cake, process and efficiency

are you sure this is the expenses process?

There is a creative process I go through to write each day. It might not look like a process, involving numerous cups of tea, bottles of diet coke, the odd cream bun and the occasional cake, but it’s a process trust me on that.
I like processes, they are a wonderful way to provide the illusion of productivity and progress. This notion applies not to just my own creative process but to many many others. In sales the saying “either be good at selling or good at reporting” is a good indicator that non productive processes are at work there. In most admin centric roles the notion of “feeding the beast” is another indicator that the process being followed isn’t really helping much.

There is a reason for this of course, often the process has lost sight of the objective. In sales the objective is more money not lots of metrics explaining pipeline, funnel or deal stage, which are all just fancy ways of saying “we lost”. Feeding the beast is demonstrating that delivery of the project/widget/gonk/thing is less important to people than the report describing how the project/widget/gonk/thing is going and me needing a cream cake before I carry on writing this drivel is more to do with me being a fat git than a demon wordsmith.

It’s important that we recognise this when we’re asked by clients to talk with them about BPM/workflow/case management etc. The process isn’t always in the client’s best interest and simply automating an existing process doesn’t help. Our usual response to this is to engage in a bought of business process re-engineering or redesign but that can be damaging as well. Over cleansing a process can be just as dangerous for a client as having a big flabby bloated process. It’s because people are part of the process too and people aren’t predictable, mechanical elements. If you streamline a process too far, automating as you go, I could almost guarantee that within a year, your process as-designed will have failed and people will be hunting for a target to pin the blame on.

People need places to hide in a process.

Again the reason is quite simple, not all sales quarters are the barn storming success they should be, not all admin processes are wasteful, and I like cake more than writing. If you take away places for people to hide now and then, you expose human elements to merciless mechanical measurement, and management usually responds to that by using their ever twitchy “fire fire fire” fingers and will engage in one of those ritualistic bouts of force reduction, potentially cutting too far and fast. This is where the process fails the organisation. The process is fine, the measures are all up and yet the company is still dying.  The process has no contingent capability you see. There is nowhere to hold up work in the process, no way to eek it out to cover lean spots and not way to hurry is through when there is too much. If the process is pared right down to the bone, it’s too lean and all that gets you is what Marshall McLuhan called the “dangerous fallacy of easy efficiency, it just gets you to the wrong place faster”.

There are two ways to address this, remove the human element from the process apart from the decisions, which is the usual method for BPM implementations, or decouple the process from a rigid framework, just record results and evidence not progress outside of those, and this is the usual case management approach. Both give enough human space to the process to make it work and both give some minor wiggle room to enable the process to flex and breath, accommodating minor changes without needing reengineering. Both approaches have pros & cons but for me neither fully addresses the way people interact with processes, particularly as we automate out all the lower value parts of our processes, it becomes more important to properly evaluate the human factor.

Processes are like mental games to many people, they are a way of keeping score during periods of productivity and a fig leaf to cover periods of reflection and recharge and forcing people to adhere to tightly defined processes when they are they only creative element left in them is a sure fire way to fail.  Gamification is one way of keeping people involved in the process but it’s not been exploited in an enterprise context. Process fungibilty is another approach, breaking the process apart into self contained units which people can work on out of order, which is appealing in crowd based process models and their crowd sourcing fantasies. To me though neither is as satisfactory as considering the human element in from day one and simply building in some fat into the process. Call it contingent planning, call it loosely coupled process modelling, call it end point measurement, call it what you will. Remember the human element and your processes will be more likely to succeed.

“Where the whole man is involved there is no work. Work begins with the division of labour.” Marshall McLuhan