Process Pain Points: Handoffs

Hi, I’m Sandy Kemsley of column2.com. I’m here for the Trisotech blog with the second in a series of videos on finding and dealing with process pain points.

Although this will be of interest to business analysts who are figuring out the Asis and 2B processes within our organization, I’ll also touch on some implementation issues that will be of interest to my more technical listeners.

Now in the previous video, I talked about finding the spread sheets and email in existing business processes in order to locate process pain points. This gives us a starting point for process improvement since having to work around existing systems with ad hoc methods usually means there’s a part of the process that’s not being addressed in a consistent fashion.

Today, I’m going to look at another paino in business processes which is failed handoffs as work moves between people and between departments. As I mentioned previously, I tend to analyze an organizations’s processes by walking around and talking to the people who are actually doing the work, not just looking at documentation and process diagrams.

As a starting point, I usually try to follow a business process from beginning to end. And if you’ve been listening in the past. you’ll know I’m a huge proponent of understanding and analyzing your end-to-end processes.

Now let’s say the process is triggered by an inbound paper document from a customer, then I start at the mail room (if it’s triggered by an online order form), and then I’ll start at the order entry (if it’s triggered by an internal timer every day that kicks off an overnight reconcililation process, I start with that). Then, I follow it through to the conclusion of the process, for a customer facing process that could be when the customer receives the goods or services or if their complaint is resolved or whatever it is that they called or emailed or sent in a form about. For purely internal processes, this could be when the account books are reconciled or an internal audit is complete and documented.

Now, following business processes through from beginning to end lets me discover where things can go wrong when handing off work between people and departments. This could be a situation where someone needs, for example, to manually re-enter the customer’s order data into an internal system because there’s no integration with the online ordering system (this happens more often than you think even today) or the information passed from an operational group to an audit group is missing some data that’s required to complete the audit, and the audit group has to request that data from the operational group and then manually integrate it in before they can do their work, or different departments don’t use the same workflow system and we end up back with the spreadsheets and email to communicate work between departments.

Now, handoffs are typically one of the worst spots for inefficiencies and even degradation of quality in processes, and they always have been even in purely manual processes. So whenever work passes from one person to another, there’s an opportunity for information to be missed, or even for tasks to get completely dropped or hidden away somewhere. Think about the last time you called in into your bank or your mobile phone provider and had some sort of service request or a problem, so how many times did you have to repeat the description of your problem to different people and even repeat your personal information so that they could authenticate you multiple times as it got handed off from one person to another? That’s because they do a really bad job of handing off work, namely your call, between people and between departments. And in part, this is why oneandone customer service interactions gained in popularity there were no handoffs or at least a minimal number so there weren’t the opportunities for inefficiencies and dropped task to happen at that handoff point.

So, looking at the entire end-to-end processes in your organization, paying special attention to what happens every time a piece of work is handed off is going to let you find a lot of your process pain points. Now the funny part of looking at handoffs as a process pain points is that many failed handoffs can be directly correlated with local optimization efforts. So in other words, a single department gets enthusiastic about optimizing their own internal processes, without thinking about where they fit in the end-to-end process, and they don’t think about who needs to provide them with inputs, and more importantly they don’t think about who needs to consume their outputs. So this can result in critical business information being locked in their departmental line of business systems where it’s inaccessible to other departments. Even those that need to do some downstream work using that same information, in order to complete the end-to-end process.

The moral of the story, if you don’t have everyone thinking about where they fit in the end to-end business process and worried as much about the metrics for the entire process as they are about their own departmental metrics, then you’re almost certainly going to be experiencing some pain at the handoff points.

That’s all for today. You can find more of my writing and videos on the Trisotech blog or on my own blog at column2.com. See you next time.