After speaking at a Midwest Process Management seminar last week, I was scheduled to give the same presentation to a local CA Clarity PPM customer. I met with the team of folks leading the IT process effort at this major retailer. Initially, I was concerned because I was meeting with folks who had already initiated their process journey. Would the concepts and approaches I evangelized be coming too late for them? Would they feel the need to defend what they had or had not done? Would I be compelled to recommend they backtrack?
My fears were assuaged quite quickly. Our immersion into the discipline of process management was right on time. The resulting discussions provided a great blend of validation, revelation and consternation. These folks are waist deep in the rising waters of the process journey. They are in the throes of a significant endeavor and their challenges and concerns brought a wonderful immediacy to what is often a theoretical discussion. It was a lot of fun - for me at least.
I was especially intrigued because on the wall of the conference room was an end-state process model for their IT organization. I won't fall down the rabbit hole of IT process models, IT process frameworks and IT process methodologies. We could discuss the merits of their model for days. My excitement wasn't in the model itself, it was that they had a model at all. They had a vision. They had an end-state. They had a destination.
I use the word "journey" to describe the effort to realize IT Governance. But long before I used the word in an IT Governance context, I used it to describe an enterprise's effort to become process-centric.
Moving your organization from being function-centric to process-centric is a journey. And as with almost every journey, you need to know where you are going. Though it seems so obvious, I have found that few organizations attempt to define who and what they are, at least in a process model.
This IT organization has the audacity, the courage, and the conviction to define their destination - and their leadership team is sponsoring the effort to get there.
There it was - on the wall. I lost count of the number of times I bounced from my presentation to their process map. I had the feeling of comfort and assurance every time I did. It is nice to know where you are going.
Where is your organization going? Are you on a Process Journey? I would love to hear about it.