Determining Your Business Context
At this point, your support group needs to determine its business drivers, strategic intent, stake-holder expectations, performance measurements, and critical issues.
What Are Your Business Drivers?
To work according to your accepted mission, you must understand the support group’s business drivers. These are likely to include some of the group’s clients’ external drivers, such as market or competitive issues. They will also reflect the clients’ experience with managing change, such as previous inability to adapt quickly when needed. Figure 9.1 illustrates this and other considerations in the Business Context phase.
What Is Your Strategic Intent?
Strategic intent states the support group’s mission, vision, goals, and principles. It also guides the choices made later concerning the group’s business process and human capabilities. All design and service decisions made later must be consistent with the intent articulated in this first step.
Mission
A group’s mission answers the question, “What style of operation will the support group assume?” The group might have some intense negotiations to reach a consensus on this, the most fundamental question that you must ask. The mission indicates to everyone the nature of your group’s responsibility. It will show your value proposition. Figure 9.1 includes a sample mission statement for a support group.
The range of mission choices starts with a simple role to influence others’ thinking about process management. Choices can extend all the way to having complete control over the design and execution of processes. Table 9.1 shows the natural progression from little involvement to complete control by a support group.
| Style of Service | Characteristics |
|---|---|
| Influencing | Raises awareness, runs education sessions, makes articles and references available, speaks to key managers and professionals Attempts to get staff to move to a process mindset and culture and to take charge of conducting process management initiatives themselves |
| Advising | Helps change management and project practitioners set up and conduct their own initiatives according to best process management practices
Reviews deliverables and plans to assure quality with feedback to those responsible Provides standards and guidelines for use by process teams that maintain direct control Recommends tools |
| Participating | Provides people to project teams to analyze, model, interview, facilitate, document, present, and so on Brings own tools and recommended standards |
| Managing Knowledge | Manages repository of knowledge about processes, projects, and alignment to other organizational assets and structures
Updates knowledge repository with process management outputs Provides reusable process knowledge to project teams |
| Managing | Provides project management resources and runs projects (architectural and specific processes)
Directs process management efforts Manages information about programs of change on behalf of executives |
| Governing | Mandates standards and tools
Runs and controls full program of aligned process and enabler change Vets rogue proposals against approved program Runs risk and quality management program |
The initial value proposition is likely to be centered on innovation and provision of capability to the organization. As the support group’s capability grows, it’s likely to become more participatory and operational.
Vision
The vision defines where a group wants to be at the end of the planning period. This will also be affected by the choice of involvement styles in Table 9.1. Refer to Figure 9.1 for a sample vision statement.
Goals
Your support group should establish a set of specific goals to be accomplished over the planning timeframe. Some goals will be achieved earlier than others. These goals might reflect a transition in involvement style. In the early days of process renewal, it might be appropriate to plant a seed, an idea for change. Then the group can fertilize the soil with successes and key supporters to grow solid roots. The bloom of the flowers and automatic reseeding might come with a gradual culture change and the attainment of critical mass support through lessons learned. Widespread education lets the business harvest its investment benefits. Figure 9.1 illustrates how the goals support the vision and mission.
Principles
At this point, look at your corporate principles and derive a set of principles for your support group. Many will be the same as corporate’s, but some will be more practice specific to your group. These are the fundamental ways of working for the process support group that will be unquestioned and that you won’t violate. Naturally, management and clients must validate the group’s principles.
Sample principles can be seen in Figure 9.1.
Who Cares?
Now that the support group has a reason for being, it must determine whom it will serve and with whom it must interact in order to do so. It also must be able to communicate what’s required for success with its stakeholders.
A set of internal customers will receive services, and another set of internal and external providers will make this service possible. Depending on the level of style chosen while defining the mission, the service group’s stakeholder groups might be widespread across the organization or narrowly focused. Figure 9.2 illustrates some stakeholders for the process support group. This set might be very similar organization to organization.
Stakeholder Expectations
To define the value of your support service, you must identify the expectations that you want to realize in your relationships with stakeholders. The same approach used in the Business Context or Vision phase should be used here. These will be affected significantly by two major decisions:
Will use of your services be optional or mandatory? Table 9.2 shows the challenges for each option.
Will human resources be provisioned completely from within your group? Will they come from elsewhere in the enterprise? Will they be in-sourced from outside firms? Table 9.3 shows some pros and cons for each approach.
Table 9.3. Pros and Cons of Resourcing Options for Group Services Pros Cons Business Process Support Group Resources Focused commitment. Slower to build initial experience. Consistency of method and tools and knowledge access. Build-up of overhead cost. Knowledge grows and remains available to service users. Danger of internal focus and lack of currency with outside professionals. Resources Inside the Enterprise Subject expertise and process capability combined. Not main job purpose; development is sporadic. Knowledge gained stays in company. Distraction due to main job functions; no focus. Low cost to initiatives. Inconsistency of methods and tools across initiatives. Resources Outside the Enterprise Faster startup. Lack of enterprise knowledge. More scalable. Loss of human knowledge from corporation. Wider experience base and broader perspective. Higher fees.
Answers to these questions affect the relationships all around the service and your style of operation.
Critical Stakeholder Needs
To define stakeholder needs for process management services, you should define the critical success factors that must be satisfied. These factors will likely center on the accessibility of knowledgeable resources, acceptance of the whole idea from the very stakeholders you support, and management resourcing of the people and budgets.
What Are Your Products and Services?
After you somewhat solidify your group’s reason for being and whom it will serve, the specific type and scope of services must be addressed. Some services can be offered initially, and others will be developed or offered later as the group learns and proves its worth.
Scope
A process management support group can enable the rest of the organization with process-oriented services. Also, as shown in Chapters 6, 7, and 8, a support group can extend its services to a much wider range of offerings that might be important to an organization undergoing change. This is especially true if transformation is expected to be difficult or risky; the organization must decide who will ensure that risky propositions are handled.
Process management, program management, project management, human change management, and risk management must have a home. The process support group must reach consensus with the rest of the organization on its role in each. Table 9.4 presents some considerations.
| Professional Practice | Considerations for Process Support Group |
|---|---|
| Process Management | What phases of the framework will you be involved with—just the more tactical Vision, Understand, and Renew phases, or will you participate in the more strategic Business Context and Architect and Align phases? Will your group play a role in Develop and Implement? What about ongoing Nurture and Continuously Improve phase monitoring? For the phases in your groups’ scope, which concepts or deliverables on the maps presented in Figure 5.4 will you handle? To what degree will you advise rather than participate? |
| Program Management | Will you manage the project portfolio defined as a result of the architecture migration strategy and/or the process transformation strategy?
Will you handle the process portions or all the enabler development? Will you be involved in defining the transformation program and defending it from unplanned initiatives? |
| Project Management | Will you supply support for the management of process projects?
Will you deal with planning and control aspects? Will you manage the projects or just support the managers? |
| Human Change Management | Will you advise and help with the development of human transition plans?
Will you develop communications strategies? Will you craft messages and/or deliver them? |
| Risk Management | Will you be involved in defining quality criteria for process project deliverables?
Will you provide or develop questions for risk assessment checkpoints? Will you manage the QA team and deal with risk reduction strategies? |
Specific Products and Services
Many products and services can help the process support group fulfill its service mandates.
Reference Materials
The group can make a set of reference materials available to project staff and process managers. These reference materials, such as the following, can guide efforts and ensure repeatability and sharing:
Methodology framework. A comprehensive process management guide, such as described by this book, can be made available to all managers and practitioners. It could also be accessed on a company intranet.
Technique descriptions. How-to guidelines for specific steps such as process modeling, process analysis, and interviewing can assist in doing detailed tasks.
Training materials. Slides and other visual media describing the application and usage of methods and techniques can be made available to all qualified trainers and for reference.
Books, articles, and online readings. Lists and access to other related materials can be provided to increase the knowledge of interested parties.
Tool Access
The support group can research, evaluate, select, and tailor a set of software tools to support the work in the strategic, tactical, realization, and operational modes of the framework. These tools can be low tech, or high tech and automated:
Low-tech tools include templates for the various information-gathering exercises that the process analysts and designers will conduct. They also include templates of wall-chart size, forms, graphics and word processing starter kits, facilitation kits, and interview kits, all related to a specific framework phase and step.
High-tech tools include software to make the framework’s methods accessible to its users and guide them through the steps. Hundreds of tools on the market claim to be process-support tools, with a wide range of capabilities and prices. What you’ll buy depends on what you want to do and the knowledge available as a result of the software’s use. A large difference exists between various tools and technologies, as shown in Table 9.5.
Some of these technologies are very methodology specific, encompassing specific ways of doing the work in the framework phases and steps. Business landscape, process architecture, technology architecture, organization design, stakeholder analysis, scope, process models, and scenarios are just a few of the types of models that can be captured and analyzed with the help of tools built on an integrated knowledge base. Examples of some of these models are shown in Chapter 5 and in Chapters 10 through 16. These sample models that connect many different business concepts were built with the support of an object-oriented knowledge tool from Ptech, Inc. (www.ptechinc.com).
With regard to tools, process support groups can play a number of roles depending on their choice of approach, as shown earlier in Table 9.1. The group can act as a source of knowledge about tools and recommend specific software, or it can acquire tools and make them available. It can also be the tool operator for initiatives or even the custodian of a tool, mandating its use.
Awareness, Marketing, Education, and Training
The process support group can play the key role in ensuring that an organization understands the process management environment. This can range from simple raising awareness to offering training on the business rationale and the ways of doing the work. For this aspect, your group might have to strike relationships with outside training providers if you don’t do this yourself.
Business Justification Awareness
The awareness-raising aspect of the support group’s responsibility will typically emphasize the business value of the process-centric approach. By using various media and messengers, it will address the questions of “What is this change?” and “Why should we do it?” The answers must deliver a consistent and compelling argument.
Methodology Education
Delivering the education required to truly understand the framework’s approach and methods ensures the capability and consistency of process and project participants. You must decide whether your group will develop and run this training or have outsiders do it. If outsiders are chosen, will you hold the training in your own dedicated sessions or send staff to public training sessions offered through organizations such as DCI (www.dci.com) and IRM (www.irmuk.co.uk)? Will you mandate certain classes or just recommend them?
Techniques Training
What’s true for method education is also true for the process and project participants’ training in techniques. How will you deliver capability in such aspects as modeling, interviewing, facilitation, and measurement? Will it be hands-on or seminar style? Will you use automated training approaches and self-help?
Tool Training
Who will deliver training on the effective use of tools? Will your group do it, or will you ask the tool vendor to do it for you? Will it be tailored to the method steps that you have picked, or will it be off-the-shelf? Will you do it onsite or in public vendor classes? Ask these questions and make sure you are ready logistically to support technology-based training sessions.
Consulting Services
The progressions shown earlier in Table 9.1 will strongly influence the level and type of consulting service you will provide. These will range from providing management and real expertise to simply proving access to outside help:
Expert business consulting. The support group can house and make available experts and leaders in the various aspects of the business. These staff members would be hired or brought into the group based on their industry-leading knowledge in one or more specific aspects of relevance to the enterprise’s mandate. These subject matter experts would act as advisors and gatekeepers on the direction of the business design in their areas of expertise.
Process-management consulting. The group can also be the source of world-class expertise on process management methods and techniques to be applied to any subject that the business would like to renew.
Facilitation. One aspect of support often provided is access to the facilitation expertise so desperately needed on most projects. This underappreciated capability can make or break the consensus to move forward with an integral solution. A support group can provide facilitation to business-managed or support-group–managed efforts.
Business Knowledge Repository
Decisions on what business knowledge to store and make available to the business process owners and participants will be consistent with your decisions about which aspects of the Process Management Framework your group will support. If the group supports the Business Context phase, all the strategic intent and stakeholder information will be potentially available to those in the business and in projects that can leverage that information for decision making.
If the group has put its effort into the development of architectures and their alignment with one another, it will be able to support program management and resource allocation decisions.
If the results of the Vision, Understand, and Renew phases are recorded, the previous projects’ knowledge and documentation can help new projects that interact with the renewed processes. Making existing process, input, guide, output, and enabler usage available can be invaluable, along with knowledge of which business rules are in place and where they are used.
Providing information about resource skills and availability will also pay off. Linking this type of information to the strategic intent and projects planned or under way will allow planners and managers to adjust and reprioritize with less risk.
Access to Process Management Framework Knowledge Sources
The process support group can also provide a great deal of know-how regarding best practices for using the framework. This knowledge, if renewed frequently, will keep the group’s value intact and the organization moving forward in capability in process management. Some categories of potential knowledge that your support group can provide follow.
Framework Guidelines
Offline or online, it’s potentially useful to provide step-by-step guidance through the framework of change. Help can be provided through models and documentation of the framework process and the techniques that support it. Also, other related guidelines can be added, such as help in estimating and quality assurance. Topics should cover all those areas that you’ve decided are in scope for your service offerings.
Practitioners find great value in visualization aids for the deliverables of the framework’s steps. Templates, samples, and description of standards make it much easier to know what the results should look like. Many of the working tools and deliverables can be packaged into facilitation kits combining the training materials, workshop steps, and reusable formats for easy recording of results.
Lessons Learned Service
The framework knowledge guidance that your group provides can be valuable, but it should never be static. The process management support group can provide feedback mechanisms by which practitioners can say what worked well for them and what can be improved. These learning experiences cross-referenced to the framework steps can improve the standard references and can be used to assess risk for future projects.
Resource Contact Information
As noted earlier in this chapter, the process support group can be actively involved in the projects or can just be a conduit to resources that can help. The group can become a valuable source of knowledge regarding those who know your framework and its associated techniques. These resources and their skills and experience can show which group resources exist. It can also show others within the enterprise who could help. Qualified outside consultants and trainers can be identified as well as their rates and terms of service. The group can also establish the mechanisms for real or virtual process management communities of practice inside or outside the enterprise.
Business Process Support Group Services Directory
All the services that the support group provides should be described in a services directory. This file should provide access points for each service. Whatever choices you make as a result of considering the factors and options in this chapter should be listed. The training curriculum should be detailed and the schedule up-to-date. Descriptions of ways to engage the support team, complete with terms and conditions, should be accessible to all potential users.
How Will You Measure Your Performance?
As with all relationships and services, you will have to measure the value the support group services give to the corporation. As for any support service, this value should be measured according to the difference it makes in getting better processes working more efficiently in shorter timeframes. Because the support service delivers guidance and enablers to initiatives and projects, any glitches it experiences can hold up the delivery of the benefits defined in the business case. Depending on the choice of services your group offers, these measures could vary. Client satisfaction and management perception metrics will likely come toward the top of the list, as will the speed and quality of the overall business rollout.