Disguising Analysis: Making the Medicine Go Down

Author(s)

Partner, Performance Design Lab
Alan Ramias is a Partner with the Performance Design Lab (PDL), a consulting, coaching and training company that specializes in organizational performance design and improvement. He brings 30 years of consulting experience in the analysis, design and implementation of performance systems. He has worked with organizations in Asia, Europe and North America. He is a co-author of the books White Space Revisited: Creating Value through Process and Rediscovering Value: Leading the 3-D Enterprise to Sustainable Success. Before becoming a management consultant, Alan was an instructional designer, training manager and organizational development manager at Motorola, where he worked for ten years, including as a member of the team that founded Motorola University. Alan led some of the first groundbreaking projects in process improvement that were the genesis for Motorola’s Six Sigma program. Alan joined The Rummler-Brache Group (RBG) in 1991, and led improvement projects in such companies as Shell, Hewlett-Packard, 3M, Citibank, DuPont, Steelcase, Citgo, Hermann Miller, Louisiana-Pacific, Bank One, Microsoft, Chinatrust, and Standard Chartered Bank . He became a Partner and Managing Director of Consulting Services at RBG and was responsible for selecting, training and overseeing RBG’s consultant teams. He also conducted RBG’s process improvement training for such companies as Hughes, DuPont, Shell, ABB, Ericsson, Citicorp, Sun Microsystems, Steelcase, Eli Lilly, Dow Chemical Europe, Dow Chemical South America, Square D, Pioneer Hi-Bred, UOP, 3M and Shell. Alan has presented on a wide variety of topics at numerous conferences, including the following: •“The Dangers of Prefab Models," BBC conference, November 2012 •“Repositioning BPM for Sustainable Success,” keynote presentation at Gartner BPM Conference in London, March 2011 •“Crossroads: How HPT and IT can Improve Organizational Performance,” International Society of Performance Improvement (ISPI) national conference, April 2009 •“How to Make BPM Work (Even in a Recession)”, International Quality & Productivity Conference (IQPC), April 2009 •“The Two Dimensions of an Organization: An Architecture for Achieving Business Results,” Fall ISPI Conference, September 2008. •“Designing the Process-Centered Organization,” ISPI Annual Conference, April 2008. •“BPM Methodologies: Turning the Land of Confusion into Solutions for Your BPM Initiatives”, Gartner BPM Conference, Las Vegas NV, January 2008 •“People, Processes, Technology: Why Can’t They All Get Along?” Shared Insights Conference, April 2007. •“The Origins of Process Improvement and Six Sigma at Motorola,” ISPI Annual Conference, April 2005. SELECTED PUBLICATIONS Ramias, A., "Integrating Process Management," BP Trends, October 2014 Ramias, A.and Wilkins, C., "Baby Steps: Making Process Management a Reality," BP Trends, June 2014 Ramias, A.and Wilkins, C., "Making Process Management a Reality," BP Trends, March 2014 Ramias, A. and Wilkins, C., “Remembering Geary Rummler,”BP Trends, November 2013 Ramias, A. and Wilkins, C., “Location, Location, Location: Does It Matter Where Your Performance Department Reports?,” BP Trends, June 2013 Ramias, A. and Wilkins, C., “Who Does What? Role/Responsibility Charting in Improvement Efforts,” BP Trends, December 2012 Ramias, A. and Wilkins, C., “Uses of the 3-Dimensional Enterprise Model,” BP Trends, September 2012 Ramias, A., “The Mists of Six Sigma’” Performance Xpress, April 2012 (reprinted from BP Trends) Ramias, A. and Wilkins, C., “Reference Models: The Long, Long Shortcut,” BP Trends, March 2012 Ramias, A. and Wilkins, C., “In From Left Field,” BP Trends, January 2012 Ramias, A. and Wilkins, C., “The Process-Centered Organization: Oh, For a Crisis,” BP Trends, September 2011 Ramias, A. and Wilkins, C., “The Process-Centered Organization: Do You Know Where You’re Going?” BP Trends, August 2011 Ramias, A. and Wilkins, C., “The Process-Centered Organization: The Long Road,” BP Trends, May 2011 Ramias, A. and Wilkins, C., “Who is Responsible for Process Performance?,” BP Trends December 2010 Ramias, A. and Wilkins, C., “Building Metrics for Processes,” BP Trends September 2010 Ramias, A. and Wilkins, C., “Measuring Process Performance,” BP Trends), May 2010 Ramias, A. and Wilkins, C., “The Role of the Performance Architect,” BP Trends January 2010 Ramias, A. and Wilkins, C., “What Process Owners Do,” BP Trends, October 2009 Ramias, A. and Wilkins, C., “Varieties of Process Ownership,” BP Trends, July 2009 Ramias, A.J. and Rummler, R., “The Evolution of the Effective Process Framework: A Model for Redesigning Business Processes,” Performance Improvement, November/December 2009 Rummler, G.A, Ramias A.J., and Rummler R.A., “Potential Pitfalls on the Road to a Process-Managed Organization,” Performance Improvement Journal (published as a two-part article in April and May/June 2009 issues). Rummler, G., and Ramias, A., “A Framework for Defining and Designing the Structure of Work”, BP Trends, (published as a 3-part paper in April and September 2008 and January 2009). Rummler, G. and Ramias, A., “The IT-Business Gap: Another Root Cause,” BP Trends, December 2007. Ramias, A., “What is a Process?” BPM Institute.org October 2007. Ramias, A., “When You Say ‘Process,’ You Mean…?” BPM Institute.org, August 2006. Ramias, A., “The Mists of Six Sigma,” BP Trends, October 2005.

Ask process improvement experts (which I have done over the years in teaching and consulting with such people) what is the hardest part of doing a process improvement project and they tend to say analysis. And in fact, it’s not just among process practitioners that you will hear people say that analysis is their most challenging activity: training program developers, organizational effectiveness types, change management coaches, etc., also tend to cite analysis as the toughest aspect of their work.

The reason is not necessarily that analysis is technically difficult—although that could be the case, the technical challenges tend to be motivating to most practitioners of the art of analysis. The real obstacle is the fear that analysis engenders in the targets of analysis. You want to analyze me? What are you trying to find out? What if it’s bad? The resistance comes out in various ways, even from (maybe especially from) senior leaders, who attempt to derail analysis by announcing that it’s unnecessary because “We all know it’s broken; let’s just fix it” or “I don’t want analysis paralysis.”

So what are some things you can do to deal with this quite understandable fear?

  1. One option is to not do analysis—just skip it and move on to solutions. Okay, not usually a good choice, unless the solution is obvious, but sometimes it can be, especially if you have a lot of experience in your area of expertise, so then why belabor the obvious just because your improvement methodology calls for an analysis phase? Well, because you could be wrong, and your expertise might blind you to things you need to examine in order to understand the situation thoroughly. So skipping analysis is a mistake. You will find yourself backtracking at some point during the project to find out things you should already know, and there is a cost to that—in time and in your own credibility.
  2. Another option is to call the analysis something else—it’s a Review, or an Assessment (although that term smells like analysis), or a Check (as in Plan, Do, Check, Act), or a Determination, or Questioning, or Concept Development. This last one may seem a little sneaky, however, if you come back during Concept Development with a whopping report that looks like an as-is analysis.
  3. A different option is to describe the analysis as being part of another phase (it becomes the first part of the Redesign phase, for example) or to layer analysis throughout all the other phases, as it tends to already be there anyway. For example, the front end of an improvement project usually has something like Scoping, or Project Definition, or Modeling, and despite the label, this front end contains analysis of various kinds—what the problem is, where it’s happening, who will be the client, etc. Then in the Design or Redesign phase, the same opportunity exists to integrate the analysis work into creating the solution.
  4. Yet another alternative comes from Geary Rummler. In his book Serious Performance Consulting*  he suggests that instead of analysis being a long protracted period of time it can be done in successive “sweeps”, each of which starts with a hypothesis, followed by data collection and then analysis proper. The hypothesis is an “informed” (as in, the client told you) guess about the current state (“The client says this process is too costly because we’re paying too much for inventory”). Information is then gathered from interviews, documents and other sources to see if the hypothesis holds up. Then each following sweep either focuses in more and more narrowly on the problem (“The data suggest that process costs are caused by both inventory costs and a high amount of rework”) or the hypothesis is invalidated and you start over. But at each stage you return to the client with your findings, review what you have found and together decide whether to continue or take a different course. This helps engage the client in the “hunt for truth” as well as bring transparency to the analysis phase. And because the analysis is done in bite-sized steps it doesn’t seem like the giant analysis phase of so many organizational studies.

Whatever course you take, do analysis, however it best works in the environment you’re in. But while doing it, never forget that the fear factor is there and needs to be attended to or it can seriously inhibit your ability to execute an essential part of improvement work.

* Rummler, Geary A., Serious Performance Consulting:  According to Rummler, Intern

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