Managing Sideways Has Its Upside
BY JOHN A. UZZI and RICHARD W. CRONEN
In today’s workplace, change is constant. Competition has expanded,
the marketplace is more global, technology more prevalent and customer
expectations are more demanding. As New York Yankee great Yogi Berra once
said, “The future ain’t what it used to be.”
The most prevalent organizational structure in use today, “The Scientific
Model,” was established during the Industrial Age. The key to its
success was based upon the ability to control all aspects of work, with
problem solving the sole domain of management.
However, we have moved beyond the Industrial Age into the Information
Age, and we know that work is accomplished through a series of linked
processes, where customer service, flexibility and cost containment have
replaced volume as the high watermark for success. The tools of e-business
and the Internet dramatically alter how we view work and what clients
and staff expect.
Yet it is not enough to have a brilliant technological solution or to
be process-focused if the critical change elements in your organization
are not aligned to support your organization’s initiatives. The following
three elements need to be engaged and work simultaneously to ensure your
organization’s success:
Work processes. These are linked activities designed to add value on behalf
of the customer. The goal is to improve business, management and administrative
processes that run through the organization, and minimize the negative
impacts of “white space” between organizational silos.
This approach provides organizations with a competitive advantage to help
contain costs, improve productivity and increase the efficiency of your
processes through expanded coordination, effective data management and
system-wide process modifications that will allow your organization to
be focused upon the future.
Process management should be concerned with handoffs, boundaries, inputs
and outputs, products/services, re-design issues, etc., that may affect
customers, upstream/downstream processes, critical processes, sub-processes,
suppliers/vendors, concurrent task teams, roles and responsibilities,
and communication/coordination plans.
System. This refers to the infrastructure for maintaining the overall
organization. They are the policies and procedures, and the sum of all
the processes used to carry out specific functions.
Organizations need to assess and build the mechanisms so the system’s
policies, procedures, regulations, etc., support the efforts of the people
who work to achieve the organization’s goals. This requires an ability
to build systems that are future-oriented.
Organizational systems are often a tool designed for the present, but
based upon experiences. Systems should be concerned with IT solutions,
project integration issues, infrastructure requirements, data management
and organizational design.
Also, your system should be concerned with reporting hierarchy, performance
evaluation and compensation, goals and performance objectives, policies
and procedures, roles and responsibilities, limiting liability, and communication
plans.
People. They influence and are influenced by both the systems and the
processes in unpredictable ways. When any changes are made to the system
or processes, the organization needs to be concerned with issues that
affect people.
People can only produce if they have the requisite skills, resources and
motivation to do so. Organizations need to assess core competencies, skill
requirements, job design and the training needed to provide the necessary
resources to get the job done. Even in the most automated environment,
people still do work.
To reflect on the three elements needed - processes, system and people
- to create a high performance organization, the required stages for each
element, in order, are:
• Processes. A value-added analysis, the reworking and possible redesigning of jobs, the decision points and inspection points required, and all targeted on the goal of meeting customer needs and expectations.
• System. A review of policies and procedures, documenting distribution and maintenance, needed forms, and operating within an open vs. closed environment.
• People. Determining their roles and responsibilities, skills and competencies, and evaluating job design that will lead to job satisfaction.
The next step concerns designing the “to be”
process flow. It includes developing a macro flow chart, “top down”
flow chart, action maps, plus creating, as needed, document and functional
development and decision maps (with the latter to include escalation charts).
In this stage, what’s also needed includes identifying performance,
productivity and quality measures to be used, developing collection and
analysis requirements, establishing policy and system requirements, and
conducting cost/benefit analysis.
The following stage focuses on the implementation of a change initiative
that may take a great deal of time and/or resources to implement. A design
team must be formed, with its role concluding with the development of
an implementation plan. This plan must include the long-term care and
feeding of the change initiative in order to bring it to a successful
conclusion. The change process, which, in actuality, is a redesign effort,
will go through predictable and manageable stages of change. But prior
to engaging the change cycle, there are several considerations that the
organizational leadership must address:
• Establishing a vision that guides the change initiative.
• Determining resource commitment.
• Conducting team learning.
• Establishing a project plan to include milestones and tollgates. In the stage one collection phase, the design team will collect and organize extensive documentation of the “as is” picture of current operations. The team will document and catalog current business processes while collecting a wide variety of supporting information, leading to:
• Establishing project objectives.
• Establishing the scope of the operations.
• Assessing job design.
• Analyzing the flexibility of the system (open vs. closed system).
• Developing macro flow and other cited charts and maps (top down flow charts, document flow maps, functional deployment and action maps). Throughout this described process leading to the creation of a high performance organization, organizations need to create an ability to set and achieve goals, establish mechanisms to ensure resources are used efficiently and effectively, and build an ability to respond quickly to changing circumstances.
Employees need to be goal-oriented, be motivated to contribute to the
success of the organization and be flexible and accountable. Also, in
order for organizations to be successful in managing change for the future,
it bears repeating that it’s mandatory to have a clear, compelling
and consistent vision. There must be an action plan (who will do what
by when, and who will follow up). And the systems must be targeted on
performance management, decision-making and information sharing.
In other words, organizational change must be well-conceived and well-executed.
It also must be understood that change is never easy, and successful implementation
will, by necessity, involve learning.
The focus during the Industrial Age was on capacity and market share.
That is, volume meant meeting the bottom line. In the current business
climate of the Information Age, the focus is on customer service, flexibility,
speed and cost containment.
Trying to solve Information Age problems with Industrial Age tools - which
many organizations continue to attempt - often creates more problems than
it solves.
In rising to the challenge of new success factors, organizations need
to distribute the responsibility equally among its members. The “structure”
of the organization creates an environment for people to achieve the organization’s
goals. Succinctly, “organizational entities” don’t achieve
goals - people do.
In a customer-focused organization, success is based upon the depth of
relationships with customers, rather than the profits from an individual
transaction. And this type of organization usually starts with a focus
on processes to better understand how it can meet the needs of its customers.
This article was previously published in the June 2001 Issue of Servicing
Management.
