I’ve had a pestering, festering feeling that we’re somehow missing the real prize. That we were heading for the stadium but somehow we got stuck in the parking lot with the gate closed…

and we just can’t figure out how to get it open.

But what are we missing?

It’s Like an Iceberg

It’s like the iceberg thing. We work like devils on the stuff we can see but the other part (and that’s where it starts getting interesting) we can’t touch. So what if our understanding of optimization opportunities is like the iceberg? What if we can only “see” the smallest part of the real optimization opportunity?

That would mean that the lion’s share of what we could do to improve our processes, our organizations, our customers experiences, even the quality of our working experiences sits “out there,” out of sight and out of mind.

That’s interesting but it doesn’t change anything until we find a way to get our hands around it. If optimization is like an iceberg then before we can tap into this vast reservoir of unleashed potential beyond the tip we are stuck on, we must find away to bring the rest of the iceberg into our “world view.” Until then it’s just a fanciful thought or mildly interesting mental exercise.

But guess what? Bennu Group is leading the way to unleashing that hidden potential – the rest of the iceberg is you will.

I always liked reading stories about famous pioneers, the scouts and explorers that were ever willing – no, that had a burning need – to ford the next river, climb the next mountain, and even cross an endless sea to discover new lands and new people; to expand our world as we know it.

In our own way, Bennu Group is also living the legacy of the pioneer and the explorer.

The work around CEM, CEMM and the Certified Process Professional program is definitely breaking new ground. That’s interesting, but that is not what makes this work so important.

The understanding around process improvement that has evolved from our work “opens the gate” to a world of process optimization we never had before. That vast reservoir remains intact, only now we have the means to take advantage of the opportunity to represents. Now THAT is important!

The Current Practice Creates Work

In our current process practices we more often than not create work for people to do, work that (oh my, this is where things start getting gritty) is non-value add to the organization.

I think it helps us to understand this when we realize that our predominant view of “process” and “management” behaves as if we think our organizations fit the definition of a machine. If they did then we would best be served by creating robust process models that are highly prescriptive in nature. People would then provide oversight and maintenance while the “processes” did the majority of any real work.

That mindset produces large, complicated process models – whether they are embedded in software or not. Great effort is expended to cover all manner of issues of concern to the organization in this approach. These issues include cost, profit, risk, compliance, control, quality, etc.

These process models are “locked down,” meaning they are infused with rules and mandates that tightly control any “work” moving through the process. Does this sound familiar?

Sure, we can optimize the heck out of these processes and that will help make us more productive. However, in this approach we end up needing to do this over and over because these processes become dated instantly any time we “bring them up” to our current context.

But the really amazing thing is that these “processes” are likely the CAUSE of 70% to 90% of the work that people do in every business and organization – and it’s ALL NON-VALUE ADD WORK. It’s waste.

The New Frontier

The new process frontier has an entirely different sense to it. The best processes will be those that have the fewest constraints built into them. Processes will be subjected to ongoing evolution that makes them lean with Causes of Work and Points of Failure stripped out of them on a regular basis.

The ideal process is one step. That’s right, one step.

Now we won’t jump to having our processes suddenly all become one step processes. Not all processes (in our current understanding) can evolve to one step and we are virtually at the other end of the spectrum right now.

What we will see is a dramatic and ongoing effort to bring our processes back from the “complexity” brink to the useful and beneficial “lean” state. That will occur through the application of CEMM.

We have already placed many of the techniques into play that are required to transform processes to the “lean, natural” state they should be from the “complex, unnatural” state we have imposed on them. That’s right, part of the new approach focuses on finding the natural state of each process, a state where the process takes on the shape that best enables it support the desired outcome.

For processes that are already documented (those controlled through software and those that are not) we now have the techniques needed to dramatically optimize them. This is the focus of the Certified Process Professional Level 1 using four of the eight steps of CEMM.

Processes that have not been formerly documented, high level processes that have never been articulated as processes, customer processes, and the like are subjected to techniques that uncover the customer-centric outcome of the process and develop explicit alignment of the process with the desired outcome. Including the advanced process optimization techniques also used at CPP Level 1, this is the focus of the Certified Process Professional Level 2 using all eight steps of CEMM.

Are your processes Ideal, Optimized, Inefficient or Uncontrollable?

One of the powerful new techniques in CEMM is the use of the Points of Failure Factor and Causes of Work Factor. These factors give us the first numerical representation of “where we are” in respect to likelihood that a process will “fail” and the number of places in the process where work is likely to be “caused.”

More than anything else, these new tools give us a way to quantify the current state of our processes and the progress we make in improving them. Take this in hand with the Points of Failure Optimization Scale and the Causes of Work Optimization Scale and we now have a quick “snapshot” method for determining what “category” our processes fall into – Idea, Optimized, Inefficient or Uncontrollable.

These new tools and techniques are also part of what the CPP Level 1 & 2 learns and uses in their process practice.

Finally, as we attempt to harness the power of innovation we find that there is a set of techniques that will help us analyze processes so that we have the information needed to set the stage for innovation. This is followed by the technique that enables us to build the Innovation Landscape of a process. The Innovation Landscape is an extremely powerful process tool as it articulates the likely levels of innovation that can be applied to the process and the cost, benefit and transformation factor of each. Process Innovation is the focus of the Certified Process Professional Level 3.

These tools and techniques in CEMM and the CPP program dip deeply into that pool of unseen process optimization potential. They take us beyond the tip of the iceberg, unleashing process optimization potential that previously had remained outside of our reach.

There is More Coming

Yet there is more coming. Even while the process leadership encapsulated in CEMM and the CPP program (levels 1 through 3 that are now available) we are not stopping there. The first 3 levels of CPP focus on processes, the next levels of CPP will focus on the enterprise.

But we will save that discussion for a later date. For now its time to get familiar with what CEMM already has to offer so that we can unleash the hidden potential in our organizations by going beyond the tip of the iceberg!