More Process Less Chaos

A few years ago, I participated in a critical conference call, hosted by the client company’s Program Management Office. It is a call to determine if the project is prepared to go before a Stage Gate Review Board and receive authorization to move to the next phase. Without the Review Board’s approval, the project will not have access to resources from other divisions. And without that support the project will be delayed, beginning a chain reaction leading to missed commitments and ultimately impacting the company’s ability to deliver certain capability to market. All career employees know exactly what this will mean – negative impacts to performance, missed objectives and for the company, potential loss of market leadership and lost revenue.

As the call proceeded it became evident certain prerequisites were missing and the team would not go before the Review Board. And that’s when the call devolved into shouting and finger pointing. As I listened to this unfolding chaos, the strained voices, and the panic, I felt a deep sense of frustration. From previous experience I knew that better process management, and in particular, process automation would have prevented this scenario. 

This situation occurs way too often and can be avoided by rigorous Business Process Management (BPM). Sure the individual project managers and team leads would be held accountable for understanding and executing all processes. And I’m sure there were repercussions in this particular situation. But do we really want to fail and then punish the guilty? If this occurs on your watch, take steps to help your teams be more successful. There are BPM engines that are fully capable of consuming business policy and business rules, and then binding teams to process in such a way that nothing falls through the cracks.

In most mid-sized businesses and larger, there is a significant collection of very complex processes that cover a wide range of activity including: lifecycle, provisioning, deployment, change, and such. Teams are tasked with understanding and executing these processes, some of which may overlap. Most of the time these processes are written narratives that must be carefully parsed and interpreted. The likelihood of this being done accurately and consistently is low.

So my suggestions are:

1. Use Business Process Modeling Notation (BPMN) to capture the narrative. BPMN makes processes visible, highlights stakeholder participation and clarifies roles and responsibility.

2. Use process models as the basis for establishing and tracking progress. It makes it easier for everyone to agree on where you are.

3. As your teams become more comfortable with process models, begin instantiating some of those into applications. Using an automated process engine to orchestrate engagement gives you the ability to bind teams to process.

There’s no reason today, for teams to miss deliverables due to a lack of coordination, or to fail at following key business processes. And there’s no reason to inflict this kind of pain on teams who are doing their best to move the organization forward.

Bottom line: A Program Management Office without mature process management is an invitation to fail.