Polished processes: the road to nowhere?

Date: 05-11-2010 12:40 | Author: Derek Glen | Category: Process improvement | Tags: change, management, communicating

Change management is all about getting an organisation to respond in a different way than today. Perhaps to its suppliers, maybe to its managers, almost always to its customers, even just how its employees respond towards each other. And of course an organisation is made up of people, so when we want an organisation to respond differently given the same inputs, what we REALLY mean is that its people must behave differently.

Often, consistency of response or behaviour is one of the key objectives, and defining top-down policies and standard processes is a way of directing this new behaviour.

But there are still those who focus only on the process. Those who view the writing, reviewing and approval of the new process as the END of the change process, rather than just the beginning. Documents are lodged in repositories and milestones on change project Gantt charts are duly ticked off. Has anything changed? Well a few more megabytes of storage on a server somewhere may now be occupied...but no. Nobody is reading those documents, nobody is using them, nobody is checking to see if they fit the needs of the organisation in practice, and everybody is just doing exactly the same as before.

Even worse are those organisations where whole libraries of such documents are produced and polished, in an impossible quest for the 'perfect' process - with no hint of any roll-out or deployment until the final product is just right.

But such polishing (without publication) is pointless - because just like a road, the purpose of the process is simply to get us there. If we all stopped driving on roads because they contain a few potholes, we'd never get anywhere. Processes only work when people are using them, arguing about them, replacing them, improving them and making sure they take the organisation in the right direction based on its current drivers and environment.