Universal business process diagram

It has been several years since I wrote on this model, and it has been enhanced only so slightly. In the wording below the BPO-wording has been expanded to products to enhance it’s universality-claim. As always, it is more interesting to read about the things that go wrong than the ideal world, so examples of pitfalls will be given which can be understood with this model.

Diagram 1. Universal Business Process Diagram

Some general pitfalls

In every organization a balanced combination of various expertises is needed. All parties mentioned above need to be represented sufficiently in the (management) team for the whole to be successful, where every industry and every situation might require a different balance. Still, a ‘general wisdom’  is that the President of an organization best come out of it’s core processes, so the horizontal development of ‘accounts’ above. Several pitfalls should be avoided:

• Sometimes the Financial Director has the ultimate say: danger is that only the immediate financial results count, and the organization is ‘bled to death’ through underresourcing. Insufficient tools are provided, and that has to be made up through harder work. The best-motivated employees (usually the ones with domain knowledge) are driven ever harder, until they really have no slack at all any more. Especially they see that some expenses are just ‘soo logical’ but they can not present their vision strong enough in the appropriate channels to get management approval. In the typical case, a saving on salaries is driven ´boiling the water for the employee, until the frog jumps out of the pan´.
• General management might not position itself as a ‘third dimension’ overlooking the whole organization, but as a representative of the capital-providers. Although this might also occur with private companies, stock-listed companies seem to have a higher incidence of this trait. The same “Financials only’ scenario follows.
• A periodic leadership by a representative of another Support or Production area might be useful in case of a calamity, but long term either this individual needs to pick up sufficient ‘core process’ affinity and experience herself, do the same within the team, or make way for one who does.
• If the company is part of a larger family, the percentage of high-potentials should be kept in check sufficiently. Rough guess is maximum 20% of each layer. Where these hi-po´s might have exemplary personal skills and backgrounds, if they are in the subsidiary for only a fairly short period of time, they do not have sufficient time to gain the domain knowledge and apply it too, before they move to the next stage of their personal development. Yes, the larger family needs their skills since they will supply the next generation of overall leaders, but the danger is that – especially the smaller – divisions they visit on their way up are left without enough ‘blood to supply the oxygen throughout the body’. If I may believe some current articles on the latest generations, we run the risk of both the combination of limited supply of hi-po’s and their high demands for mobility make that organizations do not get the time to reap rewards sufficiently of ‘internally job-hopping millennials’.

Applied to Project Management

A typical project is like a typical company, with very similar challenges. To successfully implement a change, one generally needs 3 components: Client Domain Knowledge (the horizontal axis), Supplier Domain Knowledge (production, or resources and people), and Project Management Skills (process). By the way, it is amazing to see that this division of required skills also applies to some specific areas. For IT one can e.g. identify the 3 areas as: Requirement Engineering, Solution Architecture and Project Management. Careful readers will recognize some Prince2-influence in here. These 3 areas are needed in Services, where one needs to have been exposed to the (same) client on a regular basis to know how it feels like to report on promises that you(r organization) could not keep, and still tell the client that you would love to perform additional services, and that he really needs to put down his signature on that order form because you need to get paid for it. On the Supplier side, you need to have stood in front of a crowd of a hundred people and tell them that this year there will be no Christmas party because of financial cutbacks. Or have negotiated with the supplier to deliver square pegs and they deliver the pegs albeit square, but so large they do not fit in the holes you had drilled for them. And finally – the part that most people forget – one should also know some things about Change Management, better known as Project Management.

An ideal Project Manager has skills in all these 3 areas, but that requires quite some experience, and sometimes also luck in one’s career. In a lot of Projects, these areas are divided into 2: Domain Knowledge (combining both Supplier and Client) and Project Management. Generally the Project Lead is responsible for the Domain and is supported by the Project Support or Project Management Officer. The increase in FTE is partially explained by alignment between the 2 positions, like both need to attend the Project Team meeting, Review Committee Meeting, read reports, background materials and the exchange of information between the two of them. Some large companies have an HR policy that supports employees gaining expertise in both Expert, Line Management and Project Management positions. One of the nice results of such a policy is that one individual would then be multi-skilled enough to do a Project all by herself, a significant gain in Project Management resources! (Best guess: about 50%).

Some Project Manager pitfalls

• Some people will confidently talk about the x-million $-project they have run, or how long they have been an ‘Production Manager’. That means that they think they know these fields, however, they might have been extremely successful in these jobs, but not because of their Project Management or Production Management skills. Circumstances, luck, great skills in one field crucial for that particular undertaking and many other factors might all have compensated for a lack of Project Management skills. A real Project Manager will give a certain assurance that ‘regular problems’ will be dealt with. I have sailed across The Channel, but trust me, I am not a good sailor.
• A large Project only needs one captain – although I have also seen cases where multiple captains on a ship did work – which means that typically the Project Lead is ‘boss’. The Project Management Officer might have the ‘functional’-leadership on the ‘How’ but that virtually always should be subservient to the ‘task’-leadership of the ‘What’ represented by the Domain. Typically, a PMO is one salary group lower than a Lead, but there is no necessity to that.
• Similarly, if a large project is run by a junior Project Manager, that does not necessarily mean that the Project runs afoul. The Sponsor just should acknowledge the discrepancy and take supporting measures: the Project Manager might be sent to a course, a coach might be provided, some extra expertise might be brought into the Project Team, more frequent Review Committees, and sometimes she just has to take a risk. Now if that situation persists for a longer period of time and the Project(s) are successful, it might become time to re-assess the qualities of the Project Manager who has apparently proven herself ‘in battle’.