At your next company meeting, pick a random interdepartmental job, hand out a map that shows all the departments as scattered dots, and ask each of them to connect the dots for that particular task from beginning to end. Give them 10 minutes before collecting.
You will be pleasantly surprised at how each incumbent connected the tasks together. On the bright side, if you put them all together, you may get the map of the world.
One supervisor connected six dots. One line employee connected eleven. The most senior and the newest employees didn’t even connect them. They just wrote on it! The newbie drew a question mark, while the most senior staff member of 14 years sneakily wrote, “Well… it depends.”
Congrats! Now you know why the process doesn’t work. Because there is not one but five of them. And if you are wondering what legend has somehow managed to keep this broken line together and working, well, her name is Cheryl.
This fun game is called “Connect the Dots!” and if nothing else, it is very eye-opening. Not because the teams are bad at their jobs. But because they work in silos with systems that don’t translate into one another, just like bordering countries with different languages and attitudes.
And now you want to “automate it.” It being the non-existent unified process. And you can’t really automate Cheryl’s version, since it involves a rolodex and an oversized ledger book.
Before I touch any redesign, I play a game of “Connect the Dots!” with everyone in the room. Same question, same handout and same 10 minutes. And here is how to decipher those responses:
- Where the lines intertwine, that’s your waste
- Where someone draws a blank or a question mark, there is no definite process
- Where someone says “it depends,” that’s a rule nobody wrote down
You have two options at this point. Either take the traditional quiet and uncontroversial route: skip the knowledge test, buy software, and have a third party decide what the processes should look like, inevitably followed by a sunk cost review and a very polite lessons-learned session 18 months later.
OR
Suppress the urge to force-squeeze a Band-Aid on a gushing wound, and fix it from the root once and for all.
Your next firm plan of action is:
- Define who the client is,
- Agree on where each process starts, and
- Where it ends.
Want a head start? The free SIPOC one-pager on my site walks you through all three: danieldaemi.com/free-downloads
Bottom line, tell me: if you handed out the dots this week, how many versions of your process would come back?
Want to see how I approach this? Here’s how I work, or book a free discovery call.
This piece first appeared as a post on LinkedIn.