Ensuring Business Process Success Through Managing Organizational Change (Part 1)
Let’s start with the obvious: business process redesign, process engineering and business transformation all strive to affect an organization’s bottom line. Companies like Motorola, USAA and Toyota have reaped substantial benefits from these endeavors resulting in disciplines like Six Sigma, Lean and World-class alignment being commonly recognized as best practices across industries.
And yet, so many fail.
Regardless of the merits of process improvement initiatives, too many of these efforts don’t bring about the lasting bottom-line impacts they claim they’ll deliver. All too often, blackbelts masterfully execute a DMAIC only to find that, six months after completion, the business has largely regressed to pre-DMAIC behaviors. This is precisely what you don’t want. In the scrapheap of failed transformation projects, many are bleeding from this exact wound.
In my experience, during a transformation, redesign initiatives often fail to account for the necessary organizational change. This gap leads to many of the problems you see in the long-term effectiveness of process improvement projects.
Although a sponsor/champion for the transformation is identified early on, process engineers often rely too heavily on them. Other key players are not sufficiently involved and may not buy-in to the redesigned processes for a number of reasons.
For example, although a process is more efficient for the sponsor’s scope of operations, it creates challenges for other areas outside the sponsor’s scope. The (obvious) result is a pushback to organizational norms. Communications with feedback may not be sufficient to enable others to embrace the transformation. Employees and mid-management may not fully understand the new processes and their critical success factors. Ultimately, the processes are inadvertently undermined through work-arounds and subsequent process revisions that serve to fit familiar behaviors into the redesigned methodologies. Bad news.
And there’s the culture issue. Over the longer term, culture is insufficiently addressed. Corporate professionals often do not fully consider the needs of field operations employees or key employee drivers (like corporate performance measures) that must be modified for lasting change to take place.
A classic example occurred in call centers where the leadership’s goal was to solve customer issues with the least resources. While the importance of solving customer needs received much lip service, performance measures still focused on volume. Until call centers implemented a balanced scorecard approach to assess effectiveness, customer satisfaction and retention remained low.
Likewise, failing to account for policy changes can eliminate the value from a major process redesign. Example: automating a mail room’s ability to correct addresses and eliminate the incidence of undelivered mail does little good if the business units do not allow mail room personnel to change customer data.
Finally, huge problems occur if success is neither rewarded nor recognized. In many initiatives, early adopters of the change are not given the support they need to succeed. They stumble through the transformation with lackluster results. If they eventually succeed, they are not recognized for their work. Experiences like these severely damage the ability of the transformation to spread beyond the initial pilot area as word quickly spreads about the “cost” of adoption.
(Stay tuned for part 2 of Mark Gavora’s column, scheduled for publication on Tuesday, May 25.)
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