Knowledge Spring Limited

SIPOCs – good for making daisy chains?

admin — Wed, 07 Mar 2012 12:54:36 +0000

As anyone who’s been exposed to Six Sigma will know, SIPOCs are a simple description of a process or activity. It is an acronym that goes like this:

S – Suppliers – who provides the inputs?
I – Inputs – what are the inputs that get consumed by the process?
P – Process – what is the process?
O – Outputs – what are the outputs that get produced or made available by the process?
C – Customers – who wants the outputs?

It is quickly apparent that one SIPOC’s outputs are another’s inputs. The team performing the process is probably the Customer of the Supplier’s process; and the Supplier of the the Customer’s process.

What if we daisy chain the SIPOCs? What more does this tell us than single SIPOCs shown alone?

Processes: Linear or actually a Network?

admin — Thu, 16 Feb 2012 20:59:45 +0000

Google definition: proc·ess, pro·cess/?prä?ses/, /pr??ses/
Noun: A series of actions or steps taken to achieve an end.

This is an accurate definition. It serves well when the scope of analysis or management is limited to one output, or one process. However, as the enterprise widens its view and considers the full value chain, things become more complicated very quickly. Traditional linear process mapping techniques quickly reach their limitations.

A trivial analogy might be to look at spaghetti. If a single process is represented by a single piece of pasta, then a linear model is adequate. If you aspire to model the whole bowl, including the contact points (interactions and dependencies) between each piece of spaghetti, you need a network based approach.

A number of leading thinkers in different fields are using network analysis to more accurately understand the systems that they seek to understand:

Eric Berlow applying network thinking to complex ecological systems

Sebastian Seung applies spaghetti logic to map connections in the human brain

Verna Allee applies network thinking to business processes with ValueNets

Mapping analogues: Earth vs. Processes

admin — Thu, 16 Feb 2012 20:59:18 +0000

Many of us use maps on a daily basis. With Google Maps, we are becoming increasingly familiar with the idea of zooming out to see the bigger picture and zooming in to see detail at the touch of a button. These new tools also allow us to switch on layers, adding detail in context that increases the value of these maps for the specific needs of the navigator. For most of the earth we can now get the right map, with the right scope, and the details we want in seconds.

For business processes we are some way behind. Even the best mapped businesses have standard operating procedures, and end-to-end process flows, and enterprise architectures that can seem unrelated. How often do you speak to a team about their process and find that they drown you in unfathomable detail. This detail is important to help new joiners, but it does not help managers up the hierarchy. Equally, I’ve seen teams presented with business architectures lauding a great new operating model, but they cannot and will not be able to find their valued contribution on it.

The take-away is that we need to recognize that we need different process maps at different levels, with the right detail available, and wouldn’t it be nice if we could zoom in and out. We have not yet seen a commercial Business Process Mapping product that does this effectively.

Task Inputs & Outputs: unlabelled arrows

admin — Tue, 14 Feb 2012 15:45:29 +0000

Understandably, the focus of processing mapping methods is the activity. Healthy verb-noun structure (doing something to something) provides a good impression of what is going on. The activity boxes are then connected by single arrows, which in most cases simply indicate the direction of flow, but are generally unlabelled.

As processes have become increasingly completed, and the drive for productivity has resulted in more batch t, we need to use this inter-activity information more intelligently. This is compounded as we move from mapping simple linear processes and start to see activity networks emerging.

So what do we label these arrows as? My suggestion is to look for a noun that is recognised by the sending activity whose output it represents, and the receiving activity for whom it is an input. It is likely that we need to include some status information, as it is likely that a simple noun will appear between multiple activities. It may also be necessary to indicate the channel, or system via which the object is transmitted.

Its time we make the space between activities play its part in providing clarity.

“The method of the grandmother” – coaching

admin — Tue, 14 Sep 2010 13:35:31 +0000

I am a great fan of the talks on TED.com. If you ever need inspiration and proof that the world is making progress, that’s your site.

In a recent talk, education guru Sugata Mitra talked about “The Child-driven Education”. In it he highlights one of the most effective catalysts for learning, called “The Method of the Grandmother” – “what you’ve got to do is stand behind them and admire them”.

In large organisations where we look to HR or personnel organisations to tell us how to get the most out of our staff, perhaps our early experiences are the best guide.

Rather than complex incentive schemes, and training programs, perhaps occasional words of encouragement are the answer to keeping people engaged and motivated.

Defects enter the 21st Century with DefML

admin — Mon, 06 Sep 2010 13:32:22 +0000

Leading organisations all over the world are embracing the latest developments in information management by adopting and extending XML or eXtensible Markup Language.

Financial Services firms are adopting FpML, and even Microsoft have adopted Open Office XML files as the storage medium for files produced in Office 2010.

Change is well on its way. If you haven’t followed, you are probably being left behind.

So what’s this got to do with Defects. Following earlier blogs about Post-its as a concept for Defect management, DPMO and Root Cause Management, XML offers an effective method for defect management.

Over coffee today with my old colleague Ben Nicholson, a Director driving Operational Excellence at a leading Investment Bank in London, we toyed with the idea of defining a firm-wide standard for defects using XML (DefML). It might include one-to-many associations with root causes, key dates: creation, detection, planned resolution, actual resolution and accountability information.

With DefML, finally defects might be able to hold their own in organisations where they are so easily lost, dropped or swept under the carpet.

All roads lead to BPM, but views vary

admin — Tue, 31 Aug 2010 13:30:06 +0000

There is a lot of momentum in BPM fora as people from all walks of life conclude that some form of BPM is needed in order to make sustainable lasting and meaningful change for their clients and in their organisations.

Most of the people joining the great BPM debate have backgrounds in process re-engineering or IT, among many others. Some have come from organisations where BPM maturity is high with process thinking very well established. Others have come from more chaotic places where BPM is in its early stages.

The paths taken to the gate of BPM can be very very different. This results in lots of people having strong opinions, and a good chance that most are right, albeit looking at similar problems from different angles, and different points in the BPM lifecycle.

How to unlisten to the “voice of the customer”

admin — Thu, 26 Aug 2010 13:27:56 +0000

My bank has very few branches, but one free all-purpose phone number answered by sympathetic people far far away, with above-average capabilities to the basic things right.

Over the last 6 months, I’ve had to call them about 10 times. All but the most recent one ended in frustration, and sometimes escalation to whomever at the call centre was playing manager that day.

However, a couple of days ago, I called up to ask for my IBAN – the international version of my account number. The only reason I had to call was that I couldn’t find it online next to my regular account number where I expected it.

Today I received a call from their customer service team asking me to rate my recent call: agent performance and overall outcome. Was it coincidence that I was only asked about the best, and simplest conversation?

I said “yes and no”. I wanted to offer some really actionable information. But this didn’t fit the 1 to 5 rating scale. Not the callers fault. She probably didn’t have a freeform field on her screen to take notes, or a way to flag our recorded conversation so that is could be re-routed for analysis.

After explaining that my overall experience over the last few months had been poor, and that I was only calling to ask for something that I felt I should have been able to find online, I briefly let slip that the actual call in question had been satisfactory.

At that point she had enough information to fill in her form and with a quick “thank you sir”, hung up the phone.

I’ve never felt less listened to by that organisation.

Root cause vs. root causes – who scores?

admin — Tue, 24 Aug 2010 13:25:59 +0000

Historically, on TV, the score of a football/soccer match was shown with the names of the scorers and the times during the match that the goals were scored.

In ice hockey, the basic stats also credit some players with assists. Increasingly in all sports (including soccer) the contributions of other players are recognised, albeit rather simply.

Should root cause analysis be the same? Often a failed unit fails due to a number of factors. I have found that capturing all contributing root causes helps, a lot.

Particularly once solutions to mitigate the root causes go live. Imagine anticipating a big drop in defects, having resolved the number one root cause on your pareto chart, only to find that the number two and three root causes were also factors in the defects attributed to the number one stack, but hadn’t been captured.

DPMO – Six Sigma’s unsung hero

admin — Sun, 22 Aug 2010 13:24:06 +0000

As a concept and as a tool, Six Sigma’s defects per million opportunities (DPMO) has got to be the BPM worlds unsung hero. Its limited profile may be due its complexity, but in terms of its potential to do good, its value as a universal performance metric, the power and the potential are up there. My other contender for such praise is Net Promoter. But these are two contenders from different ends of the scale. Where Net Promoter is simple to gather and analyse and pretty much anyone can “get it”. But it doesn’t point to the place to go and fix stuff. DPMO is a trickier beast, but once tamed, its unbeatable.

Which other metric encompasses so much:

points of failure – embeds points of failure definition, and their evolution as they get eliminated or mitigated
volume insensitive,
vertical and horizontal aggregation – vertically (different products) and horizontally (different phases of an end-to-end process)?

If you are struggling to find a metric that really digs into the performance of a complex organisation, processing many different products, and want to be able drill down to understand performance at any level, DPMO might be your holy grail.

If you can tame it…