Last time we talked about process as a conceptual representation of work flow. Processes show how business functions work together at a certain rate to achieve a goal. Processes show inputs being transformed into useful outputs at some rate of flow or tempo. A good process leaves out non-flow information, and is simple (Figure 1.).

Figure 1. Processes should communicate the main steps occurring within a business function. Show the inputs and outputs, and the useful transformation taking place. “Useful” is usually determined by the customer. Draw processes as simple as possible. Illustration copyright Bizmanualz, Inc.

Simple processes provide information at the level of a business function. But workers require much more literal information. Most of the time, workers design their own work by determining how they will achieve a goal within their perceived constraints: “Hit the ball by swinging the bat. You get three outs.”

Workers create mental pictures and checklists of what they need to do to get their job done. They translate, in essence, from the conceptual process to the literal steps (Gifure 2.). “Hold the bat hand over hand. Watch the ball. Swing level.”

You can help translate the process into action by showing the literal steps.  ”Showing” may entail demonstrating, training, and coaching. It may include providing pictures or diagrams to remind workers what they need to do.

Use Pictures

Figure 2. Pictures and diagrams help remind us how we want to approach our work. Pictures are especially helpful when we want to change the way we do our work. Picture credit blogs.sun.com/DaveEdstrom

Especially when we want to change or adjust how we do something, we may need to be reminded of what we are supposed to do differently. Pictures and diagrams are particularly useful for that.

Recently I built a cedar fence along my property line. Though I had built fences years ago with my dad, I needed a reminder of how to set and steady the posts (Figure 3.) before pouring the concrete, and how to scribe a level line across the fence row. I found a book with pictures and referred to it while working.

Figure 3. Even for experienced workers, referring to pictures helps plan the job and recall the special know-how that they have acquired. Picture credit: www.ourfixerupper.com

So you can see there is a wide gap between the conceptual process of playing baseball and the literal steps of swinging a bat; or between the process of building a fence and the literal work of setting a row of fence posts. Translating from the process to the literal work in ways that help people do their work is what we call implementation.

And, as they say, implementation is where the rubber meets the road (Figure 4.).

Figure 4. Your process may be fine-tuned. But it takes action-oriented communications and job training to roll out your process effectively. Picture credit: About.com

In future posts, we will look at how to use training, job aids, video and other media to effectively implement processes.

PR: wait… I: wait… L: wait… LD: wait… I: wait… wait… Rank: wait… Traffic: wait… Price: wait… C: wait…

In my checkered past are many years misspent in the fragile ecosystem known as “IT”.  I’ve been a programmer, systems analyst, and data analyst.  I found the work itself to be largely satisfying.  Many of the people I worked for and with were (still are, I hope) outstanding — talented, dedicated, and personable.  It was the politics and the lack of meaningful communication that I could do without.

Issues, edicts, proposals, RFPs, ad nauseam had to go up one side of the “ladder” and down the other.  My clients and I had to pretend we didn’t notice each other as we stood on the ground, across from one another as we steadied the ladder.

In theory, my clients passed requests up the ladder.  Up they went to a project leader or department head, who passed them off to an IT project leader.  Then, they were passed down the other side of the ladder, and they might come down to me…or they might not.

In fact, we did our best work when we ignored the protocol and worked directly with one another.  I read their request, we discussed it, and we arrived at a mutually agreeable statement of work.  Then I worked on the request, keeping in touch with them as I did so.  Typically they got exactly what they wanted within a week instead of waiting two weeks for something that may or may not work to their satisfaction.

One of the things that has always struck me about the Wide, Wide World of IT and users is the way everyone adheres to communication methods and protocols that don’t work (and never have).  Users and techies often have an unhealthy disdain for one another.  Each is secure in the “knowledge” that it knows what it’s talking about and the other one doesn’t.  One party knows better than the other and “…if only they’d shut up and listen.  We have the answers.”  (Sound familiar?)  Instead of working together for the common good (i.e., the financial health of the organization), they wage meaningless turf battles and accomplish nothing of value.

In the last decade, a lot of IT departments have been significantly reduced or killed off altogher and the work outsourced so that expenses and waste (at least, in the short term) could be cut.  (“After all, we can get the same ‘work’ for 20% of the cost.”)

Yet, a number of companies have elected to discontinue their outsourcing relationships and have brought work back in-house because (Anyone?  Anyone?  That’s right, because…) they fail to recognize that poor communication isn’t incidental, that it isn’t just one of many causes of failed projects.  It’s typically the root cause.

Communication isn’t “I give you a set of requirements and you meet them”, any more than it’s “Here’s your program — over time and over budget, minus some of the functionality you wanted — but it’s yours, so pay me.”  Communication is “Let’s talk.”  It’s a two-way street.  I share an idea with you, and you share your thoughts with me.  Communication is an ongoing process, one that requires not just open minds but a common language.

The July, 2009, issue of Quality Progress Magazine has an excellent take on the concept of improving results by improving the communication process.  In the article (“All Ears“, by Sherman & Vono), the parties in need of more effective communication are the Quality department and top management.  The authors are telling Quality, “You have to speak the language of management — money! — if you expect to accomplish anything.”

The moral of the story for IT and its users — its clients — is a similar one.   IT, you’re trying to sell a concept to your clients, internal or external.  Learn to speak their language.  Learn how to talk in terms of the bottom line.  Show how you arrived at your conclusions.  Use plenty of pictures — charts, graphs, diagrams — to further the communication process.

Effective communication improves quality and produces more satisfying results, guaranteed.

Implementing changes in an organization can generate a range of emotions within your stakeholders (employees, customers, suppliers, etc.) that can create barriers to realizing your original change objectives.  Understanding why people are responding the way they are to your proposed changes will help you to roll-out your improvements more smoothly and allow you to obtain the buy-in from your stakeholders that will actually deliver the performance improvement your changes were designed to realize.

When you start to communicate change and improvement throughout your organization you will take your stakeholders through five phases or states of mind.  Each phase is a normal emotional state that most people go through.  Developing a communication plan to help guide your stakeholders through each phase, with prepared responses for each one, can ensure a successful roll-out for your changes and improvements.

What are these phases of change and how should you respond?

1. Anticipation.

Stakeholders are anxiously waiting for what is about to come. People may not know what to expect; rumors abound, and speculation increases.  Some may even be in denial of what is about to occur.

Introduce your strategy, present your concrete steps, and build awareness to overcome the speculation and reduce the resistance or denial factor.  Identify each stakeholder group and assess what information each group may need.

2. Confrontation.

Your stakeholders begin to see that change is really happening, improvement teams are forming, or new software features are being implemented.  But that does not mean they are happy about it.  In fact, they may be angry, frustrated, or downright resistant in an effort to fight your changes. 

Help stakeholders get through it.  Be firm and have responses to possible objections from each of your stakeholder groups.  Remind stakeholders of your strategy (the one you used to address their anticipation in phase 1).  You will need customized information tailored to each stakeholder group.  There is no “one-size-fits-all” approach here.  Each group has different interests, needs and objections.

3. Realization.

Once the change has been implemented, stakeholders will realize that nothing is ever going to be as it was before.  Some may reminisce, longing for the “old ways” of doing it.  Some groups may start negotiating alternatives to the changes seeking for a way out.  They may try and not use the changes or go back to the “old ways”.  Many will have questions about the changes and will want some answers.

Be prepared with various communication vehicles such as memos, newsletters, town-hall meetings, interviews, team meetings, coaching and training sessions.  Training is very important because changes introduce new concepts.  If you don’t offer enough information to overcome their resistance, you may prolong the next phase.

4. Depression.

Stakeholders may mourn the past. Intellectually, change is here, but emotionally, stakeholders don’t like it.  People see what they believe, which means that even if the changes are working, they may not “see” positive results. 

Address each stakeholder’s beliefs and give them time to work it through.  Develop monthly communications to reinforce the behavior change.  Keep an open door to answer lingering doubts.  Show everyone how well their efforts are working.  Communicate results and recognize successes.

5.  Acceptance.

Stakeholders are now accepting the changes. Although they may have reservations, they are not fighting the changes anymore. They should be seeing some of the benefits on their own, even if they are not completely convinced.  Some will love the changes and may wonder how they ever managed the “old” way.  Overall, they are starting to feel good about the changes and accept them as the new way of doing business.

You are not done.  You will need to reinforce your changes and improvements with some type of follow-up and review.  Use process audits, process reviews, and management reviews or solicit inputs from your stakeholders to obtain feedback and “lessons learned” that can be used to start a new cycle of improvement.  That’s right, at this point we are back to phase one, using feedback to anticipate stakeholders needs and make the next round of changes.

An understanding of these phases is critical for developing your communication plan. Your communication plan objectives should address each phase.

Change Phase Communication Objectives

1. Anticipation – introduce your strategy.
2. Confrontation – respond to objections.
3. Realization – provide training and support.
4. Depression – communicate monthly.
5. Acceptance – Review and obtain feedback.

Understanding why people are responding the way they are to your proposed change will help you to roll-out your improvements more successfully and obtain stakeholder-buy-in that will actually deliver the performance improvement your changes were designed to realize.

In ‘Top Ten Reasons’, we looked at why policies and procedures don’t work.  In this post, I’ll share a little about what we do when companies ask us to help improve their policies and procedures.

“Too long”, “unclear”, and “complicated” generally top the list of “Reasons Why Procedures Don’t Work”.  We often find that clients have complex flow charts, swim lane diagrams, and subway maps, usually with no clear starting or ending point or communications objective.  When workers look at these diagrams, they don’t know how to read them — they don’t know what the author is trying to tell them.

Get Organized, Then Consider Your Communications Objectives

While capturing everything you learned while studying your process may help you, you don’t need to show that around.  Think of your spaghetti diagram as homework, but think of your procedures as having a job to do. Your procedures are responsible for communicating know-how to someone who may have an alternate view of how a task should be done.

Think of your procedures as stories, with a beginning, middle, and end.  After discerning your intent, we look in our library for something we have composed already that tells a similar story. But our procedure communicates flow, or how raw materials, information and labor come together to create value for customers. By organizing the story around flow, we can simplify your procedures, not to mention the underlying processes. Flow should be a theme in all your procedures.

When we review a client’s procedures, we compare them to stories (e.g. procedures) that we have already written. We simplify client procedures so that they communicate flow. And we add measure and balance information at transition points to keep the underlying processes running smoothly.

Procedures Should Help Work Flow

Think of work flow as the current in your favorite fishing or boating stream.  When the stream moves at a “normal” pace, the water stays within its banks.  However, if a larger-than-normal volume comes downstream, or if the normal volume encounters an obstacle (like a bunch of fallen trees), the stream rises.  Soon, the stream has nowhere to go but out of its banks. What a mess.

To maintain work flow in your company, you need to know the measure and balance that should be maintained at each transition point in your process. For example, how much raw material should Receiving hand off to Production every hour?  Every day?  Such concrete measure and balance information determines the tempo of your processes. Workers need to know the appropriate tempo to prevent production managers from being inundated with material, and prevent inventory from backing up.

Procedures communicate flow.  And other kinds of documents and communications tools have other jobs. Thinking about and achieving all the communications jobs needed to roll out a process and keep it humming along is what we call “implementation”.

After Developing Your Procedures, You Have to Tell the Story

When we review a client’s procedures, we compare them to procedures, or stories, that we’ve already written. We simplify client procedures so they communicate flow.  And we add measure and balance information at transition points to keep the underlying processes running smoothly, at the appropriate tempo.

That may end up being a lot of information — more than you would want to write in text form as a procedure — so we deploy communication tools: maps, job aids, visual work boards, training, videos, etc.  These tools get the right information to the right people at the right time, so they can do their work at the right tempo and stay in sync.  Deploying communications tools in this way is how we achieve implementation.

I’ll cover implementation in a future blog post.

We have been hearing from IT department managers lately. They say that the volume of work standards has mushroomed in their departments, ostensibly to implement accepted IT processes such as Information Technology Infrastructure Library (ITIL), Capability Maturity Model (CMM), and others. Such tools are, of course, supposed to help us gain better alignment with business goals and more efficient project implementation.

But is the volume of documentation really helping? Despite the growth of documentation, managers note persistent symptoms including an ever-increasing project backlog, and little direct feedback from completed projects indicating that they are having the desired impact on the business. These are symptoms of lack of alignment of processes and the business’ goals.

When workers view procedures as irrelevant or hard to use, they tend to rely on tribal knowledge—they just ask each other questions. While that can be effective, formal knowledge management systems become superfluous and they die. This invites other problems, like inconsistent product quality, loss of knowledge as people leave, lack of compliance and no audit trail, hoarding of information. All of this puts customer satisfaction and even the company’s future at risk, managers say.

Figure 1. Knowledge Management Systems

Written standards, policies and procedures need to be aligned with key processes, or users will find workarounds.  We hear from IT managers because they think of us as ‘the policies and procedures guys,’ and they sense that “better” procedures are the answer.

But we’re the first ones to suggest that standards, policies and procedures are only part of the answer. When found in abundance, policies , procedures and standards could be a symptom of lack of alignment around business goals. It’s like trying to patch an ineffective working relationship by writing down every possible scenario. Of course that’s impossible. And it only hamstrings the creativity and initiative of your best professionals.

But playing the role of facilitator, you can help staff and stakeholders collaborate to critique existing processes, modify them as necessary, and agree on a workable process.

As their manager and resource, you can provide communications and training to reinforce buy-in and adoption. Success creates an impetus for further improvement. With the improved focus, It’s easier to weed out unnecessary processes and get better results.

I believe that there is a misconception among many people that procedures are the most important method of creating internal control.  Then lots of procedures are written – documenting process after process, whether for processes on the manufacturing floor or in the office (as the Sarbanes-Oxley Act requires for Financial and Accounting processes).

The problem is that poorly written and unused procedures provide very poor control, if any.  How can a procedure that few people know about, and even fewer people use, provide control?  It doesn’t.

However, well-written procedures that are also well communicated can be an important element in achieving consistent results (the typical goal of process control).  But it is not the only way, and procedures are really best if used in conjunction with other control methods.

What if, along with procedures (or even in lieu of procedures) you conduct thorough and regular training for those involved in the process (and create training records to provide evidence of the training).  And you also create SMART objectives for the process, and create records of key process results that align with the process objectives, along with visual tracking of results against objectives.

Wouldn’t proper training of personnel and tracking of actual process results against desired results (objectives) demonstrate control better than an unused procedure sitting in a drawer somewhere?

There is general agreement among Quality Managers and Quality Auditors that process auditing is more beneficial than clause based auditing.

In clause based auditing, an organization or a segment of an organization is audited to verify it complies with a particular clause of the ISO 9001 QMS Requirements.

With process auditing, a particular process or group of processes is audited to ensure that it complies with any part or clause of the standard that applies to it.

For example, corrective action is a clause in the standard, but corrective action should also be a continual improvement process.   If you are doing a clause based audit, you would audit aspects of corrective action that are covered in the corrective action clause (8.5.2).  If you are doing a process audit of corrective action, then you would verify that the corrective action process is in compliance with all applicable sections of the standard, not just clause 8.5.2.  It could include things such as Customer focus (5.2) and Customer satisfaction (8.2.1), Competence, training and awareness (6.2.2), Control of documents (4.2.3) and records (4.2.4), Analysis of data (8.4), and (definitely) Management review (5.6).

But effective process auditing requires a good grasp of the standard, so the auditor or audit team knows which clauses of the standard apply to a particular process.  While new auditors or a newly established QMS may start with clause based auditing, the goal should be to move to process auditing as soon as the auditors and the quality team feel familiar with the standard.

As the above example demonstrates, process auditing provides a much more comprehensive and in-depth measurement of the Quality Management System, and thereby provides better value for your internal auditing efforts.

There are occasionally stories in the quality world about ISO 9001 Registrars handing out ISO 9001 certificates, but who are not properly accredited.  Believe it or not, there are unscrupulous people and businesses that are willing to take advantage of those who have not done their homework.

As many of you know, ISO (the International Organization for Standardization) is not actually involved in granting ISO certifications.  ISO creates standards, they are not in the business of enforcing them.  Other organizations actually handle the process of granting ISO certification.

Worldwide, the International Accreditation Forum (IAF) is the organization that handles all the facets associated with granting ISO 9001 Certification.  The IAF works with national or regional bodies, which in turn accredit registration bodies that go out and audit organizations for compliance to the ISO 9001 standard.

Here in the U.S., the American National Standards Institute and the American Society of Quality cooperate to form the ANSI-ASQ National Accreditation Board, known as ANAB.  They accredit registration organizations, attempting to ensure consistency and compliance in ISO 9001 registration auditing.

Make sure you registrar is ANAB accredited

When you hire an ISO auditor for ISO 9001 certification, be sure to verify that they are accredited by ANAB or whatever the equivalent of ANAB is in your country or region (you can find a list of members at the IAF website, http://www.iaf.nu/).  And your registration certificate should have the ANAB and the IAF logos on it.  Without them, you are not truly ISO 9001 certified.

Make sure your ISO 9001 Certificate will have the IAF and ANAB seals

The Mississippi has been out of her banks frequently this year.  It finally receded a day or so ago (from the most recent above flood stage crest) so normal riverfront activity could resume.  Of course, downtown St. Louis is quite prepared for high water.  While a few streets and parking garages may be inundated, flood gates keep most downtown areas dry.

Then when the river returns to its banks, riverfront activity quickly returns to normal.

Being prepared for natural disasters is the key to coping and restoration should disaster strike.  In business, being prepared for disaster is the most important factor in whether your organization survives catastrophic damage by fire, flood, tornado, hurricane, or whatever Mother Nature throws at you.

If you are not prepared for natural disasters, you may be interested in our Disaster Recovery Policies, Procedures, and Forms.  Here, experts in the field will guide you step by step so that, should disaster strike, you can quickly get back to business.

Bizmanualz is getting ready to ramp up our consulting services. We already provide great services for implementing quality management systems, putting policies and procedures in place, assisting companies with their sales and marketing efforts, and much more.

But we’ve seen throughout our many consulting engagements that something has been missing. While many of our clients have great intentions by trying to comply with an ISO standard or something of the like, the strategy and vision to back that up can be lacking.

“Good business leaders create a vision, articulate the vision, passionately own the vision, and relentlessly drive it to completion.” – Jack Welch

It all starts with a vision you have for your company or department. Is that vision being accurately and concisely communicated throughout the company? If not, the outcome can be far from what you envisioned.

For example, say your vision is to launch a social media marketing campaign to appeal to a broader, younger, Internet-savvy audience. What does that mean for your marketing team that is unfamiliar with social media networks? What does it mean for your sales team that has no experience with that type of lead? And most importantly, does your product make sense for that audience?

These are all questions you need to answer with a clear strategy before you launch a campaign that could end up costing your company. Our business experts are eager to help formulate your company’s strategy into clear steps that will lead to success. Contact us to learn more, and stay tuned for our brand new website just for our services clients.