Process Design? It's not a Flowcharting Exercise

To design a new aircraft, engineers will develop, among others, structural models, air flow models, vibration models, and physical wind tunnel models.

To design a new computer system, engineers will develop architectural logic models, circuit board logic models, circuit board radio frequency electrical models, thermal models, vibration models, noise models, and more.

To design a new business process, what do most people use? Just a flowchart.

So what does that say about how we design business processes? Engineers in other disciplines look at the problem and the potential solutions from many perspectives. And yet, when we "design" a business process (that we can't even see or touch, it's so abstract), we are satisfied to describe it as a simple sequence of steps.

That's not good enough. Consider some of the things that can go wrong in business processes and their implementation:

• The process doesn't get the company to its business goals.
• The process is broken, and nobody knows if the process can get the company to its goals even if it's fixed.
• Nobody knows what the whole process is, and everyone's trying to fix a piece of it.
• Nobody knows what the whole process is, and training leaves newcomers with too many unanswered questions.
• You'd like to replace an old system, but the designers are dead or retired, and nobody knows what business process it implements.
• The organizational structure is an impediment to the process.
• Because of the culture, people don't follow the spirit or the letter of the intended practice.
• The systems obstruct the process.
• The systems implement some other process, and it may be good, but nobody knows what it is.
• The systems implement pieces of the process, but there are gaps that must be painfully filled by manual operation.

We'll need more powerful approaches to understand and demonstrate which of these problems is yours and to develop a better process for your organization. You'll probably want a process that's resilient to failures in people and systems, flexible enough to react to the marketplace, cost-efficient to run, easy to manage, and amenable to continuous improvement.

There are engineering approaches to process design, and we'd be happy to talk to you about them. Before you build or buy another system, before you re-organize your company, make sure you understand the process you want your systems and organizational structures to support.