It"s Relationships That Matter
By Britain Harvey, Vice President, PMC Solutions
It"s all about the relationships, right? J. Chris White wrote in an article in Quality Digest that, “In a complex system, relations dominate and primarily determine the success of the system.”
Because processes are made up of discrete parts, how they interact defines the relationship of the parts. White uses the example of a business process that has employees as its parts, and procedures they use as its relations. “Both parts and relations must be effective for the system to succeed in meeting its objectives. Based on systems theory, changes in a system’s relations often represent the largest potential for improvement because the relations provide the structure in which the system functions,” he writes.
In many process improvements, the bottlenecks or problem areas are not with the employees. The employees act in accordance with the system that they are in. Perhaps they are isolated and working with different measurement standards, and thus, they don’t communicate often. Perhaps the reward program discourages team success in favor of individual effort. In a structure that separates employees who need to share critical and timely information, the structure itself is the problem. By changing this structure, the process achieves new, better results.
Rethinking and redesign of processes in order to improve measures of cost, quality, service and speed, often focuses on the relationship of the process parts, since those relationships determine how the process performs.
Sometimes, upon completion of re-organization and process re-engineering efforts, many companies discover they have not met their new cost and time to market targets. Those companies have not really examined the relationship of the processes they are using. They have simply re-arranged the parts. Their relationship is fundamentally the same as before.
Most companies are good at focusing on parts. They do this by:
- Informing employees about the process of which they are a part.
- Training employees for their activities.
- Showing employees their spans of control.
- Ensure that all employees are receiving necessary resources.
When companies focus on the relations (i.e., procedures, coordination and communication) of a system or process, they:
- Re-evaluate process objectives.
- Eliminate as much handling of the product as possible.
- Establish teams that include all necessary disciplines and cross-train members.
- Model the process on a computer using simulation software with participation from all team members.
White concludes that leadership should be focusing on developing the measures for success and analyzing the results. Management should, then, focus on deciding what action to take based on the analysis and then allocating resources to carry out those actions. But everyone should be involved in improving processes by examining the relationships between the parts of the processes. Only then does dramatic improvement result.