Coming out of 2020, organizations continued to face a wide array of challenges—ongoing supply chain disruptions, the Great Resignation, conscious consumption, and flailing legacy systems. Many of the organizational transformation work in 2021 that process and performance teams were involved in, were linked to 4 major drivers.
- Continuation of digital adoption—the last two years have put digital transformation work into the pressure cooker. Whether it's replacing legacy systems, automating processes, adopting AI, or digitalizing the customer experience, organizations continue to invest extensively in digital programs.
- Build agile capabilities—though organizational agility has been a topic of interest for the last decade, the last two years have proven that flexible organizations are more resilient in the face of disruption and change.
- Spotlight on productivity—the expansion of remote work over the last two years sparked an onslaught of discussions about productivity. The biggest questions revolve around are workers still productive? How do we manage and measure in a place where managers can’t observe employees' work? And how do we recreate the innovative and collaborative aspects of work necessary for productivity in a remote environment?
- Harmonizing how we work—to improve productivity, support digital efforts, and manage the customer experience, organizations require breaking through silos and shifting to an end-to-end process view. Additionally, organizations are streamlining their processes to focus attention on critical work and value management.
All of which put pressure on organizations to adapt, and in one way or another, remake themselves.
Resiliency and Transformation
As organizations started to get their footing, they realized resiliency requires a level of agility. Based on research on strategic planning and organizational agility, 96% of organizations think organizational agility is important to their overall success. In this, organizations actively engage in building flexibility into the strategic planning and implementation processes. Some significant factors that came up in the research included rolling planning and implementation cycles, embedded collaboration mechanism, what-if analysis, and autonomous teams.
However, planning and implementing changes don’t happen in a vacuum. Consequently, due to the sheer volume of changes, corporate culture has gained substantial traction this year. In fact, 57% of process and performance professionals indicate that culture is very important to how they work. Not only does culture play a role in how changes are made, often process and performance teams play an active role in shepherding culture shifts within their organizations.
Some of the relevant research from this year on strategy, agility, and corporate culture include:
- Best Practices for Driving Agility: Better Structures and Strategy Practices
- The Role of PPM Professionals in Culture
- Roles and Levers for Managing and Changing Culture
Leveraging and Expanding Core Competencies
There has been a silver lining for process and performance management professionals over the last two years. Amid all the crises, organizations have a higher-level of understanding of the value these disciplines provide. Particularly the ability to create clarity and structure around how work gets accomplished, fix broken processes, engage people in change, and staying flexible enough to support a shifting range of priorities.
Consequently, professionals were tapped to support a wide array of projects. The rash of replacing legacy ERP systems required understanding, standardizing, and documenting end-to-end processes. Significant growth in the use of process automation required process teams help to capture the current state and re-design process for execution by bots. Additionally, organizations tackled process-related impediments to transformation and productivity. Particularly in creating standards and harmony across the organization, streamlining and embedding flexibility in processes, and connecting employees to process knowledge.
Some of the relevant research from this year on process management, measurement, and productivity include:
- Best Practices in Process Frameworks
- Fundamentals of Measures
- Expanding How We Define Productivity
- Fixing Knowledge & Process Productivity Problems
Thank you all for sharing your stories, time, and insights as we continued to build in 2021. I look forward to learning more, sharing experiences, and seeing where we all will go in 2022.
As we prepare for a fresh start in 2022….
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