That’s the crux of the matter. Or: 4 sources of process complexity

Nobody intentionally designs business processes to be complex and cumbersome. And yet, over time many of those processes become complicated and result for an organisation (whether it is aware of it or not) in millions of additional costs. Read in our case study how we cut through complexity.

These four sources of process complexity are constantly at work to some degree in almost every organisation:

1. Local differences. Sometimes, good initial reasons drive variations in different places, but the same work ends up getting done in different ways long after those reasons have dissipated – entailing increased cost and complexity for the business.
2. Multiplication of steps and loops. An overemphasis on control and potential error reduction – if not subject to periodical challenging – results in the accretion of steps, control points, or reviews that ultimately make a process take too long.
3. Informality of process. Often people don’t realize that the job they are doing is actually a replicable process. The result: lack of rigour about how a process is really supposed to be and far-from-optimal execution.
4. Lack of cross-functional or cross-unit transparency. If dependencies and interdependencies throughout the whole value chain are ignored, the work of one unit may not only fail to dovetail with the work of the next ones, but sometimes can be counterproductive!

What signs of process complexity have you encountered at your organisation? What have you done about it? Share your view as comment to this blog.

This post was inspired by Ronald Ashkenas’ book “Simply effective”.

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