Hello Checklists, Goodbye Process?

My little world wobbled as I read Atul Gawande’s bestseller The Checklist Manifesto.

It seemed to challenge head-on my conviction that process matters most because it provides the language that enables effective collaboration amidst complexity.

It’s superbly well written (Dr Gawande is an eminent surgeon but he’s also a staff writer on the New Yorker). It was ravishingly reviewed in the FT, the NY Times and The Economist, whose reviewer described it as ‘a meditation on the growing complexity of the world, and how to cope with it’.

The book sets out the evidence on the value of the humble checklist in saving lives (and much else – injuries, time and costs) in even the most highly complex activities – in the operating theater, on skyscraper construction sites, and on the flight deck. It is utterly compelling.

Why do checklists work? Firstly, because ‘they get people talking’, suggests Dr Gawande. They break down hierarchical barriers and encourage the teamwork that can ensure the best possible outcomes – in surgical teams, among construction engineers, even in due diligence teams working for private equity investors.

Checklists also encourage discipline. They recognize that, in a fast-paced world, we can all too easily forget the obvious. Kitchens in top restaurants use them. Checklists can ‘force reflection’ says Dr Gawande, even in complex and dire situations like the loss of an aircraft engine.

As I read the book, I feared I was hearing the distant rumble of a paradigm shift. It seemed entirely plausible that my approach had been turned upside down, that process had been a wasteful diversion – and that checklists were the new process.

The truth though seems to be more subtle and interesting. Checklists and process may overlap but they are essential, and complementary, in enabling us to deal with our enormously complex world.

Both enable collaboration and ensure compliance. ‘Checklists are not comprehensive how-to guides’, says Dr Gawande, ‘they are quick and simple tools to buttress the skills of expert professionals’. Sometimes a checklist could be easily substituted by an end-to-end process and a Storyboard. In other circumstances, only one of them will work. What’s appropriate will depend entirely upon the context.

Context is one of the exciting themes of the book. The best checklists work because their creators are painstaking in understanding the context in which they will be used. They care about the tiniest details because they know that it matters in effective communication. Those who have advocated ‘publishing’ business processes that are static, generic and described in technical gobbledeegook might want to read and ponder these sections.

It’s also, in an odd way, heartening to read of the widespread resistance to checklists, despite clear evidence of their value. Organizations and individuals, across all industries, often applaud the idea of checklists – but have some reason why they are ‘special’ and should be exempt. They have to be won over – even if they subsequently emerge as the strongest champions of the idea. Inviting us to re-think how we define heroism, Dr Gawande reflects on this inertia:

“…We don’t like checklists. They can be painstaking. They’re not much fun. But I don’t think the issue here is mere laziness. There’s something deeper, more visceral going on when people walk away not only from saving lives but from making money. It somehow feels beneath us to use a checklist, an embarrassment. It runs counter to deeply held beliefs about how the truly great among us – those we aspire to be – handle situations of high stakes and complexity. The truly great are daring. They improvise. They do not have protocol and checklists. Maybe our idea of heroism needs updating.” [p.173]

Replace ‘checklist’ with ‘process’ and it’s the journey of most organizations towards process thinking, and towards a recognition of the process platform as an essential enabler for sustainable operational excellence.

Chalk One Up For Sustainability

Delighted call yesterday from a client whose CEO had made a stand for sustainability.

The CEO had invited in a well-known consultancy for a year to drive a Lean program on a payment-for-results basis.

I had received a despairing call two weeks ago, after the Lean consulting team had arrived and explained its methodology. They didn’t care that this organization had implemented Nimbus Control as a process platform at the heart of the business. They insisted that brown paper and Post-It notes would be used for all their work.  Amazingly, they were so attached to this that they refused to use the client’s paper. It had to be their brown paper.

When it was escalated to the CEO, he didn’t equivocate.  He insisted that his organization’s process platform must be the alpha and the omega for the Lean program.  It was, he explained to the Lean consultants, an integrated business management platform, but not in any abstract sense: it was supporting people doing real work 24/7. So it was the perfect framework to identify, design and deliver sustainable improvement projects.

What tickled my friend and led to his jubilant call was the CEO’s remark at the end of the meeting, as the consultants left the room, that if he saw brown paper being used in future, he would ‘personally escort them from the premises’.    

The price of sustainable excellence is eternal vigilance. [as Jefferson might have put it... ]

Making Sustainability Stick

True story – and I wouldn’t have believed it, if I hadn’t heard it myself…

The global head of a Lean/Six Sigma team was explaining why a presentation to his senior leadership team didn’t go entirely brilliantly.  After years of leading performance improvement projects, he’d come to see that what really mattered is sustainable improvement. 

He knew how difficult it is to make cost cuts stick. He had seen for himself what McKinsey described last year: that many cost-reduction programs are “illusory, short lived, and at times damaging to long-term value creation”.  And that only 10% of cost reduction programs show sustained results three years later.

So he was pitching Nimbus Control to his exec team, as the platform upon which to build sustainable operational excellence across the enterprise. But in the Q&A there had been some unexpected resistance, focussed on how disruptive and expensive change would be. After some dialog, the underlying objection came out:

“Yes - but if we go down this route, we are going to have to keep all our documents, everything in fact, up to date!”  

You might expect that the exec who said this was taken for questioning by the Chief Compliance Officer in a corporate dungeon.  But it went unremarked and was taken as legitimate.  It was left to our hero to note that keeping things ‘up-to-date’ might not be a bad idea anyway (this is an FDA-regulated organization).

Reading the The Sustainable Organization, published this week by Accenture, it’s easy to run away with the theory and forget how far this is from quotidian reality in many organizations.   

You can’t build a sustainable high performance culture overnight. The organizational process maturity that delivers sustainable continuous improvement is a set of capabilities that can take many years to develop. One vital provision for the journey towards a culture of continuous excellence – to borrow Nestlé’s famous phrase – is a process platform. But nothing can happen without vision, understanding and leadership. And, in far too many organizations, it’s folks at C-Level who have yet to join up the dots…

Case Study: Finance Transformation and Shared Services

True, it’s not Life Sciences – though it’s also from a highly regulated world -and its scope, at this stage, is limited to just one country… but still the video case study from BAE Systems released today provides another great example of Nimbus Control as an enabling platform for Finance Transformation and shared services. 

As a case study, it breaks new ground in showing the new normal for Nimbus clients: how the controls and audit framework is embedded within the operational end-to-end processes, with all the efficiencies that can deliver.  

The focus is on standardization, service excellence and continuous improvement. What the video doesn’t mention is that it was also enabling an ERP consolidation…

BAE Finance Transformation Case Study

Shall I Compare Thee To…. Process Maturity?

This day of furious activity for Cupid’s bow brings to mind conversations with two clients just last week.

Let’s risk breaking a few hearts by noting that not every Valentine’s Day card today will lead to courtship. And many fewer will blossom into union in happy marriage.  But, still, it’s what most of us yearn for: to find a soulmate and progress together towards ever-expanding horizons of contentment and inspiration.  

That progress, of course, depends upon a shared vision and continued effort. Sometimes it’s easy, often it can be very difficult. Which is how it’s kind of similar to an organization’s journey towards sustainable process maturity.  Both hinge on building successful relationships.

I’ve been recently with clients at both ends of the organizational journey.  One is at the Valentine’s Day card stage – bubbling with infectious enthusiasm about how great it’s going to be. ‘The business case will write itself – we will save so much time and energy by not having to continually re-capture our As-Is processes for every new improvement project.’

Which is true, and I love their passion -but we all know that staying on track towards the goal is the hardest thing.  It’s perilously easy to fall off the wagon.

My other client is going through a difficult patch, lamenting that its adoption of Nimbus Control, three years ago, as an enterprise-wide process excellence platform had morphed into support for a major SAP implementation.  The SAP implementation had been successful enough – but, along the way, the C-level perception of process had gone into reverse. The conversation was no longer about a platform for operational excellence, it was about a tool to support IT projects.  Even worse, my client despaired, the CEO had now fallen under the spell of a Lean consultancy which insisted on using only brown paper (it’s own!!) and Post-It notes for process improvement projects.  

Fortunately, I was able to share with both clients an invaluable self-help manual. The NCIA is chock-full of ideas and practical advice about how to progress along the often stony path towards sustainable process maturity. My anguished client won’t be the first to re-launch a process excellence program to get it back on track.  

But, in the spirit of the day, let’s banish any notion that NCIA is a mere methodology with a supporting notation. No – it’s our collective wisdom on how organizations can get from the Valentine’s Day card to the blissful diamond wedding celebration.

Lean Pharma: Tackling Compliance Obesity

Not to put too fine a point on it, Quality and Compliance are often completely out of control in PharmaLand.  No-one doubts the need for uncompromising quality and compliance. But the way that this is delivered in Pharma today is not just over-engineered and over-expensive, it’s become a source of risk in its own right.

Things can get to a point in obesity where surgery is the only way out. Everything I see suggests that we’ve reached the point where only a radical new approach can slice through and remove the multiple, overlapping layers of complexity to expose and manage the true compliance essentials underneath.

In a recent workshop with a Pharma organization, we were attempting to condense several dozen SOPs into a standard global process. The SOPs were often vague, long-winded, contradictory and only tenuously linked to the Quality and Compliance manual. So while the formal SOPs are consulted, in practice, they are usually ’supplemented’ by informally ’asking an SME’.  

That’s of course when the SOPs are readily available. Recently a global process owner offered to print out for me the two ‘foundation’ SOPs for his process. It took him 15  minutes to find one of the SOPs - and that was in the dedicated Sharepoint site for this particular process.    

These  organizations are not unusual: as far as I can see, this is close to the Pharma norm. The people involved are bright, conscientious and endeavor to act with integrity at all times. But they are overwhelmed with unclear and sometimes conflicting information.  In CMMI terms, these are organizations operating near to the lowest point on the process maturity curve: Quality and Compliance is often being delivered through a culture of heroes.

Most Pharma organizations are pursuing programs to simplify, to standardise and to eliminate non-value-add (NVA) activities. But often quality and compliance functions are barely touched.

It’s a nettle that has to be grasped.  Outsourcing and re-shaped business models can only go so far to deliver the required levels of performance improvement.  Quality and compliance isn’t going away. In fact, the reverse. The compliance burden is set to grow rapidly as Pharma expands into emerging markets and branded generics, and develops global operations in an increasingly multipolar regulatory world. With the costs of regulatory non-compliance spiralling, it’s not difficult to imagine that Quality and Compliance may soon be the largest single NVA in many organizations.

The liposuction equivalent for Compliance obesity is, of course, the adoption of a process management platform. In a client workshop I supported last week, that team succeeded in condensing numerous SOPs into a single standard global definition of Validation.  We spent two days creating the two top levels of the process model.  The power of process visualization, the rigor of a process hierarchy, and the constant pressure to describe things simply, in the language of the user, led to real agreement on a standard global process.  

There’s plenty of detail to be added. And the activities in this process, and its regional and site variants, will need to be cross-referenced to the library of quality and compliance requirements. But eventually, and after completing the review and authorisation cycle, it will be published - and delivered to process users as easy-to-follow role-based storyboards.  

It’s an approach that’s absolutely rigorous. It’s also multi-dimensional. It’s designed to manage complexity. It supports rich what-if analytics.  But, critically, it’s also focussed on simplicity, on user adoption and enabling real work.  Which is why it’s the key to Lean Quality and Compliance – and to continuous improvement. 

A Process Platform, Not A Process Tool

It’s true that ’platform’ sounds like Marketing-speak.  But there’s an important distinction between a process tool and a process platform.  And it’s not widely appreciated, which is why so many organizations continue to waste so many millions of dollars on process tools that can never deliver what they are looking for: operational excellence and continuous improvement.

TIBCO Nimbus Control is a process platform.  Others will no doubt catch up, but it remains the leader. It creates an integrated business management platform that underpins quality and compliance. It enables collaboration on performance improvement within a robust governance framework.   It orchestrates every aspect of business transformation. It delivers the content that supports real work, to every desktop and mobile, and it engages people across the enterprise in continuous improvement. And to achieve this, to create this platform for operational excellence, it uses the language and rigor of end-to-end business process.    

A tool is for a particular and more limited purpose. A process tool tends to be focussed on the needs of a project, and to be discarded afterwards, its content filed away. Whereas a process platform assumes re-use and longevity, a mindset of sustainable excellence

Process tools can be essential – in software package configuration or other automation projects, for instance. But, at best, they can only provide a complete view of the enterprise from the perspective of what’s automated.  Whereas a process platform aspires to create a joined-up and holistic view of the enterprise. 

Process tools have dominated up to now. And they are a big reason why process thinking has taken so long to penetrate the C-Suite.  Execs can see that, by and large, process tools offer only IT perspectives on the enterprise. Even worse, they are usually also incomplete and ungoverned, and describe process in the language of IT. 

Process platforms are the future. There’s still C-Level resistance in some organizations - mostly because both process tools and process platforms start with a visualization of process as boxes and lines.  So, at first glance, they are both ‘just process drawing tools’. Yawn…

But how process is visualized matters enormously.  Organizations that choose the language of a process tool, such as BPMN or EPC, which are focussed on automation and the needs of an IT audience, will get very different results from organizations choosing to adopt the language of a process platform, such as Nimbus UPN, which sets out to describe end-to-end processes in a way that everyone can understand.    

And, anyway, a process platform is about boxes and lines as much as Shakespeare is about words and sentences.

Reduced to basics, it’s true to say that the Bard just wrote words and formed sentences like every other playwright and poet. ”To be or not to be? That is the question.”  It’s words in a sentence. But Hamlet is a tragedy that has moved audiences for over four hundred years. It has meaning and value far beyond the words from which it is composed.

Less dramatically, a process platform too has meaning and value to the enterprise far beyond the activity boxes, lines and diagrams from which it is composed. I’m not exactly confident that it’s going to be around in four hundred years – but, for the foreseeable future, the process platform is the essential enabler for operational excellence and continuous improvement.