Process, structure and Getting Things done

My consulting career started in the heyday of business process reengineering.

Hammer’s excellent book “Reengineering the Corporation” had most executives thinking about processes and their (sometimes negative) effect on their business. Corporations across the globe were obsessing over process efficiency and looking for ways to identify wasted effort and extra steps, and to streamline, automate or eliminate.

All good—and a lot of organizations benefited from this work. Some however, did not.

When we’re working with our clients to help them align their organization with their strategy, and accelerate  business performance in a sustainable way, the topic of business processes often arises. “Should we fix the processes first?”, some clients ask. “What’s the point of working on structure when we know our processes are broken? Shouldn’t we focus on how work gets done around here?”

Our answer is that business processes are important… but so is structure. In fact, process and structure are deeply intertwined.

Let’s Start with the Definition of Work

Work is a thinking process that uses resources and methods, over time, to create outputs. To the extent that the work is aligned with the strategy, those outputs will add value to the organization. In order to “get work done”, it has to be distributed throughout the organization. We do this by creating roles and structure… and processes.

There are only two ways to distribute work in any organization: 1) top to bottom (by delegating work down carefully constructed levels of work), and; 2) across the value chain with effective and efficient business processes.

Thinking about work this way, we can see that the work of every role in the organization is connected to one or more processes. If a role holder is doing work that is not part of a process that adds value across the value chain, it is legitimate to ask whether that work needs to be done at all.

It’s also legitimate to ask whether work that is part of a critical business process is nested in the right role at the right level. For example, is the most senior financial person in the organization approving every expense of every employee? If so, is this the best way for this role holder to add value to this process or should the work reside elsewhere?

Part of the challenge with early business process reengineering efforts (in retrospect) was that sometimes, when a step and its attendant work was eliminated from a process, the role that had been accountable for that work remained. Sometimes the role was diminished (as the role was now accountable for less work and less outputs). Sometimes the role was improved, as the role holder could now focus on more work that delivered real value.

I believe that a consequence of the classical approach to business process reengineering is that the structural impact of changes to business processes are often not addressed. Our view (and our experience) is that structure and process have to be addressed, as much as possible, concurrently.

Core International Inc., and Process and Structure

Recently, we developed an approach to help executive leaders understand and gain consensus on root cause issues and to prioritize structure or process remediation efforts.

In today’s economic climate we’re seeing is a lot of leaders hesitant to take on a large scale transformation. We’ve designed this new offering to allow leaders to step into organizational effectiveness in a more tightly focused way to create a rapid, data-based snapshot of how the organization is currently structured and how the macro-level processes are working.