Readiness to Manage Process: the Journey from Functional to Process Management Effectiveness

The evolving relationship between the Process Transformers (business change professionals) and Operational Process Managers is crucial to eventual success. Operational process management development is a vital component of the change strategy to ensure that the new processes are Managed and Controlled on an end to end basis such that the continual search to Improve becomes an established part of the process-centric culture.

Aspiring process managers from a functional background need to ask themselves whether they are ready to make the required shift in attitude from “Control” to “Influence”? Can they make the change from:

• Hierarchical flows of authority
• Purely functional reporting relationships
• Quality costs more
• The key measures are actual vs. functional budget
• Authority and responsibility are defined according to functional, cost centre or profit centre units.

… to a culture that revolves around the fundamental beliefs that

• The flow of value-added work is top priority
• Quality costs less – rework disappears
• The key measures are related to the quality, timeliness, and cost of services provided to customers
• Joint authority and responsibility must be defined for providing value added services to customers.

Some of the key questions in self-assessment of progress towards process centricity include:

• Has the firm made the tough strategic choices?
• Can leaders express strategy in business process terms?
• Do we understand which business processes have to be improved, by how much, to achieve which strategic goals?
• What is your level of ‘aptitude’ in improving critical business processes?
• Do your leaders have a concise map of the firm’s enterprise business processes?
• Are there clear, usable process measures and metrics?
• Has the organization developed an enterprise view business process relationship map?
• Have business process owners/ stewards been appointed for major cross functional business processes?
• Have key performance metrics been linked from a customer’s point of view to key financial metrics?
• Has the organisation invested in training key people in a robust framework for change?
• Have we gone beyond one-time improvements to sustained management of continuous change?
• Have motivation/ recognition/ reward systems been aligned with process objectives?
• Do the leaders see the business from the customer’s point of view?
• Do leaders believe customer value is created through a company’s enterprise wide business processes?  

We charge our normal consultancy fees for conducting an audit but for those organisations choosing to go ahead with us, in developing and delivering a training and development programme for their staff, there is the opportunity to amortise those initial fees over the duration of that programme.

The Case for Change Skills Audit

Organisations increasingly realise that the skills of process management are core but changed competencies. In some respects they share common ground with functional management styles; in many others they represent modified or new values, attitudes, behaviours and skills that need to be developed and refined.

Individuals are often unaware of the extent to which they and their colleagues have some of the skill sets or which need to be introduced. T he audit and further training will structure and inter-relate the skills, tools and techniques and magnify their effectiveness.

The Audit Process

The purpose and method of an audit can involve:

• Better understanding the business culture, staff attitudes, role methodology and operational terminology of the organisation
• Establish the level of awareness of the requirements to manage process as distinct from function
• Evaluating the current process management training, qualifications and acquired skills of individuals, to ultimately achieve accreditation of valid elements of their existing expertise
• Complete an individual and departmental skills matrix set against the mutually agreed skill sets of process management
• Conducting interviews on a stratified sample of management staff to :
• refine questionnaire information
• establish genuine level of interest in the training and the qualification that would result
• Conducting a gap analysis on all issues and criteria
• Where cost effective and appropriate, recommend development of new/ modified modules
• Complete a comprehensive approach and outline costed proposals for the implementation of a “Managing in the Process Driven Organisation” development and accreditation programme
• Report to the audit sponsor by written and/ or oral means