A friend of mine is an associate professor at NYU, and he asks me to come and guest lecture for his students. This class is focused on process reengineering.

People underestimate the importance of process. Processes are horizontal, but organizations are vertical, so there’s a tension. Processes are end to end, but because organizations are silos, they only see their piece of the process which is usually well managed…it’s the “white space” between the functions that is where the disconnects usually lie.

Here are the reasons why I think bad process happens to good people.

• The 80/20 rule: the 20% of your work that is exception-based will make up 80% of your effort.
• Manual processes get created as an interim “fix”, but never replaced with automation.
• The group “handing off to you” doesn’t understand your process.
• Process breaks are built into the process, requiring human intervention for fixing, which is usually in people’s heads, creating key person vulnerability.
• The metrics are silo focused: no metrics that measure the cycle time end to end because it goes across functions/organizational reporting lines.
• No one owns the end to end process.

Everywhere I’ve worked, I’ve found that processes are broken. Not people.