives is the intent of this Competency Category.