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Business processes, a painful shoulder and bicycle brakes

Harley Lovegrove
4 responses

Recently I have been suffering from a rather painful shoulder, the annoying and yet good thing about it is that it does not hurt all the time and when it does it only really hurts when I make certain movements, however the type of movement can vary, making it very difficult to predict exactly when the searing pain will kick in.

Last week I was talking to my doctor about it and how the X-ray and echo taken by the specialist at my local hospital didn’t show up very much wrong.  My doctor, who knows about these things, made a comparison between my painful shoulder, the echo, the X-ray, and adjusting the brakes of a bicycle. He pointed out that the problem of the echo and the X-ray is that they only show the specialist a still image, making a detailed diagnosis is therefore rather difficult.  It would be more a matter of good luck if it happened to show up much at all. “It’s a bit like a bicycle wheel” he said “you can adjust the brakes perfectly, making sure that there is exactly the right amount of space between the rim of the wheel and the blocks but it is not until you spin the wheel that you will see if they are perfectly adjusted.”

This got me thinking. Very often when we set about optimizing business processes we spend a lot of time looking at diagrams and discussing procedures with experts that we tend to sometimes forget to look at exactly what is happening in reality. Not just at a given moment in time but over several hours, days, weeks or months. I am sure this can be the reason why often a business process optimization fails to deliver anywhere near the improvement we expect.  What’s more, just like my shoulder, if you ask me how it is on a good day, you’ll get a very different answer than when I happen to make a sudden movement and the pain unexpectedly kicks in, then you might hear some language that you might not expect from me!

Have a good week,

Harley

Written by

Harley Lovegrove

Harley is a dynamic 'we can do this' kind of person with a successful track record of working for a wide variety of companies in all kinds of sectors. From very small family run businesses right through to giant multi-nationals. Over the last thirty five years Harley has built a reputation for inspiring those around him to rout out and tackle the core problems facing their organizations. Armed with a wide range of pragmatic tools that he has developed over the years, Harley is able to help his clients bring about long-term, sustainable solutions, while having fun at the same time. Harley is a motivational 'people person' who is nonetheless tough on efficiency and delivery. Apart from being well known for his highly entertaining and motivational speeches, Harley is also a blogger and author of four books; 'The Change Manager's Handbook', 'Transition', 'Inspirational Leadership’ and ‘Making a Difference’.

4 responses

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  1. L Laurie -
    Thank you for sharing this Harley....any insights as to the Dr.'s suggestion for continuous monitoring that could be useful to apply to our business processes? :)
  2. V Peter Vantieghem -
    My thoughts exactly! This is why it is so important to focus on the spinning of the wheel. Optimizing business processes is about ensuring that the wheel spins at the same speed and that the wheel is balanced to ensure optimal speed. What this means it usually pays off more to try to reduce variances in a process than to try to find obsolete process steps etc... I realize this smells very much like 6 Sigma. As to Laurie's question re monitoring business processes, I can lively suggest setting up plain and simple dashboards with a limited but relevant set of KPI's to measure a process. KPI's can go from number of treated items (orders, invoices, ...) to the throughput time (order to invoice, invoice to cash, ....) and anything in between.
  3. A Harley A -
    Continuous monitoring - now that's a challenge! I guess the answer will be somewhere between people standing around with white coats and clip boards and laser technology that uses cosmic rays to split the time intervals neatly into fractions of nano seconds and then record the findings all neatly in three dimensional spreadsheets. I'll ask him! :-)
  4. M Interim Management -
    I am truly delighted to read this post which contains plenty of helpful facts, thanks for providing these data. Great article, exactly what I needed.

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