Process For The Sake Of Process …

How do your company’s processes affect the outcome of your project?

One of the most common responses received when I ask employees the million-dollar question “What would you change if you had the absolute power” is “I’d get rid of half of our processes and administration to actually have time to do my job”.

On the other hand, as a former project manager myself, I have also experienced the opposite. Especially when things go wrong adhering to the process might save your butt!

In complex matrix organisations the processes become much more robust especially when it comes to governance framework across regional companies and where, if things go wrong on the projects, the losses and write-offs will impact the overall company’s financial result.

Recently I have been asked to take part in a review of a regional business reporting risk at the project level into the parent global organisation. The main reason was that a large complex project reported sudden losses without any prior warning.

We discovered that the governance process of escalation to headquarters was not perceived as helpful but rather additional work without any value added to the project.

The main issue was the disconnect between the entities where perhaps the project would have benefited from the start if it had been flagged for special attention and involvement so that all of the stakeholders were informed adequately in a timely manner.

This forced an investigation into the process itself, including the escalation rules and management roles and responsibilities to ensure the appropriate levels of support are given in a timely manner.

Further, this also led to an organisational restructure and some serious deep discussions on the topic of how to change the culture to that of trust, transparency and speaking up when it matters the most to prevent major disasters.

Trusting Relationships Towards Less Bureaucracy

Despite the initial statement most of the lessons learned at the project closure indicate that some processes don’t work, achieve no apparent outcomes and should be scrapped whereas others were missing and caused major issues and need to be developed and applied going ahead.

My view is that having trusting relationships with the core stakeholders will lead to speedy decision making, whereas without trust there tends to be much more bureaucracy and over-processing.

However, having a process for the sake of process simply isn’t on in the times where resources are scarce!

The process needs to add value, if not directly to the project but is still important from the governance perspective of the organisation the benefits of such process must be clearly understood by everyone affected. A process has to make sense and the process owner should be the person that best understands the reasons behind it and the workings of it.

Processes are also not sterile, they will change over time as the environments change and so it is important to continuously check, review and keep up to date with the business needs.