Have you thought about the prospect that the business process is the problem?
I remember a grant approval work-flow application we were developing at Save the Children. The grant process was a core one for the organization, and one that was old. The problem was that everyone wanted to have a say before the grant was approved. Then the spending of the grant funds required another set of approvals. Since we were automating the process, everyone wanted an approval alert and sign-off step, before the next step in the process could be taken. That was a step in the wrong direction.
One of the reasons RACI charts were developed was to make clear who the decision-maker was versus the implementer and those to be consulted and informed [1]. The RACI exercise narrowed the decision maker to one. For the grant development process, the VP of International Programs was the key decision-maker; for implementation, it was the regional manager. That meant that most everyone else could be informed, which meant reviewing the periodic reports, but not holding up the process. This made an older process much more streamlined. And the system implementation simpler.
The point is not to be trapped by old process boxes, but to think outside the box. As Michael Hammer said, we need to "stop paving the cow paths." [2] |