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3 Reasons Great Process Improvement Culture Starts at the Bottom

I recently spoke to Fabio Cardeso, process excellence director - International Operations General Motors Financial, about the pitfalls of outsourcing the documentation of process failures, why people hide inefficiencies, the identification of risks in processes, and why he believes a great process culture starts from the bottom up and not the top down.

APQC: Why can outsourcing the documentation of process failures not always be the best idea?

FABIO: If you want to leverage your own resources and create accountability and sustainability over time, you should try to work internally.  Every employee in charge of a process is already an expert.  The outsourced approach is based on picking the process owner’s brain when we want to document what a process is about, either because we have the urgency to create a document, or because we want to focus on improvements. Of course this approach can work: bring people in from the outside and in a short period of time you’ll have amazing process manuals, but little has been done to empower and engage your employees with a different way of doing things.

Now let’s think for a second. Imagine how powerful you can become if your “already-process-experts” start learning how to create process documentation, how to identify waste and fix things with the right support from an internal team of improvement experts.  It can take longer, but has a lot more benefits. And most importantly, it transforms your company culture.

APQC: What is the key to getting people to focus on so the process rather than results during improvements?

FABIO: There’s a combination of things that make people see the value of understanding processes rather than focusing solely on results.  First, demonstrating how rework makes them less efficient, despite all the efforts towards the end of the process (quality checks) to deliver results, and how it is possible for them to identify, fix, and celebrate small victories. This creates a positive and powerful environment.  We empower people to get better and faster results.

Second, connecting with every individual and making them realize their contribution to the task, process, value stream and the company, makes a difference. Once that level of awareness is achieved and people are able to think in terms of their contribution but feel a sense of pride about their contributions. It’s also easier to look past your boundaries and connect with internal customers and providers, where the majority of the problems typically are.  Starting with the people and understanding the human side of processes is a much better way to foster an environment where improvements and cultural change go together.

APQC: In financial management, risk mitigation is critical. When building process maps, what is the best way to include risk mitigation?

FABIO: Breaking departmental silos and validating the process through multiple views is always required.  Risk mitigation is critical to everything we do.  That’s why, from a methodological perspective, we cover two elements as part of the “thinking and learning process”.

First, every process must be validated with specific stakeholders before submitting it for validation by the team leader.  This means that as a process owner, you need to ask for advice from audit, operational risk, or any party that can validate your process. This not only makes the processes stronger, but also fosters communication between parties that otherwise wouldn’t have interacted unless something went wrong.  Team leaders validate everything and provide feedback and guide the process owner in charge of documenting to ask for advice, closing the cycle of communication. 

Second, every process goes through FMEA analysis that helps determine whether lack of controls or potential failures may arise.  Even if you fail to strengthen controls at process mapping, the journey continues, and at some point, we will be able to have a better chance to close that gap.

APQC: A lot of process improvement programs talk about connecting people to processes. Can you give a concrete example of this?

FABIO: It may sound funny, but we make people walk around.  Literally, that’s what we tell them to do!  When creating a process map, you can often find yourself in a situation where information is processed by someone else in a different department until you get it back.  Chances are you will end up putting them in a “black box” because you ignore what they do… and that’s why you have to walk.  We tell every employee, “Get up! Go over there and ask people what they do; observe, take notes and make your process more detailed”.  We make people communicate while they’re documenting and pinpointing improvement opportunities. We emphasize that behind each “black box” there is a person; processes are people based and we need to understand the big picture: thinking outside the box because you physically walk out of your little box.  In service environments this approach is both possible and very powerful.

APQC: Can you explain why you believe a good process improvement culture starts from the bottom up?

FABIO: Only the process owner really knows how the process is performed.  Dealing with different perceptions and communication breakdowns between leaders and process owners is fundamental.  Because process improvements a time intensive, improvement efforts require prioritization to ensure time from a great number of resources trying to run the business at the same time; ultimately requiring support from the top.  The trick is to set the right goal, to sell the picture of the future correctly.  If we just tell people to take time to create process maps, two things could happen. First the process map could reflect the boss’s version rather than use the time to identify and tackle what’s not right in it. Second the employees will only focus on documentation and overlook the full value of the process and how improvements could improve how they get work done. If we incorporate every leadership level, we can create a culture of thinking about process based on honest and accurate views from front-line employees, where leaders review and approve documents within a collaborative environment as part of their objectives.

APQC: Why do organizations sometimes overlook or even ‘hide’ inefficiencies in their processes and process maps? How can organizations avoid this?

FABIO: There can be many reasons for this, and in my experience.  The first reason is a lack of process expertise by the documenter. When someone who knows little about a process creates documents they will inevitably depend on someone else’s dedication and experience.  Support could be limited, and the documentation could suffer from communication gaps and a lack of understanding.  This is the reason why I believe making process owners experts at documentation is the winning approach. 

Another reason is related to boundaries.  How far do I have to go in my documentation? Do I have to document other people’s job?   Hand-offs are a common place for communication breakdowns, mistakes, and therefore, reworks or hidden factors.  One way to avoid this is by explaining the process as part of a customer-focused, value stream.  

The third reason has to do with clarity—sometimes the process itself is wrong for the job and no amount of reworking the process steps will fix the issue.  To avoid this we need to start with a foundation where we’re clear on the objective and goals of what we’re supposed to do. This approach can take longer, but inefficiencies are detected and the possibility of compounding mistakes in the improvement process is reduced.

A fourth reason is the desire to fix things fast. The race against time very often compromises quality. This is why we end up with incomplete documents, or process maps that may look pretty but don’t include all that necessary steps. Understanding that the thought process is more important than a deliverable is fundamental. It is not easy, but it’s probably one of the first steps towards true cultural change. Just think for a second about the possibilities of replicating that thought process across your business, focusing on quality to get better quality-food for thought!

Finally, I make my team aware that while we are process improvement experts, our objective is to teach process owners to think like us.  We’re not the heroes that make the improvements and take the credit; we’re here to empower our people and make them feel proud of their improvements and efficiencies.  We are successful if the business learned the importance of being efficient and how to do it on their own.

APQC: Finally, in order to transform a culture you tell organization executives to celebrate discoveries in processes they didn’t expect? Can you explain why you teach this?

FABIO: There’s nothing more frustrating than dealing with perceptions. Leaders usually win based on their authority and it’s exhausting. Without clarity around a process, three different perceptions can be found:

  1. what the leader thinks,
  2. what the process actually is, and
  3. what leadership wishes it were (because they usually know things are not perfect, but probably don’t know just how bad).

We learned to address one of the major pains in service environments: the different views between the process owners and their leaders.  Associates may compensate for or avoid poor results by adding non, value-added steps to ensure quality, without looking for root causes.  As long as the results are acceptable, the leaders think everything is satisfactory, and the associates continue to exert themselves in an inefficient environment.  We teach leaders the value of finding the truth about their processes, while simultaneously empowering the process owners to raise their hands and document the current state accurately.  This is the only way to close communication gaps, make it sustainable over time,  and make this way of thinking part of our DNA.

Fabio will present at the 2014 APQC Process Conference in Houston, TX, October 16 - 17.

You can follow Fabio on Twitter @fabiocardeso