Process Management and Agile

Process Management and Agile: Friend or Foe?

Periodically when talking about process management, I will be told “process management isn’t for us, we’re agile”.

Is agile a fair excuse to avoid process management? Short answer, in my opinion, absolutely not; in fact, an agile environment makes process management more important if anything. Here’s why.

Agile and the Agile Trap

First, let’s start by defining agile. While agile originated from software development, it’s since become synonymous with continuous improvement following the Japanese concept of kaizen, which means to make small incremental improvements continuously. The idea is that we should always be looking at the way that we work and seeking to improve rather than blindly performing old, ingrained processes.

With this in mind, it’s easy to see why people categorise agile and process management as two competing ideologies, with the former focusing on change and growth, while the latter prioritises stability.

Let’s consider the SA Partners Improvement Journey:

When you are in the reactive phase, you’re likely to be experiencing:

• Inconsistency in the way that work is performed, depending on who is doing the work and/ or when the work is being done
• Inconsistency in the outputs that are produced by your processes, resulting in a highly variable customer experience
• Significant management time spent responding to and resolving problems

And this can be the agile trap – if you adopt an uncontrolled, ungoverned approach to continuous improvement you run the risk of trapping yourself in the reactive phase with process participants given a license to perform their work differently every time they do it and call it agile.

Process Management

How then does process management come in to save the day? Simply put, it means that we are fostering an environment of continuous improvement, however, tying governance around it.

This starts with standardisation. While it may seem counter-intuitive, for us to improve we need to start from a platform of stability so that we are all trying to improve the same process (see my earlier post where I explore the idea of standardisation in more detail).  Once we’ve achieved stability, we’re ready to start thinking about improvement. While yes, we want everyone in the organisation to be empowered to drive change, it’s critical that processes have clearly defined ownership such that while anyone can make a suggestion to change, it is the process owner who makes the decision on if we adopt the change an deviate from our agreed, stablised process.

To make this happen, every process needs to have a clear process owner and expert:

Once this ownership has been defined, anyone should be able to leave feedback on the process to suggest a change, but this feedback needs to be funneled to our process owner and expert to assess the feedback and make a decision on what action, if any, will be taken:

The benefits of tying governance around improvement are:

• Our process owners and experts are in a position where they can see the bigger picture; while something may appear to be an obvious improvement to us as process participants, it may cause issues down and upstream
• There is control over the path forward, are we okay to go ahead and implement the idea? Do we need to pilot the idea in a controlled environment? Does the idea need to be parked for now?
• While a process participant may make a suggestion, it could be a band-aid fix. The value of the suggestion is often not the proposed fix itself, but rather a flag to the process owner that there is a problem that requires root cause analysis
• If we do indeed have a valuable improvement suggestion, this approach will mean that it is more likely to stick – it shouldn’t just be us that changes the way we work, everyone should adopt the new and improved process (which should then become the starting point for future improvement)

In summary, process management and agile shouldn’t be seen as competing ideologies rather process management will help you to avoid the agile trap and drive effective, meaningful change.

Ishan Sellahewa

Digital  Transformation Business Manager 

Ishan.Sellahewa@sapartners.com