Why are processes not working as designed originally?

And how to get back to how it was thought off?

Or is the nowadays business just to rapidly changing?

So designing processes is 'Old School' and not effective and agile anymore?

There might be multiple reasons for getting in trouble with running day-to-day processes.

Based upon my working experience over the last decades, I just list a few, which unfortunately for most of them are still valid after all these years:

• Processes grown bottom-up, and/or designed from there. The bad luck of those companies which started many, many decades ago. And very difficult to get it changed. On the other hand, you might bring in a valid argument, that a lot of them are still making good profits. Very true, but nobody knows how long that will last in the turbulent times we all are in right now....

• Lack of Business Process knowledge. This sounds a bit weird, but it's one of the major reasons why companies are running sometimes into a kind of a catch-22 situation: Is the process we designed, managed an a wrong way, or do we have no good understanding how the process should have been designed from the start..? One thing is clear, if you cannot manage a process, you will have challenges to design it, and vice versa...

• Company culture is primarily Product Oriented with very little focus on Process Excellence. We have seen painful examples in the past, where technology was the only driver for companies, but the ability to execute E2E processes from R&D up to Customer Service was the killer, whether it was in consumer electronics, photo printing or mobile phones...

• Lack of Awareness and/or Sense of Urgency. Business runs as usual, so there is not a real trigger for continuous process improvement. Again, this might be just a time bomb. When business is getting worse, there might not be sufficient time (and budget) anymore to repair...

• Business and IT are not very well connected in terms of decisions to take on effective applications to supporting the business processes. Well, first of all, its good to mention that IT and Business SHOULD have different opinions about what's the best technology or application for the company. Just because they have different responsibilities, so that's perfectly OK. But how to get them aligned is often a challenge, so multi-functional teams consisting of IT, Business ánd Data Science, might be a good way of getting best of 3 worlds together...

• No budgets, so no vision or plan for: Continuous Improvement Programs, New Technology tryouts, People Development, etc. Saving money on those might be a 'penny wise pound foolish' strategy...

• Arrogance or lack of capabilities learning from others: colleagues, peer companies, competitors, universities, etc. Typically the: "we always did it in this way and we managed it always very well..." Unfortunately, solutions of the past might not work anymore for solving the issues of today or in the near future...

• Unbelief in new breaking ideas. Typically the: "we have tried this before and it always failed..." Yes, with this mind set, it will become automatically a 'self-fulfilling prophecy

• The well known abbreviations NIH and NIMBY... What a wealth of knowledge, experience and visionary thought are going down the drain, just because of these negative and selfish attitudes. A process is by definition a chain of many different activities, tools and people. If you're not a team player, you will never get that well-working...

• There's much more to add, so drop us an email on what YOU think is one of the main barriers or reasons for failure in your organization and we will add it to the list...