BPM* hypocrisy

From Stilgherrian’s post: The tyranny of the ideal:

1. Design idealised processes, safely away from the people doing the work. You are the consultant, you know best.
2. Idealised processes make great flowcharts to present to the board (the people paying your fees) – especially when you remove the messiness that is humanity. Yuck.
3. Implement the process. They, the people doing the work, will take it (or leave). More importantly, they will go on doing what is required to keep the business going, regardless of the process anyway. The ingrates.
4. So what’s the point of your beautiful process? Ah, here be the secret grasshopper… when something goes wrong, your rules become the ideal scapegoating device. And it can help you cut some staffing costs too.

On a slightly more serious note, there is a real need to design processes that embraces the messiness of being human. Rules alone will never truly modify behaviours – it takes belief and buy-in. Which is engendered from respect and listening to begin with.

When was the last time your process consultant say down with the little people on the front line? They should be spending more time down in the trenches than in the boardroom with you!

* BPM: Business process management. I need to stay current with my acronyms. Apparently this is the new name for BPR, R for Reengineering.

2 comments on “BPM* hypocrisy”

1. Stilgherrian said:
   

   Zern, you say:

   When was the last time your process consultant sat down with the little people on the front line? They should be spending more time down in the trenches than in the boardroom with you!

   While I was contracted to a Major Australian Financial Services Organisation, an unrelated change happened: they introduced The Big New Application for the customer service droids taking inbound calls. It has just been completed, and the first team leaders were being trained.

   In the very first session, one of the team leaders asked, “The most common call we get is about X and how it relates to Y. How do we deal with that?”

   A long silence followed.

   Yes, that’s right, no-one had bothered asking end users what actually happened in their job. And no-one had involved them in testing. Everything had been created from an idealised workflow — which simply didn’t exist in the real world.

   [P.S. No, you don't need to stay current with your acronyms. You should only mention then sarcastically and expose them for the BS that they are.]

   
   13 September 2007 at 5:57 pm
2. Zern said:
   

   “I need to stay current with my acronyms” was meant sarcastically

   
   14 September 2007 at 5:58 am

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