I took a moment over the holidays to reflect on my conversations with members during the last few months of 2009.  It dawned on me that, inevitably, a majority of conversations turned to process improvement and often times, more specifically, Lean.  While I wasn’t all that surprised by the interest in the topic it did get me wondering (I should warn you “wondering” often gets me into trouble)…have we not come close to solving this whole process thing yet?  I know members have been working on it.  I know we at the Operations Council have been working on it.  What’s going on?

I did some quick checking.  Did you know that over the last three years process improvement has been the top priority among operations executives? The bigger problem is that Operations Council research shows that process efficiency strategies are failing to deliver results, despite significant investments.  Executives are growing concerned about the longer-term benefits of these strategies.  More specifically, they’re concerned about the sustainability of their process improvement initiatives, and in fact, this concern may be one of the reasons process efficiency continues to top the strategic agendas of senior executives year after year.

Our analysis shows that top performing institutions are more likely to see their process efficiency efforts succeed if they move beyond the process, and consider factors like employee development and technology improvement.  Unfortunately, many aren’t doing so.

All of the above got me thinking (and FYI, “thinking” gets me into more trouble than “wondering”)…is there such a thing as too much process optimization?  I’ve had the good fortune of working with many of our IT Council members and many of them follow a process framework just like Lean but called ITIL.  You may be surprised to learn, as I was, that many IT executives focus too much on process to the detriment of other factors/strategies/competencies.  Bluntly put, many have over-optimized processes and have suffered for it!

I’m starting to become concerned that that’s where we’re headed.  Have we become so focused on becoming lean and following Six Sigma that we’ve completely forgotten about employee development, culture and technology?  Are we now at a point where we optimize processes simply for the sake of optimizing?  Are we so caught up in following a framework that we’ve lost focus on how it adds value to our organization?

We began to address this issue in a teleconference held this past November entitled, “Operations Change Watch:  Strategic ‘Red Flags’ for Operations’ 2010 Agenda.” I’m curious though…what do you think?