Did the process work, or did the people make it work?
Successful outcomes can conceal the checking, correcting and judgement people use to compensate for weaknesses in formal processes.
An order arrives. It is checked, entered into the system, released to production and eventually dispatched. The customer receives what they wanted. The process worked. Or did it? Sit beside the person processing the order and you may see something different. They check an email because the information in the system is not always reliable. One customer has to be handled differently. They telephone Production because they do not quite trust the delivery date. A spreadsheet contains information that exists nowhere else. Then an unusual order appears. “Ask Julie. She knows how these work.”
Eventually everything is sorted and the customer gets the right outcome. From management’s perspective, the process has succeeded. From the employee’s perspective, success required checking, chasing, correcting, remembering and knowing whom to ask. This creates an important management problem. Did the process work, or did the people make it work? The two can look identical from above. Good people routinely compensate for weaknesses in organisational systems. That is part of their value. But the better they become at compensating, the easier it becomes for management to believe the underlying process is performing well.
Errors disappear before reaching customers. Missing information gets found. Unusual cases get handled. The organisation sees the outcome. It does not necessarily see the effort required to protect that outcome. This is why I think managers need to spend more time examining real pieces of work rather than relying entirely upon process descriptions. Do not just ask: “How does this process work?” Ask: “Show me what happened with this order.” Then watch. What did you check? Who did you contact? What did you correct? What did you know that was not written down? Where did you have to make a judgement? A process map remains extremely useful. But it is a representation. Sometimes the most important part of the process is precisely the work that never made it onto the map.