International Process and Performance Institute

I had an interesting observation the other day that made me think again about how processes often really work and how people in process can make all the difference in the world...

The observation was a case where one person in a process - just one person - had a tremendously powerful impact on a core business process. This person, quite meticulous and very quality-oriented, was performing a role in the process that was never designed into that processs nor was there a real understanding in the organization that this person was having a specific impact. Well, that's not completely true. What the organization did understand was that when this person was there (they only worked at this company 3 days a week) things just naturally "worked better."

So what role was this person performing?

The self-assigned role was that of the CORRECTOR. What this person did was CORRECT anything that was not done right on every piece of work they touched. When I gave this situation a closer examination, what I found was that the work in the process (actually several processes) in this organization naturally accumulated a number of (usually small) human errors as work was performed. The CORRECTOR, on their own, was effectively cleansing all work of these errors that they touched.

Let's think about this. If it is common, and I think it is, that work in a process will often accumulate human error as it is transacted then those errors will require additional work at some point. Some of those errors may spawn numerous additional work activities - including impacts directly on the customer. For example, a single typo on an address can cause mail correspondence to fail to reach the customer. Suddenly that single typo spawns another process which can be as onerous as cancellation of an account for non-payment because the customer never got the bill followed by phone calls, research, corrections, reinstatement and, of course, deep customer dissatisfaction.

So I then began to wonder, how many correctors are out there "fixing" our processes? How much does the quality of our processes and the customer experience we deliver depend on a single person or a small number of people that, on their own, scour work for accumulated human error and reinstate quality into our processes? How often does this happen and we don't even realize the important role these people play?

Part of the challenge here is the focus or emphasis we give to those who work in our processes. Focusing on outcomes - and imparting outcome ownership - to people actually doing the work in a process is a critical element in delivering on that outcome. Processes designed or acted upon as if they are assembly-lines are highly likely to produce accumulated human error. Assembly line processes may work well for phsyical assembly of products, but they are highly ineffective for subjective business processes. For these, outcome ownership is the key.

But I also wonder if correctors may need to exist in our processes. People have different personalities and behaviours and I think this is a skill that is simply ingrained in some people. In that case we should probably spend more time understanding the strengths and weaknesses of the people in our processes to help us understand and work towards a balance of abilities to produce the result we desire.

Of course, you won't find this discussion in the questions and comments on most all of the "BPM discussions" like linkedin (for example). I periodically answer questions there and attempt to inject some new thought into the old - and almost frighteningly narrow - perspectives given there. What I primarily see in the BPM discussion at large is a consistent - zero value - postulation of narrow perspectives that primarily seek to validate "what I do." The opportunity is to challenge the status quo and learn from our observations so that we can understand process better and use that understanding to improve the work we do and the results we produce.

Yet how many of us have actually observed things like CORRECTORS? How many of us understand the real importance that specific people, people types (personalities) and focus (outcomes) really have on our processes? I suspect (strongly) that none of us pay as close attention to these things as we should.

Meanwhile, the CORRECTORS keep doing their thing, instilling quality into our processes and often making the difference between business success and business failure. The sad thing is, we usually don't notice their contribution until they are gone...