We live in a complex world and we work in complex organizations. Whether your organization is small, medium, large or huge, understanding how it all works is no small task. Regardless of its size, the simple reality is the performance of any organization is largely driven by its management system. Ironically, it is rare to see an organization even acknowledge it has a management system. However, this is the “mother of all processes” and until an organization takes conscious control of that system, it will have little control over its performance.

A management system is a collection of processes understood by every employee that focuses the organization and drives it to achieve specific desired results. It creates the priorities, establishes targets, clarifies accountability, allocates and aligns all resources, reviews progress, initiates adjustments and interventions when performance is below target, and drives improvement in all routine work. An effective and disciplined management system ensures the routine work of the organization is delivered with increasing quality and decreasing costs, and that strategic initiatives are effectively executed so they deliver the expected results.

Download the full article, The Mother of All Processes: Part One to learn more about this important key to the NOW System of Management.

Processes are a series of steps or actions that transform inputs into well-defined outcomes or outputs. Well-managed organizations understand that everything they do is a series of integrated processes: purchasing, building, product development, technical support, customer service, hiring, accounting, finance, etc. These organizations also know that their processes and related impacts extend beyond the walls of the organization to include suppliers, partners and customers.

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Process ownership introduces a dimension of management that has a huge impact on costs and on meeting internal and external customer needs. Since most processes move across the whitespaces of the organization, any inefficient handoffs from one to the next becomes a huge source of waste, rework, rush costs, customer frustration and employee disengagement.

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Over the years, Henry Ford’s mass production system of management and its underlying logic has permeated organizational life from factories to banks to grocery stores and even our educational system. Today few of us realize that the underlying logic of the organizations we work in or run as leaders is in fact based on the model of management Ford invented over a century ago.

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One of the great failings of many process improvement approaches has been management’s failure to understand the Theory of Constraints. If process mapping one of an organization’s processes is a good thing, isn’t process mapping 200 of its processes a great thing?

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