Have you been handed a remit by an executive to build a process governance function? Are you the only one on the team thinking, « There has to be a better way »? Or maybe this isn’t new; it’s exactly what you were hired for. If you haven’t already found out, you will soon discover that managing processes is a team sport, and not everyone is quick to buy in. More than any technology, more than any framework, securing buy-in from people will ultimately make your job the best in the world…or nearly impossible.
Knowing who is involved in the processes you’re aiming to improve and understanding their needs is essential for gaining their support. As a budding or seasoned process excellence professional, your goal is to document and optimize processes to ensure smooth operations and informed decision-making.
However, achieving this at scale requires buy-in from various stakeholders, each with their unique perspectives and priorities. In this blog, we’ll explore how to navigate these diverse viewpoints and secure the necessary support to drive successful process improvements.
Two broad questions you should ask in the beginning are:
- Who are the people involved in the processes you’re trying to improve?
- And what do they want?
For you, the answer to the latter is easy. You want processes that run smoothly and efficiently, and that allow the company to make the best possible decisions. You know that investing in process intelligence and optimizing processes ensures your company remains competitive.
However, the questions become more difficult as you try to identify stakeholders and understand what makes them tick. Each has their own set of views, preferences, beliefs, and objectives, all of which impact how they understand and value a specific process.
The Importance of Perspective in Process Improvement
To illustrate this principle, let’s step outside of the corporate framework for a minute. Think of how this plays out in a pizza restaurant. If you’re a customer coming to collect a pizza, chances are the factors you care about are whether your pizza is fresh, tasty, and on time. You’re probably not interested in the equipment the chef used to make it, what kind of flour they used, or where they sourced their ingredients. But to the chef, those points are far more relevant. They want to use the best tools to make the best pizza.
Meanwhile, the restaurant owner has other priorities. Sure, they care that what comes out of the kitchen is fresh, tasty, and made with good ingredients. However, their primary concern is whether the pizza-making process is running smoothly enough to keep the business making money. Otherwise, the other considerations become irrelevant.
In a corporate context, the same logic applies. You need to understand the viewpoint of everyone involved in a process, including the viewpoints of executives that can greenlight a process improvement initiative at scale.
For executives, an obvious point of value is the metrics that they themselves are measured on from a strategic perspective. The company’s Chief Revenue Officer will be interested in the bottom line: How do these process changes impact metrics like Annual Recurring Revenue?
For sales team members, process changes should address their pain points and improve their quality of life. Implementing changes like sales automation may reduce the number of tasks they need to complete manually. In turn, that should make it easier for individual reps to manage the accounts they’re working on and build meaningful relationships with clients. Additional considerations for this team might be how these improvements impact their ability to earn commission and their job security.
Meanwhile, for the IT team, there are other considerations. Will the new process break anything in terms of security and existing systems? Is it difficult to implement or easy to integrate? To what kinds of vulnerabilities might it expose the company to? And if there’s already an existing solution: Why do we need this shiny new one?
You can’t account for everyone’s concerns and viewpoints at every turn. However, going into your process optimization effort with some idea of different viewpoints and the resistance you might encounter will make it far easier to select an appropriate process intelligence solution – one that addresses concerns right out of the box and can provide the kinds of metrics you need to sway people to your side.
Importantly, though, metrics shouldn’t be considered the be-all-and-end-all of process improvement. As a PEX professional, it can be tempting to fall back on the numbers and methodologies like Lean and Six Sigma to demonstrate the value of a process improvement approach.
These tools do provide a robust way to measure each step of an initiative and offer a rigorous approach to executing change. Ultimately, however, meaningful and lasting change is about changing human behavior. And few people will be motivated purely by mathematics!
Continuous Relationships for Continuous Improvement
It’s also worth remembering that getting buy-in for your process intelligence plans isn’t simply a “one-and-done.” You’ll need to engage with people in the long term, get them to talk to you about their processes, and get buy-in for each new initiative. You also need people to meaningfully change their behavior to support long-term process improvement.
Understanding different stakeholder viewpoints is a great starting point to achieve those goals. But, it’s also important to be sure you speak the same language as the people you work with.
This might include how you frame process change in the first place. Cultural differences between regions (and within workplaces) can influence how ideas are received.
In some places, this may mean being direct and clearly stating: “There’s a problem with this process. Here’s what we need to do to fix it.”
In others, it may be a better approach to steer clear of identifying “process problems” and to focus on opportunities for improvement instead: “There’s a more efficient way to run this process. Here’s what we’ll gain if we make some changes.”
Understanding these kinds of differences, and how best to frame an improvement initiative, can mean the difference between getting your program funded and watching a brilliant idea fall by the wayside. It can also radically boost your chances of successfully improving your company’s process landscape in the long term.
Demonstrating Process Excellence
A good tool in the toolbox when it comes to getting buy-in is being able to easily demonstrate exactly what you’re talking about. A platform that’s easy to use, understand, and navigate can go a long way toward convincing stakeholders that an initiative has merit. This is especially true if you can also demonstrate real value by giving them a “quick win” in terms of a small but meaningful process improvement.
Put another way: It’s a lot harder to convince members of your C-suite to invest in a process intelligence tool that costs hundreds of thousands of dollars and takes a year before producing any results. Therefore, a good process intelligence platform should make it easy to demonstrate results and alignment with the priorities of all relevant stakeholders. In short, it should do some of the heavy lifting of convincing them for you.
- Pick your process. And then pick a part of that process. You want something small that can generate a quick win. Something simple with a consistent set of activities can make it easier to identify improvements (e.g. Accounts Payable in Finance).
- Draft your team. Reach out to the accountable process owner (e.g. Head of Accounts Payable). See if they already have any ongoing improvement initiatives or pet projects. If there are, make friends with the people that are running them. Joining a cause rather than creating a new one is a great way to get day one buy-in. Don’t forget about the supporting cast. Find out what system is being used to manage the process (e.g. an ERP). Find a person in IT responsible for that system and add them to your team. Be sure to understand what it is that each person wants.
- Roll up your sleeves and start improving. We typically see this in 3 phases. You start with discovery to make an honest assessment about the current process state. Process mining can help here. Then you design an improved version of the process. Process modeling and process simulation can be helpful to test various hypotheses for what that improved version looks like and how much ROI it will generate. And finally, optimize the process. Implement your changes, whether it’s system configuration, AI, automation, or something else. If you need to secure budget for something, the ROI assessment will come in handy.
- Rinse and repeat. Make sure to spread the good word about what your team has accomplished. This will secure the human capital and financial capital that you need to embark on more improvement projects. At some point there will be a shift wherein people are reaching out to you for support, rather than you finding improvement projects yourself.
To see how our process intelligence solutions can help you secure stakeholder buy-in and drive successful process improvements, book a demo today.