Process 101: How Much Is Enough?

Michael is the President of Sapir Consulting. He has been providing operational, organizational and management consulting and training for over 14 years. He is a certified project management professional and Gestalt process facilitator, offering training, consulting and solutions development in project and product management, process improvement, leadership and team-building programs.

  Agile   ProjectsAtWork  

We solve our uncertainties with more process. We believe that we get a better grip on reality by having a process that dissects one step into more steps, and then asks everyone to check, verify and analyze. This doesn’t work. Try a lean-and-mean approach instead.

A few years ago I was consulting in the IT department of a global manufacturing organization. Four years before, the PMO defined 18 processes for business analysis including templates and work instructions. The crown jewel was a 70-page project plan with a business requirement document. I asked them how many processes were implemented at present. The answer was “none."

We went back to the drawing board and defined the least amount of process necessary that would still allow top-down control on the one hand and burden-free development on the other. Yes, it worked — in two years we had a robust yet lean process for IT product development. It was just what we needed.

Am I saying that you must eliminate 90 percent of process? Not quite. Indeed, some process is redundant, some is truly wasteful and some is absolutely required by regulation. Here is a way to analyze wasteful process:

   > Create a value stream snapshot of your project delivery and analyze process elements built into it.

   > Now build an alternate bottom-up snapshot of delivery that has only the necessary process elements.

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