With my new duties, I’m finding business processes that need to work better. Recent experience with a couple of our salespeople has shown me a “I’ve followed the process, what more do you want” attitude, partly as a result of the futility of the broken process they are supposed to follow (the other part is laziness).
So I want to change the process, only find the issues Creating Passionate Users Blog wrote about recently:
The systems, policies, procedures aren’t set up to incorporate your proposed change, and nobody’s willing to think about changing things. It would just be too disruptive. It would make too many people uncomfortable.
Kathy Sierra points to one possible response you may get from your organization, that you don’t “have all the facts and don’t see things from the ‘higher’ perspective of management.” Or, in my experience, the answer is that the process does handle the issue, its just that the employee or customer doesn’t understand how to follow the process. When the answer is RTFM, I’d call that a signal that there is a broken process, not in-attentive staff or clients.
But, like Kathy acknowledges, sometimes you may find the mountain too steep. I’ve got enough mole-hills to stomp on right now, anyway. Choose your fights wisely.