Frameworks or Processes
I was discussing our processes at work 1
day with my manager, Bruce Heard. You notice I automatically said processes.
The question is do we have processes or frameworks. Bruce said to me, “if you
stood in front of a classroom and write a load of facts on a whiteboard the
pupils will remember about 10℅ of what you said. If instead you tell them the
subject and that they must use the tools available, eg the internet, books etc
to find out what they can about the subject. The pupils will ultimately
remember more and learn more.” This principal can be extended to the workplace
by providing not a hard rigid set of rules but a more flexible framework to
allow the employee some degrees of freedom to investigate, experiment, adapt
and learn.
First a business needs to decide if to
adopt a Framework or Process approach.
Whichever you choose between using Frameworks
or Processes which will be specific to your business its important to have a
coherent approach throughout your business so if its Frameworks or Processes it
should be a value held throughout your business so all departments fully adopt
the approach selected.
Now its equally important for your
Frameworks or Processes to evolve but its equally important that your Frameworks
dont become Processes or vice versa, to ensure this doesnt happen its necessary
to define what your business defines as a Framework and a Process, which will
be specific for your business.
This will allow you to govern your Frameworks or Processes and
ensure that they don’t gravitate too far away from becoming its opposite force.
Your business should continually monitor
your Frameworks or Processes, whichever you have selected as your core value
for your business to ensure that they remain steadfast to their definition. A
department should be accountable to ensuring all departments adhere to this, if
you like, internal auditors of your Frameworks or Processes ( whichever is
selected for your business )
It is imperative that each department buys
into the core values because if some departments adopt a Framework approach and
other departments Processes, since departments rarely act as silos in a
business or shouldn’t act as silos and should communicate across their borders
you will consequently develop poor communications and tensions will arise
between departments
A separate dimension that we’ve not discussed are the tools to use
which act as enablers for your Frameworks or Processes. You should have a consistent
approach to the tools you use and the tools should be specified in your
Frameworks or Processes. Defining tools to use ensures a consistent approach. If
tools are not specified in your then the user can select any tool they wish to
do their work
which may not be safe, may not following
industry standards, could cause issues when you are being audited, may not be
efficient, may result in losing business ISO accreditations, difficult to
manage, train and support etc
When would you use a Framework or Process.
To answer this there are a few things to take into account. If you adopt Frameworks
you would not make statements, such as "click here now click there, enter
this and then jump up and down", you simply state read this article in the
event you need to do X, in other words signpost the user and let them go and
work it out for themselves exactly what they need to do.
For processes, you will consider every
possibility without the possibility of any other permutation and specifically
state the steps the user needs to perform which could be references to other
articles and online tutorials etc but the difference to frameworks is that all
possibilities are considered and accounted for with a process to explain to the
reader what they should do in such events.
Frameworks foster an environment of
creativity, empowers employees, saves time in producing exhaustive reams of
process material and is more adaptable, and makes employees accountable as they
cannot hide behind a process and blame the process when something goes wrong;
they know what their role is, they know what their duties are and they are
given the tools, training and a framework to achieve their duties.
Frameworks work well in ever changing
environments, but not as well in environments were control is necessary where
consequences of error is catastrophic.
Processes allow strict control with little chance of anomalies
occurring. In businesses were roles and responsibilities and duties rarely
change, well defined processes can work well and where it is 100% critical that
an exact process is followed; organisations such as hospitals, military and
where the consequences of deviating from a strict set of processes can result
in catastrophic failure.
Processes can lead to personnel avoiding
accountability when errors occur because they are able to blame the process.
The only exception for this is if the organisation does not adopt good tools to
support the framework, and doesn't allow freedom to develop and experiment with
the framework.
