Mar
4
WRITTEN BY:
Don Boyd
Thursday, 4 March 2010
Whilst it would cause me great joy to spend a few paragraphs on the perils of debt, wallowing in countless examples of how it has ruined most people’s enjoyment of the 21st century, my attention is turned more directly to a particular type of debt and the effect that it has on organisations. That debt is time debt.
You don’t need to look too far to see examples of it and how people try to escape it. Like people transferring balances from one credit card to another, individuals transfer their time debt to someone else. 'Don’t worry about that, we will come back and fix it up later – we just need to get it out the door. The client is screaming for it.'
In reality, every activity that an organisation performs has a time debt. It may be spread across people but it exists. Understanding this simple truth sheds a great deal of light on why so many process improvements fail.
Many of the so called process improvements are little more than a transfer of the time debt from one process (or person) to another. The sales process is streamlined and the productivity benefits are trumpeted from on high, but little is said about the storeman who has to spend additional time getting the necessary detail that got eliminated in the re-engineered sales process. These sorts of improvement are everywhere and they are proliferating as organisations strive to find that edge. Unfortunately, because in substance they do not generate any real productivity benefit for the organisation, they rarely survive.
The only real way to get persistent, valuable process improvements is to eliminate the time debt and, as with anything of real benefit, it is difficult to achieve. This process demands that the organisation be viewed as a whole. Recognising that it is completely connected, the genuine analyst understands that all changes carry the potential to create additional time burdens elsewhere in the organisation.
Could the reason that shallow time transfers proliferate as process improvements, while the meatier ends of transformation get relegated to the too-hard basket, simply be because it is just impossible to get that sort of view? It is certainly difficult and it is not a job for novices, but I do not believe it is impossible.
Gaining an in-depth understanding of the organisation’s processes is critical but it is only the first step. The true analyst must also be able to connect the conceptual process with the activities they are mapping; they must have the depth of commercial understanding and experience to evaluate the process as well as how it actually works. Only then can the true improvements be discerned.
Real benefits arise when you reduce the time burden of the organisation as a whole. So the next time you are faced with a process improvement, ask yourself, are we simply transferring the balance or are we really eliminating some debt?
With due acknowledgement to Peter Senge’s Systems Thinking.