Category Archives: Process

Accountability, Empowerment, Implementation, Process

Taking a Step Back

Normally in business when we mention the phrase “taking a step back” people immediately think of accepting a position or assignment with a perceived lower title or lower set of responsibilities. That may well be the case, but that is not the step back that I want to discuss here.

In business we all have our areas of responsibility. These normally come in the form of job descriptions and objectives. Simply put these are the things we do and the targets we are supposed to achieve. We are provided directives and incentives associated with them. We are incited to focus only on our specific pieces and parts of the business. With all that focus it is very easy to become somewhat myopic with respect to the overall business or organizational picture.

Sometimes all of us need to take time out of our ever more hectic days, take a step back and look at the overall business picture and what our specific part or role in it is, to see if what we are doing or have done is still fully aligned with the greater good.

As an ever more refined and specific business process is viewed as the clear path to greater efficiency and more profits, the incentive for each participant in that process is the ever refine and narrow their focus to their specific role in that process. As this structure evolves, organizations end up trying to create integrated end to end customer solutions out of ever more discrete and individualized work components. As the number of hand-offs in the process increases, the disconnection between the solution components increases as well.

In the extreme you can end up with a number of disconnected groups performing discrete unrelated activities (all while following a “process”) that results in a final work product that may not meet any of the requirements that were initially assigned to it. Everyone may have done everything that they were responsible for doing, but the final result doesn’t meet the need.

I think that much of today’s process orientation has originated in the Project Management discipline. (I have gone through the Project Management Institute PMP (Project Management Professional) training and certification process and do have a PMP accreditation.)

Part of the process of managing a project is to create what is called a Work Breakdown Structure (WBS). Creating a WBS is the process of subdividing project deliverables and project work into smaller, more manageable components (A Guide to the Project Management Body of Knowledge (PMBOK Guide) 4th Ed., pg. 103). It is described as the decomposition of the work to be executed by the project team to accomplish the project objectives.

But isn’t that essentially what every process is? Isn’t every process a series of work components that at the end of the process are supposed to deliver a finished work product or solution?

So enough of the esoteric discussion of the similarities of projects and processes. Where does this all get us and what does it have to do with the position I have put forth about taking a step back?

In a project there is a project manager. That person is vested with the responsibility of managing that project from end to end. As Harry Truman would say: “The buck stops there”. It is the project manager’s responsibility to make sure that all work components are aligned and additive in the direction required to complete the project.

In today’s organizations where parts are globalized, parts are regionalized and other parts are verticalized, all in the name of greater efficiency, it is almost impossible for someone to call themselves the “owner” of a process that spans multiple organizational structures. Organizations and people within those organizations may own pieces of the process, but there are precious few with the purview of a project manager who can review the process from end to end.

Once the process has been decomposed into its smaller work components, and those components are distributed to different organizations and groups, it seems the overall end to end view of things gets lost. Responsible parties seem to focus only on their specific work component. They perform their task and pass it along to the next responsible group.

It has been shown that when dealing with a uniform process all tolerances or margins for error are more or less normalized out. What that means is that in a uniform environment there will normally be additive and subtractive variances. Estimates will normally be either a little high or a little low, but on the average they will cancel each other out. This is the model that is used when the process is created.

When the process is decomposed into its component functions and then distributed into different and somewhat unrelated organizations, it can no longer be looked upon as a uniform process. It is probably more accurately defined as a “Random Variable” process. This is a process that is not uniform and where the variation in one group performing a work component has no effect on the performance of another group performing a different work component.

Okay, so what does this mean?

What is means is that when a process is no longer uniform the variances associated with the various work components no longer have the tendency to cancel each other out. They have a tendency to add together to create ever larger variances.

The net result is the creation of a process that by its very nature will not deliver a desired solution. Each group that is responsible for a work component can and will provide an acceptable output, but the sum of these outputs will invariably not be an acceptable solution.

A good example of this phenomenon can be seen in the creation of cost structures. In a project that is controlled by a single project manager, some costs will be estimated high, and some will be estimated low, but on the whole the costs will balance out. In a cost process where there is no single owner and multiple groups and disciplines involved, all costs will be estimated high (in an effort to make sure that all individual contingencies are covered) with the final cost estimate being unacceptable to the customer.

As I noted, in a project environment the project manager has oversight and control of the costs and processes associated with the project. Costs and activities must all fit within the overall envelop associated with the project and the project’s profitability. Variances within any specific group are then viewed from the point of the overall project. This ownership and oversight does not usually exist within the decomposed process. It is due to this comparative lack of oversight that a uniform process can devolve into a random variable process over time.

It is due to this sort of inertial force associated with process decomposition that we all need to periodically (read “frequently”) take a step back and review our roles and deliverables. In a greater scheme of things all that we do can be viewed as part of the ongoing business process. There are pieces that we can control and pieces that we must rely on others for. We need to make sure that we are in fact maintaining our alignment with the overall organizational goals and not just maximizing our specific work products.

It may sound a little counter intuitive. The idea should be that if we all maximize our work products, then the final deliverable should be maximized. In theory it should work. However when the goal is to minimize, or reduce or drive greater efficiency, sometimes maximizing does not work as well or drive the desired solution.

Take a step back and think about it.

Decisions, Process, Simplification, Strategy

Cartoons and Strategy

My son was being abnormally quiet the other day. Actually he was being quiet with periodic outbursts of laughter. This is not the normal state of affairs. For those of you with teenage boys you also probably know this to be the case. There is normally an ongoing chatter followed by screams of either anguish or happiness depending on who was most recently vanquished in the current on-line military game being played. I won’t mention which one. They all seem the same to me. We have all seen the commercials on television.

It was so odd to hear him in this mode that I did the unthinkable. I went upstairs to the game room to check on him. He wasn’t wearing his gaming headset. He wasn’t even on the internet. He was watching the Roadrunner and Coyote (more specifically Wile E. Coyote for those fellow purists like me) cartoons. I remembered watching these cartoons when I was young. It was amazing to me that they were still on. He had stumbled across them on a network that only played old cartoons; surprisingly enough called the “Classic Cartoon Network”.

Being of sound mind and body, a guy, and having cartoons on the television, I did the only logical thing. I went in, sat down and watched old cartoons with my son. Some of them I remembered and some I didn’t. It was fun to hang out with my son, but as usual, it got me to thinking. The humorous aspect of the Roadrunner and Coyote cartoons was based on the simplicity of the task at hand; catching the Roadrunner, and the ever more complex slate of strategies employed by the Coyote in his attempts to complete the task.

Leave it to me to compare perfectly good classic cartoons to business. It’s an insult to the cartoons.

Sometimes his failures came from obvious, predictable and expected issues. Sometimes they came from unexpected directions. They were all entertaining. The Coyote’s single mindedness regarding catching the Roadrunner always made me smile.

I always wondered, if he could actually buy, build and fly his own ACME rocket, why didn’t he just use that same intelligence to order take-out from his favorite restaurant, or switch to chicken, which might have been an admirable substitute for Roadrunner and bought some at the grocery store? It probably would have saved him a great deal of wear and tear from all the falling off of cliffs and having large rocks fall on him.

Undaunted by each successive failure, the Coyote would generate a new strategy to capture the Roadrunner. Each new strategy would invariably contain maps and charts and plans on what to do and where to do it. Each new strategy was usually also more complex and more intricate than the last, but was guaranteed to work this time. They never did.

What Wile E. Coyote Inc. teaches us about strategy is something we all probably recognize but occasionally need to be reminded of: Simpler is better. This obviously applies to other business strategy as well.

A good strategy has only a few major attributes. I’ll try and go through at least my opinion of them, just as a refresher course.

First: The goal must be achievable.

On the surface one would think that catching a Roadrunner should be an attainable goal. It probably was, but it was how the Coyote went about it that was entertaining.

As a corollary it’s also okay to want to double or triple in size as a business. It may also on the surface appear to be an attainable goal but the question that should always be asked is: What is going to fundamentally change in the business that is going to enable, or even drive this kind of growth? Everybody else in the market wants to grow too, and they also have strategies. You need to have a very solid and strong precept that makes you different.

Second: The strategy must be simple.

Rube Goldberg is a name that is synonymous with creating very complex machines to achieve very simple goals. He also appears to have been the chief strategist for Coyote Inc. in its desire to overtake Roadrunner Inc. There is even an annual competition in his name where a simple task must be accomplished in no less than twenty different steps. The 2015 objective was to “shine a shoe”, and due to the complexity of some of the past entries (with over two hundred steps) the contest has been limited to a maximum of seventy five steps.

In business the goal should be to shine the shoe. Find the shoe, apply the polish and buff till the desired luster is achieved. That’s it. As the Coyote taught us, the more complex the strategy, the greater the chance there was for something to go wrong.

Third: No strategy survives contact with the real world intact.

This is a paraphrasing of the original quote:
“…no plan of operations extends with any certainty beyond the first contact with the main hostile force.”
Field Marshall Helmuth Karl Bernhard Graf von Moltke (The Elder)

Now for those of you who are not up on your nineteenth century Prussian military history, Moltke was the Prussian military commander during the middle part of the century, and he wrote this in his book “On Strategy” in 1871.

Again we look to Coyote Inc. for examples of what not to do here. He would usually achieve one of the attributes he was striving for in his quest to get the Roadrunner. With the help of his trusty ACME rocket he could achieve the speed of the Roadrunner. He would close in only to see the Roadrunner demonstrate his ability to stop before running off a cliff, or turn sharply before running into a cliff. The Coyote with his ACME rocket usually would not be able to match this agility and maneuverability, with the (now) expected results.

The very act of implementing his strategy caused a change in the behavior of his target. Coyote Inc. was able to go as fast as Roadrunner Inc., so Roadrunner Inc. learned to stop or turn quickly in order to elude its pursuer. The same goes in business. Things change. The competition will react to competitive behavioral changes. Customers will do the same. You had better be able to learn how to change direction quickly.

The idea is to be ready for it. The simpler the strategy means there are fewer moving parts in it. The fewer the moving parts means the fewer number of things that can go wrong, which in turn means the fewer the number of things that will need to be modified as conditions in the market change. This is especially useful when it comes time to change direction because a cliff suddenly appears in front of you.

Keeping goals attainable, strategies and the number of contributing components simple, and preparing change direction as the conditions warrant seems to be enough for any business. It is the complexity that is introduced into the plan that is usually the cause of issues. When it comes to strategy and its components, I am a firm believer in the adage that “Less is more”.

It was an enjoyable time with my son watching old cartoons. It didn’t last nearly long enough. It seemed in no time he had his headset back on and was busy wiping out whichever opponent was on line at the time. I on the other hand was ready to impart all of these strategy and strategic insights that I had drawn from the Coyote’s obviously poor performance to him. He didn’t seem very interested.

I really didn’t expect him too, but still it was mildly disappointing after sharing a solid thirty minutes of quality time as we did. Still the cartoons stuck in my mind and the basic tenets about strategy were there. I suppose if Wile E. Coyote Inc. had actually employed the simple and straightforward strategies it should have in its quest to overtake Roadrunner Inc. the cartoons would have been much shorter, and probably not nearly as funny.

And I probably wouldn’t have gotten to spend some extra time with my son.

Goals, Leadership, Process

Goals and Processes

Whenever I find myself casting around for a topic to write about, I seem to always migrate toward one of my favorite conundrums: Goals and Processes. Is it goals that drive business processes, or is it processes that enable business goals? Because I have a little time, I think that I’ll go ahead and address this one some more.

Almost everything I see and read these days on this topic seems to be focused on the Process side of this question. It is interesting how the focus and primacy of management ideas and structures ebb and flow over time. In the past it did not seem to be such a Process focused set of business literature. I guess William Deming was one of the first to work in this area, and he did some ground breaking work. Having a Process focus is good from a predictability and repeatability point of view. Businesses like a predictable and repeatable outcome.

A good business process is like a security blanket. If you don’t know what to do, you can fall back on the process and hopefully expect to end up relatively close to where you were aiming to be at the end. Having a process reduces the risk and can remove uncertainty from the business.

At the risk of sounding like some sort of business contrarian I need to openly admit that I do not particularly ascribe to this way of leadership or business thinking.

For me an over reliance on process removes the value of people from the equation. They don’t Plan-Do-Study-Act as Deming said, they just follow the process. If they are following an industry “best practice” they probably are not even encouraged to think. They are part of a production line-like process. This seems to promote a very risk averse position for people. They can’t be wrong if they are following the process, and if they are wrong it is the processes fault not theirs.

I think a process is an extremely efficient and effective way to codify something that you have already done. That means that some way, somehow somewhere someone has already achieved the goal, and that the process has become the documented method that they used to achieve it. If you have been successful in manufacturing the first widget, then a production line process for all subsequent similar widgets would be called for.

When Sir Edmund Hillary climbed Mount Everest, there was no known process associated for a successful summiting attempt. People had been attempting the summit since 1921, but it was not until 1953 that is was actually accomplished. It was only after he was successful that the process of creating a series of ever higher camps, and the selection of which specific routes provided the greatest probability of success started to coalesce. In fact it has now evolved to a situation where the process for climbing Everest is so well defined that even novice non-climbers are now being taken up the mountain escorted by seasoned mountain climbing guides.

I think the cost for the Everest “guided expedition” is approximately sixty five thousand dollars ($65,000) and takes several months to prepare and execute.

I think this is a little bit of hyperbole, but it does illustrate my point. It took more than thirty years to achieve the goal. There was no defined process that anyone could fall back on. Every attempt was breaking new ground. We also need to recognize that just because there is a process does not guarantee that each climb will be successful.

To date there have been about eleven thousand (11,000) expedition attempts to summit Everest, with the vast majority of them since the year 2000. This would indicate that the process is reasonably well defined. However there have only been three thousand (3,000) expeditions that have ended in success. These successful expeditions resulted in only approximately five thousand (5,000) individuals that have actually stood on the summit.

In the mean time it should also be noted that more than 260 people have died while trying to climb Everest. That means that for every 20 individuals that succeeded in climbing Everest, 1 paid the ultimate price.

Thank goodness for the internet and Wikipedia. Where else can you get facts and statistics like that so easily?

So, what does all this have to do with the discussion of Goals and Processes in business? As I said, I think it illustrates several points:

First, if something has never been done before, there is probably no defined process available for doing it. People knew the process for climbing mountains. They had been doing it for years. It took more than thirty years and many unsuccessful attempts before they climbed Everest. They ended up creating a new process in order to do it. If you are trying to do something in business that has been done before, you had better come up with a faster, better cheaper way of doing, otherwise being the second successful one probably won’t get you too much.

Second, it was not the “process” of climbing Everest that captured people’s imaginations. It was the “goal” of climbing Everest that did. It is difficult to get people committed to a process. It is far easier to get them committed to a goal. The same goes in business. It is the goal that drives people to succeed, not the following of a process.

Third, just because you have a process that has proven to be successful in the past does not mean that it will continue deliver success every time. Less than a third of the expeditions attempting Everest are successful. Even well defined processes can fall victim to external environmental issues or potential team issues from within. Expecting to follow a process to get you to a goal without being prepared to deal with the unexpected or unforeseen enhances the probability of not being successful.

Fourth, even if only one or two out of the entire expedition actually get to the top of Everest, the entire expedition is considered a success. The goal is to get someone from the expedition on top of the mountain. If the goal was to get everyone to the top of the mountain, no expedition would be considered a success, and we would still be searching for the process to do it. The idea is to make sure that success is clearly defined and that everyone can participate in it.

I think it is reasonably apparent that it is goals that inspire people and it is the attainment of those goals that most people are measured against. Processes are good in that they provide a guideline on how to go about achieving the goal. But just like the weather on Everest, or the makeup and capabilities of the team attempting the summit, there are always variables associated with achieving the goal that cannot be accounted for in the process.

Processes are at their best and most useful when they are simple and allow for variances based on the environment surrounding the goal. It is only in the most repetitive of manufacturing production lines that a process can be fully relied upon, and even then it is subject to the vagaries of the humans doing the work.

As an example of this I would point to automobiles. They are produced primarily in a production line; however the quality of some cars can vary significantly. They are all produced by the same process, but some are acknowledged to be significantly worse than others. Hence the concept of getting a “lemon”, and the creation of “lemon laws” to protect the consumers unfortunate enough to have purchased one of “those cars”.

Business is lead and inspired through the use of goals. Processes can be of assistance in attaining those goals, but it is the goal and the measurement of progress against that goal that is important in generating progress. It is when business supplants goals with processes as its primary focus that the business will start to lose its way.

Achievement, Creativity, Leadership, Process

Stop Using Best Practices

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Businesses, like just about everything else, are always looking for the best way to do things. Businesses also like predictability. They like to know what the response or result will be to any specific action that may be taken. It is because of these drives and desires that when something is dubbed a “Best Practice” all businesses seem to flock towards it. While on the surface this has all the appearances of a good thing, in reality I think it has a tendency to hold businesses back.

I think the idea of “Best Practices” is a business construct created by consultants to position themselves as invaluable to the progress and evolution of business. In other words, it was created so someone could get paid for it. This would be similar to a music critic who tried to position Justin Bieber as invaluable to the progress and evolution of music. I guess you truly have to be a “Belieber” to buy into either of them. I also do not know of any music critic that would propose such a thing, and still be allowed to retain their music critic membership card, or music critic certification, or music critic secret decoder ring or whatever it is that allows them to be accepted as some sort of music critic. Even so, there are people who are actually “Beliebers”, and there are also businesses that buy into the idea of best practices.

Personally I am a Jazz and Alternative Rock kind of guy. I guess this musical preference may also indicate why I am more attracted to the more original and less formulaic ways of doing things.

I am concerned that when someone claims that they have developed a “Best Practice” that they are inferentially removing the possibility that there may be some other different or better way of doing things. After all, what can be better than a best practice? An even better than best practice? A new and improved best practice? This also brings up the question to me of: who gets to declare something a “Best Practice”? How do they know that their “best practice” is better than anything else, including those methods that may not have even been tried yet? My view is that they don’t.

I seem to have gotten off into musical allegories here, so I guess I will try and continue in that vein. Just because John Phillip Souza may have developed what some music critics now consider to be the very best practice when it comes to the genre of music that is known as “Marches” does not mean that he has developed a best practice for music, or marching bands for that matter. In fact as I sit here the idea of people who march to the beat of a different drummer continues to work its way into my consciousness. To take this idea even a step further, I think I remember watching a college football game on television last year where at half time the band actually played a heavy metal song by the band Metallica, instead of a Souza march. As I recall it got quite an ovation from the crowd.

I think any business that aspires to something other than their own optimal performance is limiting themselves. The idea here is that optimal performance is a moving target. As times, competition and conditions change, so will the optimal performance target. I think this will be the case, as in a different case, for each individual business. It is the differences and the different approaches to their optimal practices that generate differentiation, and competitive advantages for businesses in the market.

Best practice has a tendency to be thought of as a process, or a way of doing things. The idea being that if you do things in the best way possible, you should end up with the best possible result. Herein lays the issue with best practices for me.

Any process that is deemed to be best without first comparing and adapting it to both the existing business environment and the known and desired goals will probably not work. For me the definition of a best practice is the process that will get the business from where it currently is to the goals that it has set for itself the fastest, least expensively and the most efficient way possible. Notice how the best practice is dependent on both the starting point and the desired end state.

There are many purveyors of the best practice solution who would posit that this is not the case. They would say that the proper system is to change the business to adapt to a known process. This sounds suspiciously to me that a consultant (or the equivalent) has generated some sort of process that if rigorously followed should generate a positive result. Instead of going through the effort of adapting the “Best Practice” to the current or new business environment, it is positioned that the environment must be changed or adapted to the process.

Wait a minute. How is that again?

That to me would be the equivalent of deciding on a time signature (beat) and a chord progression in music and then stating that all successful songs will need to follow that guideline. Classical music, waltzes, polkas, pop, rock, jazz, bluegrass, etc, etc, will not all fit into this best practice guideline. It is the creativity and ingenuity of the musician who takes their knowledge of music and generates a new song that determines how successful they will be. If there truly was a best practice in music that was to be followed, all songs would sound monotonously similar.

Just as it is with the creativity and ingenuity of business leader who takes their knowledge of the components of the business and combines them in a new way that creates a new more efficient business model or (gulp) practice.

Too many times it seems that businesses want to look at their practices and processes in isolation of the goals and objectives. As a would-be musician I practice in order to maintain my current (low) level of musical proficiency, and to hopefully improve. My goal is to play as well in the Jazz band as I do when I practice. I find that each time I perform with the Jazz band, by the very nature of having others in the band who I interact with during the performance, each performance is different from how I practice.

Sometimes it is better, and sometimes I wish I was better. It is the difference between having proficiency and trying to apply a best practice. It is the performance that counts, not the practice.

Driving an adherence to the idea of implementing an existing and defined best practice will stifle the creative ability of leaders to try and evolve and create new models for the business. The constraint of trying to change and to fit the business to the defined process limits the ability of the leader to define a new way or new direction, and the business’s ability to adapt to the changes in its environment. They will be locked into trying to recreate something that may have worked in the past practice, but may not fit with the current members of the business and the performance that they are being asked to give.

In music you look for people who have capability and proficiency, and can combine their talents with others to make the music. In business I don’t think that adherence to a best practice can be a substitute for capability and proficiency, and it may in fact hinder a business’s ability to change and adapt, especially when the music changes.

Planning, Process, Product Life Cycle, Tools

Swiss Army Knives

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I remember when I was a kid that one of the things that I really, really wanted was a Swiss Army Knife. I liked the idea of having a one size fits all kind of knife. If I wanted to whittle something I would have a small knife blade that I could fold out and whittle with. Likewise if I wanted to saw something I could fold out the saw blade and start sawing. The fact that it was a three inch blade with a non-locking mechanism wouldn’t stop me. If there was a two by four that needed some sawing on it I would be ready.

The same could be said for cork screw despite the fact that it would be more than a decade before I would be old enough to drink wine, however if my mom needed any help I would stand ready. There were also blade and Phillips head screw drivers for all the things I would build or repair while in the wilderness, awls for working the leather I would take with me camping, tweezers for removing all the splinters I would amass while roughing it and even a smaller back-up knife blade in case I broke the first one from too much use while in the woods whittling.

In short I guess it could be said that the Swiss Army Knife could do just about anything. This idea of being able to do just about anything had a significant coolness factor. The kid who had the knife that could do the most things that he would never use it for was obviously the coolest kid.

I have grown older (I don’t know of anyone who would be so foolish as to say that I have grown up) and I no longer have the same affinity for Swiss Army Knives that I did when I was younger. Like most guys I am now preoccupied with the number of functions that my favorite Multi-Tool can perform, that I will never use. The primary difference between then and now is that I can now afford a far more complex Multi-Tool than I could ever afford Swiss Army Knife then.

So what has all this got to do with business? Good question.

Reminiscing about my favorite old Swiss Army Knife got me to thinking about optimization for purpose and use. Those knives (and today’s Multi-Tools) are capable of doing just about everything. The problem is that they are not optimized, or really good at anything. The knife blade can be used to whittle, the screw drivers can drive screws, I wouldn’t know about the awl for working leather as I never had the opportunity to really try it, and the corkscrew will in fact remove a cork from a wine bottle. The problem is that it really doesn’t do any of those things very well. The functions are all there, but they are not optimized for their respective applications.

In business it is not about being able to do everything. It is about being the very best at what you do. You usually don’t ask your Finance and Accounting people to go out and sell your good or service. Marketers normally can’t count well enough to have them keep the business’ books. Sales people aren’t normally any good at anything else other than sales. You don’t ask people to do something that they may be able to do, but that they are not at their best at.

This is the same principle that governs the applicability of Swiss Army Knives in functional applications. Professional mechanics do not use them to work on engines. If they need a screw tightened they go and get the appropriate and specific screw driver that meets their specific need. Have you ever looked in the hardware store at the number of different types of screw drivers that there are? There is a reason for that. Each one is optimized for a specific screw tightening application.

My wife has never ever asked me for, nor asked me to buy her a Swiss Army Knife or Multi-Tool with a cork screw so she could open a bottle of wine. In fact I think she has at least two designer cork screws, one of which has an electric motor, whose sole purpose for existence is to only remove corks from wine bottles as quickly and stylishly as possible. The fact that a Swiss Army Knife or Multi-Tool could do so much more than just opening the wine seems to hold no allure to her.

This optimization for purpose and use should be applied throughout the business. Products should focus on being the best at what they are used for. Look at the screw driver example I used before. I’ll also illustrate this precept by using a hi-tech example from my past. I worked for a company that essentially made a chassis that would house a variety of application specific boards and blades (sounds like a Swiss Army Knife). Each blade was optimized for a specific application, and there were a lot of them to choose from.

Customers said that the number of different application blades could be confusing and suggested that the company undertake the development of a “universal” blade that would enable the customers to do several different applications instead of the usually capable and provisioned one. The universal blade came out … and it was a failure.

The resulting universal blade was much more complex, much more expensive and less functional on every application that it addressed even though it addressed far more applications than the single blade – single application counterparts. In short it could do just about everything, but it couldn’t do anything as well as each of the specific application blades could do it, and due to its complexity it was much more expensive to boot. Less optimized and more expensive is not a good business proposition for success.

The same would go for business processes. Processes are supposed to be a simplified, streamlined, consistent way of doing things that will optimize your efficiency. However when you try to create the “universal” process, much like the universal application blade, they end up not being optimized for anything and hence reduce efficiency in everything.

As an example, suppose you are addressing two markets, the North and South Poles. On the surface both are similar in that they are cold and have snow. But the North Pole is populated by Santa’s elves and they are primarily interested in candy and toys. The South Pole is populated by penguins who are primarily interested in fish and not being eaten by sea lions.

If you were to create a global process that addresses the needs of both the North Pole and South Pole markets it would have to take into account the specific and disparate needs associated with serving both elves and penguins. By the very nature of your markets at least half (and probably more) of your process would not be applicable to one or the other market. If you were to complicate things further by adding third market, say the Himalayas (again cold with snow) you would then have to add the processes associated with serving the populations of Sherpa and Yetis in the area. As we all know Sherpa are primarily interested in climbing and Yeti are primarily interested in leaving foot prints and not being seen.

Sherpa and Yeti, elves and penguins all live in similar markets (cold and snow) but I don’t think that a universal process can be put together to efficiently address each of these markets’ specific needs. It would seem to be much more efficient to create and optimize a process for use in each specific area.

Business is about addressing specific markets and even more specifically, specific customers and their specific needs. The better that you can do that, the better your chances of success both with that customer and in that market. Swiss Army knives and Multi-Tools are cool, but people, and customers, who have a specific need are not looking for all the other functionality that comes with the more complicated or diverse solution. When you start to hear the siren song of the universal product or the universal process it may be best to emulate Odysseus and find a way to maintain your direction and focus on the optimization for purpose and use that your customer really wants, and that has been the cornerstone of business success.

Humor, Priorities, Process, Task Completion

White Boards

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There have been a lot of great inventions that I have tried to take advantage over time. A great example of invention progression is the evolution from cassette tapes to audio CDs to MP3 players. It used to be an effort to take your music with you on a trip. Now without a second thought I can bring it along in my smart phone, stick in my ear buds and try to ignore the large guy next to me who is staking claim to take half of my seat in addition to his on the plane while he snores and drools on my shoulder. In business the advent of voicemail, email and PCs has had the beneficial effect of removing both time and distance from the business environment. While I have had cause in the past to point out how these advancements may have been abused or used in ways that they were not intended, they have by and large been beneficial to business. What I want to discuss now is an invention that in my opinion has far outstripped any of them in its importance to business, at least for me – the whiteboard.

The whiteboard is the product of its own technological evolution. It appears to have started out in the open air conference areas of Egypt a few thousand years ago as a granite slab, a hammer and a chisel. During the meeting when you wanted to write something down you chiseled it into the granite. This worked great until you filled up the slab. Erasing was problematic, so you just went and got another slab. This had a tendency to slow ancient Egyptian business meetings down.

Millennia passed and the granite slab was eventually replaced by a sheet of black slate. The writing substrate was still rock based; but it was much more easily erasable and you were much more efficient in that you didn’t need as much of it. The hammer and chisel were likewise replaced by white chalk. This new technology worked so well that blackboards and chalk were placed in almost every school room in the world. These blackboards were heavy, expensive and caused students to try and suck up to teachers by offering to rid the erasers of excess chalk dust outside during recess. Then came colored chalk. While this improved artistic license it did not improve the bottom line.

Black slate boards then gave way to pressed particle boards and chipboards with some sort of sprayed on green, semi-erasable covering. The green boards did not seem to erase quite as cleanly as slate boards, and they still used chalk but the boards were not nearly as heavy and expensive. The expensive, heavy slate chalkboards were then recycled into heavy expensive slate roof shingles which were then used for the roofs of expensive houses. There may be some moral to that story but I can’t quite figure it out. Green boards not only appeared in schools they also started appearing in conference rooms.

Business executives were still not happy in that most of them had a difficult time translating the ideas and information that were expressed with light colored chalk on a dark colored board into ideas and information that they would write as dark colored ink on a white sheet of paper. This light to dark thing seemed to cause a great deal of consternation in the management ranks. The solution to this problem was either to change all business over to using dark paper and pens that wrote in white ink so that the ideas and information would not have to suffer through this color inversion conversion, or create a white surface board for people to write on in the first place. I still believe that we would all be writing on black or green paper with white ink if they had been able to figure out how to mimeograph and photocopy on to dark paper.

The first whiteboards were actually sheets of steel with a white porcelain coating. It was found that the porcelain was so non-porous that it would not absorb any of the ink used to write on it. This allowed it to be erased perfectly clean. Because steel and porcelain were again found to be too heavy and too expensive and probably too efficient, new old substrates such as particleboard and chip board were quickly substituted for the steel sheet and other white, more porous coatings were substituted for porcelain. The fact that these new coatings would partially absorb permanent ink which in time would eventually render them useless seems to have been lost on everyone. These are the ubiquitous whiteboards that we have today.

I am a huge fan of the whiteboard. I have not one, but two of them in my office. I would have more if I could but the corporate facilities drones have told me that would be showy, presumptuous and far above what they consider my current station in the organization. I have thought about scavenging another white board from some other empty office or conference room but my “To Do” list has not yet exceeded its current two whiteboard limit, and I am not that desperate.

I keep an ongoing list and record of the issues, topics, ideas, customers, etc. that I must address on my white boards. This way whenever I have the opportunity to look up I can reassure myself that I have prioritized what needs to get done, and which topic is next to be addressed. As issues are solved they are erased, sort of, since today’s whiteboard coating are now semi-absorbent, and as new items come up I can add them in.

To the casual observer coming into my office, my white boards are impressive. They are covered with cryptic topics and diagrams, all of which are color coded in association with whichever of my multitude of dry erase pens was functional enough to leave a legible image on the whiteboard at the last eureka moment in time where I identified a topic or requirement that I would need to note in order for it to be prioritized and addressed. Some of the topics have been there for a while, meaning they are either immutable / unsolvable issues, or are of such a low priority that I never seem to be able to get around to fixing them. Some are as recent as my last ad-hoc discussion on issues facing the business this week.

I have commented in the past that it is well documented that work expands to fill available time (Parkinson’s Law, C. Northcote Parkinson). Likewise I have had people comment that it appears the number of issues and the size of the writing on my whiteboard seems to increase in proportion to the available room for topics on the whiteboard. The more I think about this the more I am inclined to review it. If this is indeed an accurate white board corollary to Parkinson’s Law, I have an empirical test that I think I will try.

Instead of adding another white board to the brace of them that I currently have, I may actually remove one of them. If the whiteboard corollary to Parkinson’s Law is correct and issues expand to fill available space on a white board, then by removing a whiteboard I should reduce the number of issues I have to deal with. If I take this to the logical extreme and remove both white boards, I should hit the point of optimal performance. Since I will have no white board space where I can write down and capture the issues that I need to deal with, I should therefore have no issues deal with.

Maybe I won’t try that one after all.

What I have found is that I do some of my best work when I am animated. I think many others do too. It is difficult to be animated and to continuously produce quality work when you are sedentarily sitting at a desk and staring at a screen. When I work and even as I write this article, I periodically feel the urge to get up and move around if for no other reason than to become active. Having a whiteboard around allows me to capture topics and ideas during these active times.

Several millennia from now when the future equivalent of today’s Egyptologists are excavating the ruins of my office they too will be trying to decipher the hieroglyphic remnants of the messages that remain on the whiteboards. The difference will be that where we had only one layer of carvings on granite to try and understand the topics and priorities of the ancient Egypt
ians, they will have innumerable partially erased layers of permanent ink on semi-porous whiteboards to try and piece through with us. These future archeologists may also wonder why we created these multistory mausoleums that we inhabit today, where the crypts on each floor were so densely packed. They may also wonder why the walls in each crypt didn’t extend all the way up to the ceiling and we put the whiteboards on the inside of each crypt; when the ancient Egyptians only created the pyramids with walls of stone for their hieroglyphics.

Some might say that we have come a long way.

Activities, Process, Process Management

Process

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If there is one word that should strike fear in the heart of business leaders it should be the word “process”. Please don’t get me wrong. I understand the need for and support the idea of some form and amount of standardization of business conduct. There are efficiencies that can be gained. A certain amount of uniformity of methodology will remove customer variability and should improve satisfaction. I get it. But as the old saying goes: Too much of a good thing is bad, and process is no exception.



Simply put processes are defined as a sequence of events. They are a model of the flow of how things should be done in an optimum environment. The idea being that by establishing a process for an aspect of a business you will remove unwanted variance from the way the business operates. Reduced variance should mean more consistent performance and increased efficiency in the business. Consistent performance and increased efficiencies should lead to more satisfied customers and more profitable operation. What’s not to like about that?



Process was initially introduced into the manufacturing or production environment, where the variation in the end product produced was an undesirable outcome. The idea was to assure that each product was manufactured the same way with a resulting uniformity in the output. This uniformity of output or outcomes seems to be the driving force behind the drive to apply process science to non-production oriented business functions.



If a little bit of process formalization delivers significant returns, then a full scale push toward total business process formalization should be the answer to all our business needs, right?  This direction leads you down the path toward higher order, more complex controls and processes, and as many of the old maps would indicate about uncharted territory, “here there be danger”. The problem is that as the process gets more complex in its efforts to be more broadly applicable, it becomes more cumbersome to document, follow and apply. This necessitates a greater process staff whose task it is it to marshal the process to assure that it is being followed.



By creating a process staff you are now introducing another drag on the business. The process staff is not focused on achieving the goal. They are focused on how you go about achieving the goal. Incremental staff associated with documenting and implementing the process means incremental costs that must now also be offset by additional process efficiencies before the business improvement driven by the process can contribute in a positive manner to the business performance. We now find ourselves in the position where the law of decreasing returns comes into play. The more we depend on the process for improvement, the more people we must have to support the process. The more people we have supporting the process the more improvement the process must provide in order to overcome the incremental costs associated with the increased number of people supporting the process.



Circular logic now ensues. The process gets bigger trying to drive more savings. More people are required to sustain the process. The process has to get even bigger to cover the extra costs of the incremental people.



The major issue that I have with processes is that as they evolve and grow and become bigger, more complex and more all encompassing, they have a tendency to become too focused on how things are being done and seem to lose their focus on the objective of what is being done.  Business is about getting things done. If you can get more things done, and done right than your competitor you should have a competitive advantage. When you start to expend increasingly greater amounts of resources on how you should get things done as opposed to the quantity of resources focused on actually getting things done you have probably hit the point of decreasing returns for your process investment.



The idea of process and process refinement came about when the market was primarily involved in a production and production worker environment. As we have evolved into a knowledge and knowledge worker environment we still seem to be increasingly focused on formulating and formalizing the way we want our knowledge workers to work. We are in effect trying to dictate the way our knowledge workers use their knowledge. This also seems fundamentally flawed to me.



Henry Ford ushered in the mass production process when he stated anyone could have a car in any color they wanted, as long as it was black. He built the ultimate no variability process. He built black model A’s. And that worked for a while. Mass production gave way to mass customization in the manufacturing environment. At one point not too very long ago you could buy any combination of features and colors on just about any car model you wanted.



 It was during this period that a number of car companies started going out of business as their processes, amongst other issues had become too cumbersome to be profitable. The process that worked well for the simple did not hold up as well for the multiplicity of options or the complex. And so the pendulum began to swing back toward far fewer and more simple groups of options or option packages, in order to reduce option complexity. This seems to be the current status of the production process in the automotive industry.



It appears that knowledge worker processes are still going through the “mass customization” stage of application. It seems that the processes themselves are becoming more complex in an effort to address the multiplicity of variables that are present in the knowledge worker environment. We are creeping ever closer to potentially strangling ourselves with the very processes that we hoped would be our profitability generating salvation.



Processes need to provide guidelines on how to deal with the known as well as unknown in business. They need to have enough specificity to provide direction, but also need to allow those that are working within them the ability to vary and adapt them to the changing needs of the customer, company and environment. One size process cannot fit all unless it is so big and so complex as to be able to handle all variables present in the business. Why would you want to build a process, or a model of how you are to conduct business that is as complicated as the real business is? Processes are supposed to simplify things, not mirror their complexity.



We need to keep our processes simple, the staffs associated with them minimal, and allow enough flexibility so that those operating within the process can react and adapt to new situations. Trying to expand the process to work in every instance of business inevitably leads to increased complexity and decreased returns for the effort.

Metrics, Operations, Process

Watch the Operational Metrics

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Mark Twain said “There are lies, damned lies,…and then there are statistics.” In some instances he could have just as easily been talking about metrics.


We all understand the need for metrics when it comes to running a business. If you can’t keep score, how do you know if you are winning or losing? Just remember when you start basing compensation on these metrics that it is changing the game that is being played.


Here is a good case in point. A business I knew was running in the red. A look at the product prices (and costs) showed that it was almost 20% more expensive than the competition on a cost basis. However, based on the operational metrics they were running at the peak of efficiency (99+% on the production yield targets). How could this be?


A deeper dive into the metrics showed that over time the production yield targets had been lowered (to an 86% yield target!) so that the operational team could maximize their goal attainment and incentive compensation. They were actually achieving 99+% of an 86% target.  The rest of the market was attaining true 99+% production yields. The incremental 14% disadvantage in production efficiency was the root cause of the product cost differential in the market.


Over time it had become easier for the operation to change the metric that it was measured (and paid) on, than it was to improve the process. This is obviously an extreme case, and it was a metric “creep” that had occurred over many years. But it does point out how a metric can affect how you look at a business’s performance. You can go from looking seriously at exiting a business because it is thought that it could not effectively compete, to looking at the root cause of the issue: how do you make the business more efficient and continue to compete.