This is an excerpt from my recent book, co authored with Mark McGregor called Thinking of... People-Centric Process Management? Ask the Smart Questions  published by Smart Questions

 

One way that we have found to consider the different perspectives is to use hats. We understand that each of the four groups has in most cases valuable inputs and concerns about any given process. At the same time we also find that it is important to differentiate between the differing views and perspectives.

 

Using the hat system described below in workshop situations has meant it is easier for people to appreciate other views, easier to build consensus and easier for people to identify risks and priorities. The following is a simplified take on what each hat represents and the key needs of each group represented by the hat color and style.

 

End Users

 

End users (or business users) are focused on delivering business results through processes. They understand that processes are how they work and deliver the products or services that provide value to our customers. These people also understand that good internal processes assist with staff training and ensure consistency. For some business users good processes also make it easier to move staff around or to expand operations, they use them to enable scalability. They are interested in ensuring that processes are logical, effective and accessible – in short they want processes that help them work the way they need to, they do not want to have to change the way they work to suit a new system.

 

These people understand the problems in the business and the frustrations of their customers. They are the source of a massive amount of knowledge.

 

On the down side they can also be blinkered at times into only seeing solutions from a very narrow angle, they can be the type of people that Henry Ford was thinking about when he said “If I had asked them they would have asked for a faster horse!”

 

These End Users we refer to as our Green Hats.

IT Department

 

The IT department wants to understand the business users’ view of the operation to ensure that the IT systems they build and maintain truly support the business users, at minimum cost. They want to ensure that there is integrity of information as it flows around the systems. Paradoxically although they suggest that they are very interested in process, they are in fact interested really in procedure because it is at this level the software applications operate. The reasons being that in order to build a system one has to know exactly how a decision is made and which path to go down when, there is no room for ambiguity?

 

Traditionally IT departments have not had a great track record in understanding the business or the real needs of customers, but happily this is now starting to change. Conversely though because of technology there are new and innovative ways of doing business that many of our Green Hats could never dream of. So ensuring we that we are getting great advice from the IT department is vital, to ignore them is highly risky in today’s world.

 

The IT Department is staffed with the White Hats.

IT Vendors

 

The IT system providers such as ERP, BPMS or Cloud vendors want to ensure that the configuration of their system is managed accurately and that it hangs together end-to-end i.e. passes System Testing and User Acceptance Testing.  In short, they are looking to ensure that it meets the user needs, but more importantly perhaps that they can get paid quickly. Of course they do also want to ensure that they have happy and referenceable customers.

 

Although they talk to solving business problems and so try to align themselves with the Green Hats, they frequently find themselves as having more in common with our White Hats.
In an ever changing landscape they find themselves having to increasingly act like chameleons, on one hand they know that the Green Hats control the budget for them, while on the other hand the White Hats control the ability for them to be installed.

 

Good clear processes will usually lead to clear requirements from customers, thus making it easier for this group to identify how well suited their application or platform might be to the client’s needs.

 

The danger with this group is that they have a tendency to always believe that their system does everything that everyone else does but better. This can make it hard for Green and White Hats to chose between Blue Hats.

 

The IT Vendors are Blue Hats.

Risk and Compliance

 

The Risk and Compliance Officers want to be able to demonstrate to auditors that end users are following a documented process, and that the correct risk control points have been identified and are effectively managed from a governance, ownership and auditing standpoint.  Unfortunately in an ever regulated and litigious society the needs put upon business by risk and compliance is getting ever greater. This burden seems to fly in the face of waste removal or Lean initiatives, but does not look like getting better in the near future. So the risk and compliance team have a vital part to play in identifying, managing and improving processes.

 

The prime interest then is that of auditability and provability, some suggest that in simple terms their role is to keep management and executives out of jail. Whilst this may seem glib or trite it may be nearer to the truth than some people realize.
As with the other groups, they will look at the problem from their own perspective. The risk of course being that the cost of being compliant far outweighs the commercial benefit of compliance, as ever it is a balancing act.

 

This is the Red Hat perspective.

 

 

The questionnaire is the form “Are you a sensitive lover” which are found in Mens magazines.  At the end you can add up your scores and based on the answer we’ve suggested some things to think about.

Try our simple quiz to find out if you are really ready for it by answering our multiple-choice questions and then totting up your score…

NEED - Do I need this… some typical signs?

Q1. Do we have one or more business transformation initiatives?
a. Yes, they are coordinated by a Programme Office with a shared business model
b. No, but there is one major initiative across the company
c. Yes, but we seem to have difficulty coordinating the results
d. I’ve no idea. Each department does their own thing

Q2: Are the following initiatives company – enterprise application implementation (ERP, CRM, Supply Chain), 6 Sigma, Business Process Reengineering, Sarbanes Oxley, M&A integration, outsourcing/shared services, launching new operations…..):
a. 1 or less
b. 2-4
c. More than 4
d. Probably all of them

Q3: We only get a percentage of the benefits stated in the business case.  This typically get:
a.  75-100%
b.  50-75%
c.  Less than 50%
d.  We don’t ever measure the benefits

DESIRE – Is there a strong enough desire to follow through?

Q4: Our positioning vs. the competition is best described:
a. We are setting the pace of change for others to follow
b. We are able respond to change and are able to stay competitive
c. We able respond to change but at a huge cost
d. We are unable to respond quickly enough

Q5: Our ability to stay alive requires us to transform the business:
a. No – we need some small course corrections
b. Yes – but it is limited to one business unit-
c. Yes – we recognize that changes are required
d. Yes – we require a radical overhaul of the business model

Q6:  The top team and managers recognize the benefits of moving to a process-focused approach
a. We have aligned our org chart to the cross-functional processes
b. We have process owners and a functional org chart
c. Work is organized in line with functional organization
d. Getting managers in different departments to talk would be a first

Q7: Which of these statements best reflects your attitude to compliance?
a. My company has to achieve the highest levels of compliance.
b. It’s a necessary evil.
c. It can sometimes get in the way of business.
d. I wonder who will get found out next?
OPPORTUNITY – Are there initiatives where this could be applied now?

Q8: I can see an initiative where we could apply these principles
a. We are already have a central source of information reused by all initiatives
b. We have a perfect initiative starting in the next month – the business case is being presented at the next Board meeting
c. I can see an opportunity in the next 3-6 months
d. I’d need the management team and project managers to read this book before I’d get them to adopt these ideas

Q9: We can mandate this approach on our external consultants
a. We mandate a process focused approach in all projects
b. We have a good relationship and the consultants are open to new ideas
c. We would need to convince the consultants of the benefits of this approach
d. We have fixed price contracts and they will fleece us if we try to change

Q10: How much is the business controlled by regulatory bodies
a. Very little - thankfully
b.  As we have a US parent we need to comply with Sarbanes Oxley
c. We need to comply with our industry regulations (is FSA for Financial Services, FDA for Pharmaceuticals)
d. You name it  - we’ve got it. It seems like we work for the compliance offices.

CAPABILITY – Do we have the technical infrastructure and the skills?

Q11: How well connected is the organization?
a. All our offices are connected by a single intranet and many of our staff have full access to servers and systems from home
b. All our offices are connected by a single intranet
c. We have separate intranets for each country
d.  We are thinking of outsourcing this area of IT

Q12: How long does it take to get a new software application installed?
a. With a business sponsor, less than 1 month.  That is the IT dept’s SLA
b. Less than a month on a test server, and less than 3 months into production
c. It varies a lot based IT’s priorities – you put it in the queue and wait
d. We’ve outsourced IT to XXX so it is now impossible

Q13: What experience is there of running process-focused projects?
a. We are currently running all projects using the principles in this book
b.  We have a project manager who has the skills and a small team of analysts
c. We have strong project skills, but would need coaching and support
d. This would be a first.  We would be dependent on external consultants

LEADERSHIP – Is there support at senior management to become process-focused?

Q14: Do you have a single strategy in place which aligns the top team?
a)    Yes. We couldn’t perform without it.
b)    Yes. We reached agreement on a strategy in the end.
c)    Yes. I think so.
d)    Yes. In fact we have several of them and we’ll probably have a new one next week).

Q15: How many of the top team would openly endorse the principles in the book?
a . Virtually all of them.  A couple of them could have written the book
b. Certainly the operational side – the finance guys have a numbers basis
c. Very few, but after they’ve read it they would be open to the approach
d. Forget it.  They are too busy fighting turf-wars

Q16: What chance is there of changing the organization structure around the end to end processes ?
a. We’re nearly there
b. We’d be more comfortable with a matrix organization reconciling functions with processes
c. We’ve a strong functional organization and we’d need to be convinced of the benefits
d. Didn’t you see my answer to Q15 .  No way.

Q17: If you were to receive an award for your desk, which one of these phrases would be engraved:
a. ‘The buck stops here’
b. ‘Executive of the year’
c. ‘It was like that when I found it’
d. ‘Gone for lunch – back in 2008”.

 
Interpreting your score

Now simply add up your scores (with or without the help of your accountant, as necessary).
For every a) you score 10 points; every b) = 8 points; every c) = 5 points; every d) = 0 points.  How have you done? How ready are you for it?

Over 120 points:
Great – you’re red-hot. Give me a call because I’d love to profile your success story on our website and in the next book. 

80-120 points:
You’re nearly ready to take the plunge, but there are still a few things you need to sort out. At least you are aware of that some things need to change. Think through all of the issues raised in this book and, once you’ve done that, you can leap right in.

30-80 points:
Unless you get a lot more buy-in for the principles any initiative is likely to fail. It sounds like you need a bulk order of the book so you can distribute it more widely – or get the top team to attend one of our seminars.

0–30 points:
You’re clearly passionate about the process-focused approach or you wouldn’t have read this far, but you’re clearly in the wrong company.  Come and talk to us, because we know some companies that need you.  At the very least get out now before the excitement in you dies.
 

 

I've been re-reading Blink by Malcolm Gladwell.  One section that fascinated me was the chapter on "Why People Love Tall Men".

 

A survey of thousands of people in the US showed that every extra inch of height is worth $789 a year in salary - and far more so if you are in the upper level of management.

 

BTW You don't get the same effect is you are short man who wears high heels.

 

A summary of the ideas are below from Gladwells website

 

This excerpt is from the part of "Blink" where I talk about the things that throw off our powers of rapid cognition. I've just been talking about a test--called the IAT--which measures your level of "unconscious prejudice." That's the kind of prejudice that you have that you aren't aware of, that affects the kinds of impressions and conclusions that you reach automatically, without thinking.

 

Or what if the person you are interviewing is tall? On a conscious level, I'm sure that all of us don't think that we treat tall people any differently from short people. But there's plenty of evidence to suggest that height--particularly in men--does trigger a certain set of very positive, unconscious associations. I polled about half of the companies on the Fortune 500 list--the largest corporations in the United States--asking each company questions about its CEO. The heads of big companies are, as I'm sure comes as no surprise to anyone, overwhelmingly white men, which undoubtedly reflects some kind of implicit bias.

 

But they are also virtually all tall: In my sample, I found that on average CEOs were just a shade under six feet. Given that the average American male is 5'9" that means that CEOs, as a group, have about three inches on the rest of their sex. But this statistic actually understates matters. In the U.S. population, about 14.5 percent of all men are six feet or over. Among CEOs of Fortune 500 companies, that number is 58 percent. Even more strikingly, in the general American population, 3.9 percent of adult men are 6'2" or taller.

 

Among my CEO sample, 30 percent were 6'2" or taller. The lack of women or minorities among the top executive ranks at least has a plausible explanation. For years, for a number of reasons having to do with discrimination and cultural patterns, there simply weren't a lot of women and minorities entering the management ranks of American corporations. So today, when boards of directors look for people with the necessary experience to be candidates for top positions, they can argue somewhat plausibly that there aren't a lot of women and minorities in the executive pipeline. But this is simply not true of short people.

 

It is possible to staff a company entirely with white males, but it is not possible to staff a company without short people: there simply aren't enough tall people to go around. Yet none of those short people ever seem to make it into the executive suite. Of the tens of millions of American men below 5'6", a grand total of ten--in my sample--have reached the level of CEO, which says that being short is probably as much, or more, of a handicap to corporate success as being a woman or an African-American.

 

(The grand exception to all of these trends is American Express CEO Kenneth Chenault, who is both on the short side (5'9") and black. He must be a remarkable man to have overcome two Warren Harding Errors.)

 

Is this a deliberate prejudice? Of course not. No one ever says, dismissively, of a potential CEO candidate that 'he's too short.' This is quite clearly the kind of unconscious prejudice that the IAT picks up. Most of us, in ways that we are not entirely aware of, automatically associate leadership ability with imposing physical stature. We have a sense, in our minds, of what a leader is supposed to look like, and that stereotype is so powerful that when someone fits it, we simply become blind to other considerations.

 

And this isn't confined to the corporate suite. Not long ago, researchers went back and analyzed the data from four large research studies, that had followed thousands of people from birth to adulthood, and calculated that when corrected for variables like age and gender and weight, an inch of height is worth $789 a year in salary. That means that a person who is six feet tall, but who is otherwise identical to someone who is five foot five, will make on average $5,525 more per year. As Timothy Judge, one of the authors of the study, points out: "If you take this over the course of a 30-year career and compound it, we're talking about a tall person enjoying literally hundreds of thousands of dollars of earnings advantage."

 

Have you ever wondered why so many mediocrities find their way into positions of authority in companies and organizations? It's because when it comes to even the most important positions, we think that our selection decisions are a good deal more rational than they actually are. We see a tall person, and we swoon.

A great debate last night at CIONet with presentations on various aspects of Cloud Computing.  

 

Andrew Jordan of Complinet presented a compelling case for their migration from MSExchange to Gmail and some unexpected benefits. Here's a video which summarises his experiences

 

I presented ideas from my book on Thinking of ... Buying a Cloud Solution. The fact that business users "don't know what they don't know" and are buying Cloud Solutions and putting their business as risk (compliance, governance and security). The lucky CIOs invited to the event were given a complimentary copy of the book - thanks to CIONet

 

Lucy Mills from Nimbus presented their experiences of developing a raft of app using Salesforce.com and Force.com and the current implementation of FinancialForce.com

 

Then Paul Parsons of Server Labs talked about the mind-blowing amount of data (1PB one petabyte) that the European Space Agency Gaia project are planning to collect and process on Amazon EC2

 

The rise of the Steath Cloud

 

One element of the debate was the rise of business initiated cloud computing, which the CIO may never hear about.  Something I'm calling the Stealth Cloud

Cloud Computing seems to have struck a chord in a way that ASP, OnDemand, SaaS and all the previous incarnations never have. Every analyst is blogging and tweeting about it, there are a slew of conferences, and a surprising number of books have already been published.

 

And there is now more than one sort of Cloud. There are Public Clouds and Private Clouds. I propose “Stealth Cloud” should be added to the lexicon.    As the name suggests is does its job – quietly, unseen, unnoticed.

 

Silver lining?

So business people are embracing the ideas of Cloud Computing. Why? Because they can see immediate value from the applications and services being offered.  And with technology becoming easier to develop there seems to be no limit to what is being provided in the Cloud, all packaged in a very compelling, fun user experience. 

Consumers are business people too

 

So when the individual is provided with these elegant services as a consumer it is inevitable that they bring them to work. With services such as on-line backup, project management, CRM, collaboration and social networking all available through a browser, is it any surprise business users are signing up and ignoring the staid and boring applications provided by the IT department.

 

Hence the rise of the Stealth Cloud.  Services being consumed by business users without the knowledge, permission or support of the CIO and the IT department.

 

The widening business IT divide

 

Too much has been talked about the Business IT divide. But unfortunately the Stealth Cloud has driven an even greater rift between business and IT.  It is exposing, as far as the business are concerned the lack of flexibility, agility and responsiveness of IT.  From IT’s perspective who can see the risks (operational, compliance and integration) of using some of these Cloud services, is simply underlines how cavalier and naïve the business users are.

Unfair rap

 

Corporate systems are costly to build and maintain. They are mission critical and need to support the entire operation.  So there is a good reason why the internal IT department cannot ‘knock-out’ application as fast as a nimble start-up.  The IT department is spending 80% of its time and effort ‘keeping the lights on’ and the remaining 20% on providing new solutions that are robust, scalable, secure and integrated into the core applications. How many of the ‘new’ Cloud providers are truly enterprise ready?
 

Do you recognise any of thse discussions in your dealings with customer or vendors.  See how they make you squirm when applied to 'real life'.

 

 

 

P!nk takes 'performance' in rock concert terms to a different level

Even if you don't like P!ink worth watching 3:15 - 3:30 - exquisite timing 

 

Heard a lovely quote the other day:

 

Analysts are rather like eunuchs in a brothel.  They come to work each day and see it being done, they spend time talking to those who do it, they know all about the approaches and techniques, but no longer able to do it.