Saturday, June 06, 2009

Processes - Gate Keeper or Enabler

Read this piece on “Gatekeeper or Enabler” and could not help add my views, I have been in the process world for some time and been keenly following some of the relatively newer development on the process front actively.

One way to look at it, like Neel mentions is to put yourself in a more rigid and at times an academic position where you do everything by the “BOOK”.Well from my own experiences of defining processes, running them, implementing them for others I have over the years come to well and truly become a believer in them.

I have a simple theory as to how and who should create these processes and I have seen it to be working well.Most times when something is created by “others” and thrust upon you, it just does not seem right, even though you might have ended up doing the same thing yourself, considering the constraints etc. It hurts more when these processes are created by “others” who are also “amongst the management”.

Processes that are customer facing need to be created by people who have been there, done that and over and above critically reviewed by people who have a sense of the customer business and ways of working. I would put business before the processes and Business value ahead of regulation (unless it’s a legal, compliance related process).Internal processes must be defined by people who are less arrogant, flexible and understand the intricacies of the business, these must be reviewed by people who typically are hard to please, a bit arrogant.

When one is looking at implementing these processes typically try to expose people to the changes as the stuff is being created, see the feedback, test the waters as they say. Any sudden change is a thing that most people do not wish to take up, so bring it slowly but surely and do not retract once you are sure that you have the right process and can back it up with a business reason for doing something!

1 comment:

ecophilo said...

For processes you have hit the nail on the head. Processes created by "others" without adequate buy in are a big culprit in people getting disillusioned with them.

And this is compounded when the so called process owner never does anything except add more layers on it without a clue on how it helps business - it a becomes a cargo cult process.

A true process would be so deeply embedded that in doing the work, you do the process and vice versa...