Designing the Organisation and Enterprise Architecture

I presented on designing a customer driven, process based, flat / horizontal organisation at IRMUK's business process and enterprise architecture conference this month.

It was a great event and I learnt a lot about enterprise archirecture as well as checking my understanding of business process design.

I tried to take account of some of these learnings too, broadening out the presentation to include the use of new enterprise architecture opportunities to develop a digital organisation too.

I'm not completely sure I've got this right and will be reflecting more on it over the next few months, and posting again once I've come to some firmer conclusions.

Jon Ingham
 

@joningham, http://linkedin.com/in/joningham
info@joningham.com, +44 7904 185134

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Speaking at Business Process Management

And the next conference after that is this one, because I love spending time at the periphery of our profession, and also because I do quite a lot of process design and management work (including this training session).

But even so, attending the other speakers' sessions is going to be a really interesting experience for me, and should hopefully result in some great learning.

I'll be tweeting and posting here as normal.

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Exit as the Keystone to a Retention / Partnership process

 

  As I noted in my previous post, both my workshop group’s thinking on retention processes, and my previous notes on career partnership, suggest that retention / partnership consist of a series of sub-processes, particularly head hunting; delivering the deal; proactive exit and alumni management.

I find it interesting that I came to the same conclusion about retention through by a process perspective and a more intuitive one.

But what I find yet more interesting is what the process perspective suggests about the role of the proactive exit sub-process, supporting points I’d already made in response to my earlier responses to comments on my hack at the MIX.

And that is, that out of all four sub-processes, it is the proactive exit one that is key.  In fact, I’ve begun to think about this as being like the keystone in a bridge.  All of the other sub-processes stand on their own – the proactive exit one only makes sense when placed within this cyclical retention /  partnership process (this is the reason that the proactive exit sub-process seems so odd).  But it when this sub-process is combined with the others that the whole retention / partnership process starts to really work (becoming more strategic and proactive).

 

Thoughts?

 

And also please note that, as of today (Monday 10th January), you’ve still got 9 days to comment / vote on my proposed hack on the MIX.

 

Photo credit: John S Turner

Technorati Tags: Employees,retention,proactive,exit,career,partnership,process,MIX

 

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Do you need an Employee Retention process?

 

   I don’t normally post about client work but I’ve been in a workshop this week that has been particularly interesting and relevant to some of the stuff I’ve recently posted on here.

So, the overall context has been on retaining employees, but one morning was devoted to developing a business process for retention.  Now, I do quite a lot of work facilitating the development of business processes and I think it’s a skills / technique many more HR professionals should have.  And I’ve also run a similar workshop once previously focused on retention (at Kennedy Information’s Retention Summit in Orlando in 2008).

Actually, it’s a workshop I’d like to run a lot more, because I think it works so well.  In particularly, it helps demonstrate that what organisations often say are important, eg retaining its people, aren’t supported by actions that well.  Where is your employee retention process for example?  And of course, no organisation (?) has one.  Retention is split across a number of sub-processes eg some activity in performance management, some in reward etc.  Or probably more honestly, there’s often no process at all – retention is just (hopefully) a by-product of these other processes looking at other things.

And it sounds crazy to suggest that we should or might have a retention process.  But I think this is only a consequence of the way we have build HR processes around supporting the business, not developing Human Capital.  If we were focused on human capital, and if things like employee retention really were important, then we’d have a process for it.  Wouldn’t we?  (That’s basically the definition of a business process that I use within my workshop – a mechanism for doing something that the organisation sees as important.)

But this was the first time I’ve run this workshop with a client.  And it was possibly because this was an internal client group that we got a lot further in the workshop than I did before.

So, some of the group’s conclusions were:

• That the start point of the process should be recruiting people who would be likely to stay in the organisation
• That the end point would be arranging an appropriate departure (with links to the business development, employer branding and other different business processes as well as back to the beginning of this one).

 

In fact, the group found it difficult to specify and end point for the process – and it basically started to become a loop in which employees would leave the organisation but would then, very naturally, be re-recruited later on.

And, and this is the key bit, to make this process really work well, the organisation would engage with the individual employee to ensure they left at the most appropriate point (which might mean encouraging them to leave earlier than they would have otherwise done).

 

The interesting thing for me, you as well?, is that this is what I’ve proposed as a career partnership model a couple of times here before, and which I’ve recently entered as an example of a management hack at Gary Hamel’s Management Innovation Exchange (the MIX).  But I’ve never thought of this in process terms before, which makes me feel more confident that I’m right about both ideas (that organisations should have a retention process – or at least some aspects of one – and that a useful basis for employee retention would be a career partnership approach).

 

See:

• Stop treating people like tools
• Hack: career partnership (on the MIX)
• Career Partnership and the Human Capital M-Prize

 

Technorati Tags: Business,process design,employee,retention,workshop,management,innovation Beehive,exchange,MIX,hack

 

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Management innovation

 

   As organisation capability has become a more important basis for competitive advantage, innovation in management processes (as opposed to business processes, or products and services) has also become more critical.

Gary Hamel's 'Future of Management' describes the opportunities for management innovation very effectively, and this blog seeks to apply some of the same principles to the management of people.

So I was interested to read the CIPD's report on 'Innovation in the Workplace' (incidentally, for all the flak taken by the CIPD, they continue to do a lot more interesting research than SHRM).

Key findings of the report include the fact that only 25% of respondents' organisations give a high priority to management innovation compared to about 55% that prioritise innovation in business processes and 65% who prioritise innovation in products and services.

This is unfortunate given that "pioneers in management innovation attract and retain top employees, and they build a capability for change and adaptation.  These are important attributes in today's highly competitive world."  (Interestingly, this does seem to contrast with the CIPD's own approach to HCM which emphasises measurement and pays little attention to innovation.)

One reason for the lower priority seems to be that "management innovation is extremely hard to do.  Partly because "most organisations lack either the tools or systems to help them become better management innovators".

-   If this is the case for you, I'd recommend the value triangle, which I find, supported by some creative thinking tools (eg visualisation, metaphor etc), provides a very suitable basis for innovating management practices.

And secondly, most survey respondents developed "their innovative practices through the creative insights of their own colleagues, or by learning from other organisations" rather than with the support of external parties.  This may also limit their innovative capabilities given that "management innovations typically come about at the confluence between 'internal change agents' or 'intrapreneurs' and 'external change agents' such as consultants".

-   I do a very good one day workshop using the value triangle if you're interested...

 

Technorati Tags: CIPD,Julian Birkinshaw,Innovation in the Workplace,Gary Hamel,Future of Management,Value Triangle

Organisational diversity / mystery shopper

Diversity is an absolutely critical part of just about any organisation's strategic capability, and a core accountability for HR.

I've had some of my comments on using mystery shopping techniques to assure diversity in recruitment processes published at the Work Clinic blog. You can review the post and comments here. What do you think? Please comment on that or this blog.

Can / should HR take on more accountability? (2)

I do a fair amount of process design work with my clients. These are often business teams in organisations where business processes have been able to grow out of control. And sometimes they are HR teams, for example as part of a HR capability development programme, helping HR to interact with the rest of the business in a very different way. For these teams, we generally use HR processes to help get up to speed on the process design methodology.

The methodology I use is a lot broader than that described by Hammer and Champy and focuses much more on how people use processes to achieve their objectives, rather than the process mapping stage itself (it’s interesting to note that subsequent to their joint book on re-engineering, both Hammer and Champy separately linked the failure of many re-engineering projects to their lack of focus on people and implementation).

One useful tool within the methodology is a RACI (pronounced ‘racey’) analysis. RACI stands for Responsibility, Accountability, Consulted and Informed and describes a hierarchy of involvement (see example slide from one of my workshops). Accountability is the highest level of involvement at the top of the hierarchy so the acronym should really be ARCI (but ‘arsey’ doesn’t sound so polite):

• Accountability describes where the buck stops, who is held to account
• Responsibility describes where the work is done, who is responsible for carrying out a task
• Consulted are the critical people who need to contribute prior to completing the activity
• Informed indicates that it is less critical for this person to be involved but they need to be updated and informed about the outcome of the activity.
  
  

When working with HR teams to redesign HR processes, we have typically made managers both Accountable and Responsible, noting that HR can be Consulted or Informed. But is this necessarily so?

The result of doing assigning Accountability and Responsibility to managers is that HR takes the sort of support role referred to in my previous post by Allan Leighton.

But are some additional results also the general dissatisfaction with the HR functions of many organisations, and the low levels of engagement of their people?

The principle that managers should be Accountable for their people and that HR should support this activity sounds good in principle. For example, in may book, I describe the following, typically colourful exchange with Tim Miller, Standard, Director of People at Chartered (who also wrote the foreword for the book):

Miller: “Ulrich suggests that HR should be spending seventeen per cent of its time on being an employee champion – it’s utter rubbish. This is the fundamental role of the manager – to manage the relationship between them and their staff. If HR gets in the way it diminishes the role of the manager and wastes HR’s time.”

Ingham: “Although I don’t think this is quite what Ulrich is suggesting – he’s not saying that HR should spend time with employees, but they need to be employee advocates, to understand what factors would motivate them, to be their sponsors.”

Miller: “But why do they need to do this? The argument’s intellectually flawed. The biggest advocates of staff should be the managers. There will be the occasional case where managers discriminate or employees are short-changed but these will be one-offs. And yes, HR needs to provide a sense of arbitration, but it’s deminimus. HR’s job is to make the heads of the organization more effective and help them make their managers more effective. But we need to stay out of doing it for them – if we surrogate for poor managers then we’ve got a big problem.”

It’s a great point, and I don’t mean to suggest that HR should take on people management activities or Responsibilities for these activities from line managers. But leaving them with Accountability for people management only works in organisations that value the management of people in practice as well as in principle (Standard Chartered and a few other organisations like GE are in this category but many are not). Otherwise managers having accountability often just means that nobody takes accountability.

A few essential requirements are probably:

• There is a clear role for line managers which focuses on managing people rather than technical activity (and this means there is probably a career structure for people who don’t fit into this role)
• There is effective performance management, including the performance management of managers
• People are only promoted or recruited as managers if they have the capability and motivation to line manage
• Reward for line managers depends on the activity of line management and the effectiveness and retention of the people they line manage.
  
  

So I’m not suggesting that HR should be Responsible for the execution of HR processes - this needs to be left with the line manager. And I’m not even suggesting that HR can be Accountable for the implementation of processes. But HR can (should?) be held Accountable for the output of these processes… not at the level of business results… but in the quality (alignment, effectiveness etc) of human capital.

HR typically counters this suggestion by explaining that they don’t manage the managers and cannot be held Accountable for what managers do. But surely the implementation of HR processes is at least if not more important than their design. So if line managers don’t use the processes as planned, either the processes are inappropriate, or the change / communication / education processes haven’t been up to scratch.

So I would suggest that within an HCM approach to people management, HR should be held Accountable: for human capital, ie the capability and engagement of employees and the behaviours of leaders, and organisation capital: the effectiveness of organisation structure and the suitability of the culture etc.


(And in the case of Royal Mail, HR should be held Accountable for effective relations with the company’s workforce).


So, what do you think? Come on, I must surely get a few comments on this!