Business Process Transformation at Warp Speed
Transform your organization at light speed with a few simple hacks
In this post, I share significant hacks that quickly accelerate, de-risk, and reduce the cost of enterprise-wide business process transformation initiatives.
Focus on the choke points of complexity.
An enterprise has thousands of processes. A global enterprise has tens of thousands of processes. But regardless of the size and complexity, organizations have just a handful of object classes, such as people, buildings, machines, products, materials, suppliers, customers, etc. And regardless of the industry, these objects' attributes, methods, and life cycle events are more or less the same. Therefore, digitalizing these objects and their life cycle events is almost a straight line of activities decoupled from the rest of the organizational complexity. I advice initiating a baseline program that scales on "objects" as the unit of digitalization right away.
In the context of this baseline program, define life cycle owners. For example, the top person in the HR organization should be accountable for the life cycle digitalization of "people." The top person of the procurement organization should own the life cycle digitalization of the "supplier."
This establishes ownership early on and provides the best form of master data management and an excellent knowledge graph later.
Focusing on objects as the choke point of enterprise complexity delivers 70-80% of the whole digitalization scope in a simpler, faster, and cheaper manner. Don't listen to consultants who advise attacking thousands of processes head-on with brute force; this is how they make money.
Start with the UX and everyday experience
The enterprise is the aggregate of the individuals and interactions, not business processes.
Don't jump into organizing sessions where ten people draw flow charts on MS Visio. Instead, start with understanding individuals' actual work content and context.
This approach delivers 4 benefits;
Helps you see reality and get reality-bound insights rather than theoretical opinions.
Delivers a human-centric process transformation.
Leads to a consistent UX from the get-go and preempts the proliferation of apps and processes for users to switch back and forth 20 times a day.
Simplifies process transformation because there are fewer roles in an organization than the number of processes. Taking a sample of individuals for each role suffice to get enough coverage.
I use the following canvas to elicit the actual work content and context to discover how best to enable individuals to perform their best by offering assistance, augmentation, automation, and analytical tools they can rely on.
Establish business ownership
Most business transformation initiatives fail due to the lack of business ownership, which puts business stakeholders in a position passively expecting and reacting.
First, define the process domains in a MECE way. Process domains are usually as few as recruit-to-retire, lead-to-cash, source-to-pay, and plan-to-fulfill. Then, set owners of these domains, such as the COO owning the plan-to-fulfill process domain, which later breaks process domains into processes and sub-processes with business owners at every level of the organization.
Set limits
Business process transformation is a fun exercise with visible benefits. So, it is tempting to overdo and over-index. I advise setting limits to the scope and level of detail.
Unless limits are set, business processes become complex monsters that are too slow and expensive to maintain and eventually become obsolete. Also, over-indexing makes processes very rigid and transactional, compromising flexibility and killing people's intrinsic motivation by ticketizing the work.
Setting limits to the scope and level of detail sounds smart, but it is a cumbersome exercise. Here is a better approach: one good way is to start with creating agile Kanban-based working tiers right away and build business processes wherever it makes business sense as augmentations to the tiers. Here is another post where I touch on this idea from another angle.
Sequence
Business processes have dependencies. The entire web of process interdependencies calls for an opportunity to optimize the sequence of business processes to be implemented.
It is tempting to start with the peripheral processes, but it is actually better to tackle source processes first because they unlock many dependent processes. However, this means a slow start to enable exponential speeds later, which must be communicated clearly.
Raise an army of Citizen BAs
The whole no-code / low-code hype is too centered on the citizen developer, which has enough attention, and I assume you would raise an army of citizen developers anyway. However, the citizen business analyst has a more critical role, and this is never mentioned. Train an army of citizen business analysts and ensure it is a pervasive capability maintained across the organization.
Define implementation patterns
Setting up the grammar of implementation patterns simplifies communication. Also, it streamlines the logistics of implementation, makes scaling easier, and reduces the total cost of IT.
Set Up Simple Governance Processes & Levers
Steering is multi-dimensional, and it tends to get fuzzy and complex unless curated.
Focus on the 3 most important levers and discretize them for visible and easy governance. The framework should feel like an aircraft cockpit with levers, pedals, a steering yoke, and a dashboard. Without the facilitation of such a framework, stakeholders talk and speculate in unactionable ways.
The 3 focus areas can be;
Business steering governs priorities, goals, direction, speed, and funding.
IT steering. This aligns the business process transformation program with the governance of the rest of the IT.
Operational steering. This governs resource allocation, management of the program, and program improvement based on the field outcomes, feedback, and lessons learned.
Partners & Platform
Grow a network of partners and utilize external know-how to strategize, design, plan, and implement where possible. Functional managers should not be expected to deliver business process transformation, but they should ultimately be accountable as the domain or process owners.
In the same context, platforms are necessary for scaling efficiently and fast.
© Saip Eren Yilmaz, 2023
