International Process and Performance Institute

 Today is a good day for me, a very good day actually. I am finally part of the vision that has been brewing for some time – to found a nonprofit community organization around the CEM concepts I have pioneered.

It’s a very good day because today I will share part of a vision with you, a vision that will take us to a new place, the place we want to be – and the International Process and Performance Institute is already making great strides in taking us there.

For some time now I’ve had a pestering, festering feeling that we’re somehow missing the real prize. That we were heading for the stadium but somehow we got stuck in the parking lot with the gate closed…

...and we just can’t figure out how to get it open.

Well I’ve figured it out, and I’m going to share it with you.

It’s Like an Iceberg

It’s like the iceberg thing. We work like devils on the stuff we can see but the other part (and that’s where it starts getting interesting) we can’t touch. So what if our understanding of optimization opportunities is like the iceberg? What if we can only “see” the smallest part of the real optimization opportunity?

That would mean (if it were true) that the lion’s share of what we can do to improve our processes, our organizations, our customers experiences - even the quality of our working experiences - sits “out there,” out of sight and out of mind.

Ok, that’s a possibility but it doesn’t change anything until we find a way to get our hands around it. If optimization is like an iceberg then before we can tap into this vast reservoir of unleashed potential beyond the tip, we must find a way to bring the rest of the iceberg into our “world view.” Until then it’s just a fanciful thought or a mildly interesting mental exercise.

But guess what? We are going there now and IPAPI is leading the way.

I always liked reading stories about famous pioneers, the scouts and explorers that were ever willing – no, that had a burning need – to ford the next river, climb the next mountain, and even cross an endless sea to discover new lands and new people; to expand our world as we know it.

In our own way, IPAPI is also living the legacy of the pioneer and the explorer.

The vision (or insight) alluded to earlier is what I will start sharing with you today. It goes something like this:

A New Vision for Process Improvement

Let’s reflect a moment on the difference between machines and tools. It’s an analogy that will help us incorporate this insight into our world view.

Machines do work. Machines in there extremis can operate as independent automata. Many machines operate this way with little more than oversight and maintenance by people.

Other machines have controls by which people can “tell” machines when and what to do, and in what order things should be done. Yet to qualify as a machine, the machine must still be the thing that does the majority of work.

Tools on the other hand are the things people use to make the work people do more efficient, of higher quality and even in some cases possible. Without tools there are many things people would not be able to do.

The contrast between machines and tools is extreme. Machines are essentially self-contained in respect to doing work while tools can do nothing in and of themselves. Tools only have value when they are used by people.

This is why in manufacturing machines experience continuous development, advancement and innovation. In the physical work aspect of manufacturing machines do most of the work.

Everything else that businesses and organizations do (including in the manufacturing industry) is done by people. Certainly people rely heavily on both tools and specific use machines (telephones, fax machines, copiers, trucks, cars, planes, pens, paper, etc, etc, etc) but people are the primary work component, not the machines. If people do their job well, then the work in the organization gets done right and all is well.

But here is where things get disconnected. Think about the implications of tools and enabling machines (machines that do a specific-use task in support of the work done by people) in comparison to machines that do most of the work. Machines require very hardened “command and control” structures to be in place. Everything is engineered into the machine that is needed for it to perform its task(s). There can be no subjectivity or ability to adapt to changing conditions “on the scene.” Machines cannot function in a work environment laced with nuance, innuendo and subjective decision making. Their world is one of absolutes.

People on the other hand are fraught with adaptability, subjectivity, nuance and innuendo. People continuously flow within current context to decide what should be done, when and how. People are the ultimate decision-making entity for which no machine can achieve even a remote semblance of mimicry. People do exactly what machines cannot do, while machines do rote tasks that people could do, tasks that do not need the unique abilities of people to do them. That’s why we make machines to do these things.

Does this make sense to you?

Now, what is the ONE BEST WAY to reduce the ability of a machine to do its work?

Make to many controls for it, requiring people to “baby-sit” the machine.

What is the ONE BEST WAY to reduce the ability of people to do work?

Place too many controls on them forcing them to focus on the controls rather than the work.

So for machines, the answer is to build the control into the machine so that it can work as close to autonomously as possible.

For people, the answer is to create processes and tools that impose the least amount of control on them so that people can focus on doing the work that only people can do.

The Current Practice Creates Work

In our current process practices more often than not we create work for people to do, work that (oh my, this is where things start getting nitty-gritty) is non value-add to the organization.

I think it helps us to understand this when we realize that our predominant view of “process” and “management” behaves as if we think our organizations fit the definition of a machine. If they did then we would best be served by creating robust process models that are highly prescriptive in nature. People would then provide oversight and maintenance while the “processes” did the majority of any real work.

That mindset produces large, complicated process models – whether they are embedded in software or not. Great effort is expended to cover all manner of issues of concern to the organization in this approach. These issues include cost, profit, risk, compliance, control, quality, etc.

These process models are “locked down,” meaning they are infused with rules and mandates that tightly control any “work” moving through the process. Does this sound familiar?

It sounds like a machine to me.

Yet people need tools, not machines. A tool is something that makes the work people do simpler, easier and more successful – but the person is still the primary work actor.

The really amazing thing is that these “machine like” processes cause a big part of the work that people do in every business and organization – and it’s primarily non value-added work... It’s waste.

The New Frontier

The new process frontier has an entirely different sense to it. The best processes will be those that have the fewest constraints built into them. Processes will be subjected to ongoing evolution that makes them lean with Causes of Work and Points of Failure stripped out of them on a regular basis.

The ideal process is one step. That’s right, one step.

Now we won’t jump to having our processes suddenly all become one step processes. Not all processes (in our current understanding) can evolve to one step - and we are virtually at the other end of the spectrum right now.

What we will see is a dramatic and ongoing effort to bring our processes back from the “quasi-machine” brink to the useful and beneficial tool state. That will occur through the application of CEM.

We have already placed many of the techniques into play that are required to achieve this shift back to the “natural” state processes should be in from the “unnatural” state we have imposed on them.

Specific use techniques have been created to start applying the basic “machine to tool” transformation techniques on processes by identifying and removing Moments of Truth, Break Points and Business Rules from existing processes (IPAPI CPP™ - Optimize).

The techniques required to do the same to processes that are not currently aligned to our customers are now available, again achieving the transformation that empowers people and taps into the 70% to 90% underwater portion of the process optimization iceberg we previously didn’t know was there... while aligning the process to the wants and need of the customer (IPAPI CPP™ - Align).

Pushing out towards the “one step” ideal process state, we can even challenge the basic premise of a process within the larger context of what role it plays in our customers’ lives and how it could be recast into a new form – even a one step form (Best Buy Instant Rebates for example). We have the technique for that now as well (IPAPI CPP™ - Innovate). In some cases this even leads us to eliminating the current product/service process entirely as we move UP the customer value chain.

We’ve Only Just Begun...

We are forging forward into the new frontier, but we have further to go and more discoveries to make. IPAPI has already initiated a Special Interest Group using my Process Maturity Model whitepaper to develop an enterprise model for planning, managing and measuring our journey into this new frontier for example, and there are a number of other areas we need to explore that have already been identified.

It’s an exciting time, a worthy cause, a great mission, and more than anything else – a worthy endeavor.

I hope you have the chance to join us in this journey of process and performance discovery that we have begun...