Processes vs Departments

The marketing manager wants to mail a marketing piece to help the sales team with new leads. To do this, he needs the prospect list from the sales manager. And, oh, by the way, the finance manager has to approve the budget. And since the piece will be delivered over the internet, IT needs to come in. IT will only code what the design team has submitted. And it goes on and on. By the time a simple marketing piece is sent, more than six departments have worked on it. My question is, “who is really in charge of marketing?”

If you manage projects in any capacity, you know that it takes a host of tasks to complete a single project. On the other side of this same coin is the fact that these tasks are performed by, not machines, but by people.

One of the challenges of managing people is that people, unlike machines, are territorial. In a large corporation for example, you have directors, managers, and heads of departments. If one employee belongs to department A, for example, she will go an extra mile to please the head of that department. If a director from another department wants something to be done by this same employee, hesitations will be observed.

Most employees (and employers alike) think of their company tasks in terms of departments. What they fail to realize though is that tasks do not necessarily obey protocol. Sometimes tasks will create conflicts and hostilities among department heads. Deadlines will not be met, quality will be compromised, and deliverables will be half-baked.

One of the ways to solve this problem is to look at a company as a sum total of process and not departments. Processes are more flexible than departments. A process looks at a particular project as having a beginning and an end. Processes actually deliver value to clients, not departments. Processes remove bottlenecks created by departments.

There are several tools that could help you to design your company as a system of processes rather than departments. A simple good search will bring up several. One of my favorite ones is the Balanced Performance Indicator (BPI). Why is it my favorite? Because I created it:)
Stay tuned for more about the BPI.