Too many process captains and too few indians

The post will be less valid to American readers and I guess also readers from the U.K. and several Asian countries as it will be a little rant against all the IT process models which are smothering the average Dutch IT organization. Readers from counties which also have a ‘consensus’ culture might however find some common ground in the text below.

My country (The Netherlands) is both blessed and cursed with a culture where everybody wants to talk about every decision. This is totally unlike for example the American style where the department head decides and the rest executes. This approach has as a site effect that potential lower in the organization remains untapped, but it also enhances focus and speed.We have a large (IT) service industry and this combined with our consensus culture created an ideal feeding ground for process models like ITIL (infra support), ASL (application support), and BiSL (information management).

For process models to be effective they require part of the responsibilities and mandate of the functional heads to be distributed lower into the organization. The (theoretical) advantages of a process oriented way of working are evident and I am not going to repeat them here. The disadvantages have been discussed less however (to my knowledge) and it basically boils to the ‘law of diminishing returns’ and the focus on activities instead of result.

The process models all aim to improve the quality of service provisioning towards the client and that is good, excellent even. It then goes wrong in two places:

• The drive of the creators of process models to build and build piece after piece on their model, making it ever more elaborate, bureaucratic and  expensive. Most well known is the ITIL V3 version which spun totally      out of its orbit and spoiled a excellent concept and model. More and more control leads to unhappy clients as control means ‘to exercise restraint or direction over’ (Dictionary.com) and is thus by nature focussed more on the downside of the business instead of the upside. Control is good, but by implementing ITIL, ASL, BiSL and a process model to manage the external suppliers, the IT-organisation is too busy with itself to have any time left for a client. So to the writers of all those beautiful process models: ‘less is more’.
• Implementing processes is typically done by creating a new department. And a department needs a chief and that chief want to see its department grow. Grow because the process managers and coordinators all want to do a good job: exercise control on as many things as possible. The result is processes with fifteen decision steps and meters of paper describing the procedures, forms and work instructions. The second reason for the growth of process departments is of course the drive of any middle manager to increase its budget and thus power. 

The result (very black and white) is process managers bugging the people doing the real work with procedures which could be half the length and half the time to execute.The result of all the process implementations is SLA’s and reports showing only green colors while at the same time have business managers getting red faces when thinking about their IT-department. And the reflex of the typical IT-manager seeing a red faced business manager: more procedures in an effort to control the control of the control.

And in the meantime nothing really changes, except for an ever increasing number of escalations in order to get at least something done.Ok, this picture given here is very black and does not do justice to the actual situation, but I talked already to several IT managers which are seriously thinking about killing their process departments and absorbing a minimum of process managers into their operations departments.

Like with standardization are also processes a means to an end and not a means in itself. As discussed in previous posts do I think that standardization is starting to hurt the business as driving for IT efficiency only damage business value when pushed too far.

Processes and their managers have their value, no doubt about it, but IT organizations have to learn when enough is enough. When does the addition of one more process manager start to cost more than it adds to the bottom line of the company.

So no post about outsourcing this time, but some process ranting...