We’re halfway through a process workshop, and I’m on my third cup of coffee. We’ve booked our best conference room for two solid weeks and assembled the best and brightest of my client’s process and IT experts. The integrator consultants, who have been contracted to renew my client’s business critical but badly outdated system, have brought in their team, and their offshore experts are on conference call.
It’s been over a decade since anyone had a proper overview of this system. Documentation is outdated, and the system has been patched too many times by too many people to keep track. Knowledge of how the system works is in people’s heads, and here we are, putting all the heads together to extract the knowledge. Before we got this far, we spent several weeks identifying our processes and activities in the system. My team has cried blood over Visio flowcharts.
The consultant asks, “Is this status code still active?” Hmm… We’re not sure. Maybe it could be cleaned out, or maybe it needs to be converted to the new system. Someone suspects one of the more obscure departments is still using it. Another question: “How many of these orders do you process per month? Compared to these others?” We have a rough idea, but no exact figures. The amount fluctuates, but we’re not sure what drives this behavior.
Now we’re almost done. Thank goodness this is not meant to be a process improvement workshop – we simply want transfer the existing operations into the new system. This is hard enough. It would be nice, though, to implement some of the advanced features that the new system offers. “Are there any issues in this area?” the consultant asks. Intense discussion follows. “Not really“, starts one. “Oh no, this module has never worked properly for our orders”, counters another. “We’ve asked for changes to this module for years but nobody takes any notice, so we invented this workaround”, goes third. “What? You…” the original speaker yells. We break for lunch just in time to avoid a fistfight.
Why is this so difficult? What if we could have facts about our processes? What if we knew exactly what data flows through our systems, and what the pain points really are – based on facts instead of feelings?
Actually, we could. In this case, I just spectacularly failed to convince my client that we should use Midagon’s Process and Data Excellence concept to quantify the current processes. We could have answers to all of these questions within seconds, with a couple of simple clicks. Next time, I’ll try harder.
Taru Weckroth, +358 40 510 1918
taru.weckroth@midagon.com
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