I recently wrote a White Paper about Simplifying Government Services: Avoiding the Slippery Slope and thought I’d mention it here.
If you hear people talking about the 10, 20 or 100+ processes in your organization, you’ve hit the slippery slope. In truth, there are only a handful of processes in any organization, and if you’ve wrestled with the capability maturity model at all you should know that maturing 10, 20 or more ‘processes’ in an organization is an exercise in futility.
A process by definition consists only of activities (what we do). As soon as we’ve added people (i.e., swim lanes, who) and/ or tooling (how) we entered the land of practice.
Practice – a set of organizational resources designed for performing work or accomplishing an objective.
So, while practices are very important they are not the key to simplification.
Take a look at the free e-Book, Demystifying the term PROCESS, which describes the 10 requirements that something must meet, before we can call it a ‘process’ in a mature service management context.