Process, enterprise 2.0, lean and agility

October 4, 2011 By 1 Comment

Summary: enterprise 2.0 has often been shown as the opposite of formal organizations and processes that have been the rule until then. What raised a keen interest from and fear for others who know that enterprises, organizations with a production purpose, can’t live without processes. In “Enterprise 2.0 and processes”, Yves Caseau shows that putting the one against the other in a Manichean way is wrong and to what extent each one improves and completes the other.

I usually don’t write about french books on this blog, for obvious reasons. By definition, most of the audience I have here can’t read french and even for those who do, prices are too expensive on amazon.com for imported books. But I decided to make an exception for this one because I think it brings a new way of considering things that is worth knowing about for anyone.

This book is Processus et Entreprise 2.0 (Processes and enterprise 2.0 in english), and is about innovation and collaboration through lean management. It’s by Yves Caseau, Senior VP at Bouygues Telecom (large Telco, part of the Bouygues Group). This book is interesting because it makes us look at enterprise 2.0 with a new point of view in this kind of literacy and gives it, in my opinion, a new relevance that lots of CxOs many have not seen until then. As a matter of fact, the common vision focused on social media/communities/passion/engagement often turns its back on value measurement and relies on the only fact one is a believer or not. What I often call “Enterprise Denial” made the message hard to get in “our” european cultural context relying on rational scepticism. Caseau’s approach is different : it starts with processes and shows that enterprise 2.0 is the only possible way to keep them efficient in the future.

Let’s start with some words as an aside. Even if this movement may look odd, I did not came to enterprise 2.0 by the web but by short cuts that were more about operations efficiency.Many parts of  the management side of enterprise 2.0 (or, rather, all the things one should wonder to avoid staying in a world of angelic illusion), have things in common with Theory Of Constraints (anyone should have read The Goal at least once in his life). It’s also impossible to deny that new forms of management we are promoting can be found in Deming’s 14 points, Deming who had also a clear understanding of what what wrong in our economy….30 years ago. The list is very long… It’s interesting, even surprising, to see how the manufacturing industry has solved agility, quality, improvement issues while the world of services and knowledge relying on intangible flows is still struggling. Maybe because the intangible nature of flows makes visual management impossible or makes it easy not to see things one don’t want to see ? Maybe. We’ll discuss this in a future post.

So let’s come back to Caseau’s book. Rather than starting with the assumption that 2.0 (or social) is the answer to anything and try to make the enterprise fit in, he starts with the opposite approach. He starts with problems and ends with a solution that appears to be enterprise 2.0. Like it or not but enterprises are organized on processes that are essential and vital and this won’t change. I’m to talking about the caricature of processes we’re being inflicted to make it too easy to hold them up to public ridicule. but what they should be. Caseau makes it clear that processes should be as light as possible to be manageable, as agile as possible to be improvable. Hence the importance of lean management. Things become really interesting when enterprise 2.0, rather than being seen as a danger for steadiness and processes appears than being a lever that serves agility and innovation. In this context, conversational systems support ongoing learning, innovation and ongoing improvement.

He ends with the necessary cultural of human sided of this necessary change.

Contrary to what some like to promote, processes should not disappear but become people centric to make sense, be understandable, drivable, manageable, improvable. As a matter of fact, processes are here to serve both people and the enterprise while the reality is more about people serving processes. Caseau gives us an “understandable” explanation of the world of processes, quality, Lean, Lean Six Sigma and hits the nail on the head on things like KPIs, information flows management, meetings (that are the more elementary form of exchange…)…

This book will appeal to people who don’t see a clear link between the new paradigm and what the enterprise and its operations are about or see it rather like a danger. A technical book that those who love incantations, acts of faith and fairy tales may enjoy less but that reminds us that 2.0 and social are here to serve the organization. I endlessly repeat that enterprise 2.0 increases the human and knowledge capital that can be tapped to better process execution….that’s what all the book is about.

If I had to summarize the book in one sentence I’d say “looking at the future, feet on the ground”.

Processus et entreprise 2.0 is available on Amazon. It’s so expensive oversees that buying it on amazon.fr and having it shipped could be a better option. I think it’s also available on iTunes for iPad owners.

 

 

 

 

Filed Under: Books I read, Enterprise 2.0 & Social Business, Management & HR Tagged With: , , , , , , , , , , ,

Getting rid of unproductive shadow organizations

August 30, 2011 By 1 Comment

Summary : enterprises will have to improve their organizational and management. Projects, pilots, initiatives are multiplying to experiment, learn, understand. But what is the right duration for sandbox ? The common answer is that it should take the time it needs but there’s a risk that’s growing with time. Many projects do nothing but creating shadow organizations inside enterprises, organizations that sometimes compete the one with the other and often with the official one. In the end, no one wins in such zero-sum games when they last too longs : enterprise see their immediate performance decreasing, projects fail at delivering their promise and employees lose their motivation. It’s essential that, at a given moment, enterprises align themselves with the projects they launched if they don’t want to loose everything.
If there’s a consensus on the fact today’s organization are far from being efficient and that things aren’t improving over time,  it does not go further. To some extent, we can say there’s a convergence on the future model but not on the way to get to it. Top-down, bottom-up, both, in an interventionist or optional way, evolution or revolution model… It would seem that all roads lead to Roma…let’s hope that’s true. But it seem logic : on people-centric project (people as a matter, a lever and a target) it’s impossible to overlook the past, culture etc..

To make it short, “push organizations” are dying, welcome to “pull” ones. Consequence : the largest part of what we call management is to make it difficult for people to work (these are not my words but Peter Drucker’s one…and I fully subscribe to that). This leads to the need of reversing the pyramids and to do it in an efficient and productive way. It reminds me of an anecdote taken from Vineet Nayar’s experience. At the beginning he set up the first elements of an organization designed to serve those who actually create value, then he realized the limits of his approach. Everything that was being implemented was applying and relying on the existing model, systems and processes, designed to be top-down. Hence a new approach aiming at building, step by step, a new coherent model aligned with its goals instead of a poultice on a wooden leg.

Now, let’s have a quick look at many enterprise 2.0 or social business projects. In how many cases did they come with process re-engineering ? With a reflexion on how to trace how value is created ? On how things and people are measured, evaluated, assessed ? Of course, that’s still a young and emerging matter. But, as I recently heard from two people that can be considered as convinced people, advocates, project ambassadors : “it’s been young and emerging for such a long time that it’s getting old now !”, “Ok for chaotic experimentations but we’ve been trying so many things in so many ways in so many directions for 5 years and the people ‘above’ haven’t understand that it’s time to blow the end of game whistle and make things square”, “Honestly, I’m about to give up the fight…I’ve been knocked about too many times for no benefits…and they still don’t get the thing”.

What were they talking about ? They were saying that these projects were generating new structures and way of working that go against the official organization compete with it and, even experimentations that compete the one with the other. [Read more...]

Filed Under: Enterprise 2.0 & Social Business, Management & HR Tagged With: , , , , , , , , , ,

Organizations don’t (only) need builders

May 5, 2011 By Leave a Comment

Summary : it’s a shared assumption that enterprises need doers. But, pushed to its limit, these logics do not always mean improvement but, paradoxically, stagnation if not regression. As a matter of fact, “doing” and “building” often means adding things to what exists without taking time to unravel it even when it goes against what has to be implemented. It has a well known consequence : a pile of orders, rules and contradictory processes that cause the opposite of what’s expected : lost, employees do anything but what they’re expected to, don’t take initiatives because they always go against an existing rule or, on the contrary, make failure to respect the rules the new rule. Before building, instead of adding, organizations need people who clean things up. Tomorrow’s organizations are organizations that remove things more than they add.

I recently wrote a post on the myth of “superman manager” that was a barrier to any significant evolution of this role. My intent, in this post, is to go further in the reflection. Behind all that, there’s the idea according to which the only people that matter are the “doers”. At first sight that seems obvious. But it highly depends on what we mean by “doing”.

I won’t elaborate once more on the fact that, for many, “doing” means acting in a visible way and micro-managing.

“Doing” also means leaving one’s trace, one’s mark. And that’s not only an individual issue but also a collective one because the whole organization is acting the same may. Managers’ job being to make things work, they try to take the necessary steps. At the organization level, all the managing body is heading in the same direction : taking steps to solve problems and move forward.

That’s where things often go wrong.

Is something doing wrong ? No problem, a new layer of tools, procedures and rules is implemented. Should things dysfunction a little time later ? The same method will be applied. Organizations have been piling layers of tools and rules supposed to make the organization more efficient for decades. Each time with the satisfaction of having done things well for those who have “built” the solution. In fact they often added their own repair patch to the patches others added before them.

At the moment enterprises are making a move toward enterprise 2.0 or social business there’s no doubt they’ll use the same old good methods. New tools and rules that will make sure that the right usage (because it’s all about usage) will be adopted.

So employees will have to sort tools and arbitrate between 15 layers of procedures that prescribe them 15 different behaviors in a given context. The result is often farcical situations where, having to comply with many conflicting obligations, employees do not respect any of them.

For example, I’m often asked “how to be sure this community will work”. My answer is often miles away from the expected one that establishes community managers as the saviours as dying community systems. Sticking to a very strict definition of what a community is, I’m convinced that a facilitation system may help when things makes sense but can’t make miracles. In other words :

• If the community really exists, it will work by its own. A little facilitation can improve things to some extent.

• If the community exists but is not alive, there’s no reason to add systems that will make people go against the systemic and corporate rules, even against their own interest. In this case, the solution is not to add anything new but remove the barriers tha prevent people to make a move from intention to action.

• If the community does not exist there’s no reason to set up a system that will create it. What has to be created is the interest toward a topic, the “community feeling” will follow and we’ll end in one of the two above mentioned cases.

To state things in a more simple way : what prevents new models from working and from solving today’s problems is what has been implemented to solve yesterday’s problems and seldom makes sense today. Examples are more than numerous.

So, lets have a quick tour :

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Filed Under: Management & HR Tagged With: , , , , , , , , , ,

From the enterprise that adds to the one that removes

July 16, 2009 By 2 Comments

Still in the “how to adapt the way we work to new challenges”, a frequent question is to know how to get employees involved.

If we rely on what I said here, three cases can be distinguished.

- when employees follow rules, processes.

- when employees are left alone and have to go out of the usual patterns to achieve their goals.

- when the organizaiton relies on employee’s willingness to participate.

I won’t tackle the third one here because it’s marginal in comparison with businesses main issues and needs a specific approach. But the two first still remain.

In the first case, which is about enriching an existing process, one or two rules have to be added. I specify that adding rules doesn’t necessarily mean adding an extra workload : it’s often about making public things that used to be kept for one’s use, that were only shared by two people (debrieffing a mission or a project with a superior…) because there was no relevant way to sharte them, or that were shared through irrelevant tools (email…)

In the second case, it’s the contrary. What can make people switch to an “adhoc” work mode in order to attain their assigned goals ? The answer can be found in the difference between a “push” and a “pull” mode : in one case the organization has to add pressure to move forward, in the other it has to remove constraints.

For some reasons you will easily find by yourself, no one never think about removing things while managing a transformation project. Managers, project leaders, executives have their pride, which is about what they built, not what they remove. Building, adding, shows that one is really doing somethings, it increases one’s status. Removing make people think you have no solution, you try the easy way. To some extent it’s considered as lazyness. Even if removing needs a lot of work, even if it’s more complex that adding something, organization only pay attentions to those who do, those who add. Anyone who build a huge labyrinthine system will be rewarded, not the one who removes barriers what is seen as a “non-achievement” that is not worth being on a CV.

Just imagine what this kind of attitude would look like in medicine. It would be like treating appendicitis not by removing an useless organ but by making a difficult transplantation. You can find the opposite example in the software industry where many OS or softwares are made by endlessly adding new layers on an old base no one masters anymore, because things have been added for decades without simplifying anything. Ten years later, we all can see what it means in terms of user experience, maintenance etc…

Businesses who will do things the right way will be those who will learn how to reward those who remove instead of endlessly adding useless layers that harm the organization.

Years ago I wad told that the evidence that a software has reached maturity can be seen by its designer’s ability to make it more simple and remove useless things instead of adding unneeded features, a pretence of progess that is in fact a true regression. Some industries discovered the LEAN method, knowledge industries need to learn from them.

Then, and then only, organizations will reach a kind a maturity.

Filed Under: Management & HR Tagged With: , , ,

Management 2.0, SOO and productivity

March 26, 2009 By Leave a Comment

I started, here and there, writing about the need for changing flows direction within organization : switching from a “pushed” to a “pull” way of producting and communicating. The purpose is to make it possible for people to determine their action according to a goal rather than to an order.

Why is that so important ?

Because it’s more consistent with the reality of people’s work today. It waid said many times, repeated, but the time when employees has to reproduce endlessly an unique task or gesture is over. Their activities, their daily tasks, are not defined in a production plan but by a request, a need that are continuously changing. Generally people don’t need to be be told what to do but need support to do things. They need more support than instructions and this support, as paradoxical as it may be, may come from above. Today, orders are coming from above and support from above is expected. What is needed to help people to do their job is the exact opposite.

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