Lean By Design
Lean by Design delves into the dynamic world of biotech, pharma, and life sciences, focusing on operational excellence through effective workflow and process optimization. Join hosts Oscar Gonzalez and Lawrence Wong as they engage with industry leaders who share their insights, innovative strategies, and real-world experiences in transforming complex challenges into streamlined, efficient solutions. Through thought-provoking conversations, you’ll gain practical tips and inspiration to drive continuous improvement and success in your organization. Produced by Sigma Lab Consulting, Lean by Design empowers you to enhance productivity and innovation, one process at a time. Listen on Spotify, iTunes, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
Lean By Design
0203: Build or Buy? Developing Internal Process Capabilities vs. Relying on External Experts with Liam O'Neill
Have you ever noticed the gap between where your organization is and where it needs to be widening every day—especially when workflows are undefined or changing?
In this episode of Lean by Design, we sit down with Liam O’Neill of BPM‑D to tackle the big question: do you invest in building process capabilities internally or lean on outside consultants? We’ll walk you through evaluating your readiness, embedding process ownership in leadership, and starting with a real business challenge so you can create sustainable, scalable process excellence rather than just putting out fires.
Learn more about BPMD at https://bpm-d.com/
Connect with Liam at https://www.linkedin.com/in/l-oneill/
Ready to assess your organization’s efficiency? Connect with us at leanbydesign@sigmalabconsulting.com to uncover high-impact improvement opportunities. 🚀
Learn more about us by visiting: https://sigmalabconsulting.com/
Want our thoughts on a specific topic? Looking to sponsor this podcast to continue to generate content? Or maybe you have an idea and want to be on our show. Fill out our Interest Form and share your thoughts.
We're back with another episode of Lean by Design podcast. I'm your host, Oscar Gonzalez, alongside my co-host, Lawrence Wong. We're excited today because we have a guest, Liam O'Neill, director of BPMD in the UK. It's a London-based boutique consultancy specializing in business process management, and we're going to have a conversation with him to see what is it like on the other side of the pond. What are they doing and what are they seeing in this industry? By using the latest tools and techniques, BPMD is leaving behind perceptions about process being bureaucratic and boring. He has worked with companies like BBC, MSC and Lego to get value from process, from accelerating audits to delivering digital transformation. Liam, welcome to the show.
Speaker 3:Thanks so much for having me. That was a lovely introduction. Oscar Really appreciate it, Really excited to talk to you guys today.
Speaker 1:I got to hand it to Lawrence. He's been really knocking out these introductions.
Speaker 1:So, thank you, lawrence, for taking on that task.
Speaker 1:So I want to get us moving in the right direction.
Speaker 1:The main challenge that we see is understanding and recognizing that there are many organizations that don't necessarily have clear workflows or processes.
Speaker 1:They face that crucial question of should they invest in building internal process capabilities or should they rely on external consultants. And I'm sure that you have been also sort of understanding what the perception is for external consultants that we might come in and they're going to give us something and then they're going to leave and then nothing actually changes as opposed to internally. They may have more of the technical knowledge of things that are happening, but maybe not that setup to deliver a new process, to drive a new design of the process, to drive the adoption. So I'm hoping in this conversation we're going to start to explore how do you evaluate if you're ready to take on and make that next move in optimizing a process or delivering operational excellence and building out new processes at these organizations. So I want to start with this when a company is not clear on building or buying process support, what starts to happen at an organization? When they can't determine if they're going to try to tackle this internally or reach out to a consultant such as yourself.
Speaker 3:The fundamental problem why you want process internal or external is that things change and they're changing really quickly. There's lots of new systems, new capabilities, changing the market and you've got to adapt. Things change so quickly. If you're not shifting your business model, if you're not evolving, then you're getting left behind. So that ability to understand what you're doing, understand what you can be doing and then bridge a gap between the two is really critical, now more so than ever before. Having a process excellence team, having an operational excellence team who can help to take you from where you are to where you want to be is a really emerging critical capability.
Speaker 3:So, understanding that needing to change is absolutely paramount to being successful, organizations have to ask a question how do we want to change? Do we want to rely on an external agency to come in? Do that to us, do it for us, and then great, we'll get to where we're want to rely on an external agency to come in? Do that to us, do it for us, and then great we'll get to where we're going to go. But then we need to go somewhere else after that. So you need to go back to market again versus. Do we want to do that internally? Build that team in our organization, go through the hard knocks, take the hard lumps, take the learnings, but get something internally where you can make and bridge that gap yourselves.
Speaker 3:Maybe you change a little bit slower initially as you're trying to do that with your internal team, but long-term you have this more sustainable capability. And that's the question Long-term, do you want to keep this really critical capability to change? Do you want to keep that in-house or out-house? Do you want to have it where you've got the risk of it failing, sitting with your business or sitting externally? And that's a question everyone has to find the right answer to for themselves and very often it's not black or white, it's shades of gray. You might have some internal team. You might need to bring on some capacity just to bridge that gap. As you get over the biggest kind of jump from point A to point B and then flex it down, have your Intel team keep it ticking over until you get to the next major transformation.
Speaker 1:You know, I love how you started off with that response where you really highlighted that there is constant change. You know the old adage saying of there's only two things that you can guarantee guarantee taxes and change. Well now, who knows what taxes are going to be going on in our space, in organizations? It has been our experience that in the earlier days of your career, you are not thinking of this space that you're working in as a company as you being part of the fuel for this business. You are looking at this as like it's a job. It's a part of my career, it's you know I'm developing myself, but I think it's. There's this lens, this entrepreneurial lens that you start to see is being required, at least desired by organizations, to have this internal understanding that this is also a business and to conduct business and secure the future of your business. We need to adapt.
Speaker 1:And it's not just adapt next week, it's not just adapt next year, it's a daily adaptation into the changing environment. We don't know what's going to happen from year to year we think we do so. We create five-year plans, 10-year plans that in the first six months are already not going in the right direction because there have been some other external forces that we were not ready to take on. I love the idea of really sitting, taking a look and saying is this something that we're prepared to grow internally and be a part of those bumps in the roads and those learnings? Or can we trust enough that we can work with an external party that has made those bumps in the road, that understands why you would or would not go into a certain direction to really spearhead that organization into the next stage of their?
Speaker 1:What have been those early warning signs that there's trouble working, that a company is struggling because they took the wrong approach? Maybe they tried to take it internally. They tried a Tiger Tee comprised of four different departments, but then when you look at it, it's not in their job description, it's not really a part of their corporate goals. It's sort of a side quest that, in my personal and professional opinion, demands more time. You need to put more thought and effort into doing change than a quick band-aid. What are some of those early signs that you've seen?
Speaker 3:I think one of the biggest misdirections is you're literally full. People have their own motivations and their own drivers and it's going to be different for everyone across an organization. What a CIO wants is different to a CFO, is different to the receptionist on the desk. We're all looking for different things and there's a nice separation area of kind of the business, the broader business and everyone who does the core kind of operations, or even some support team like finance, and then you really core transformation process excellence team. If we look at the core process team first, some of the challenges you see where companies have set this up but it's not yielding the results. That you're expecting is that they have a view on what they want to do, what they need to do. Let's model all the processes, let's run these continuous improvement surveys and get lists of issues and they're doing task and point great, but we're not looking at the bigger picture. If you're a BPM team and you're just modeling processes and no one's using them, you're not helping anyone. If you run in endless continuous improvement surveys, find an issue after issue, but then none of them are getting fixed, how many people spend time filling in the survey? There's a bigger picture that you've got to look at and that bigger picture is making everyone in the business's life a little bit better.
Speaker 3:If you're a process team, great. Do your models, but only if they've got a purpose. Maybe. People spend months and months preparing for audit, writing reams and reams of documents and then having to revisit this dusty old Word document every two or three years to stay accredited. Take that pain away. Do that with your process tool. Change it so that people don't have to do that part of the job that they hate. If you've got to do continuous improvement surveys, make sure you actually see that change through. You give them all the tools they need. You're helping the business to make that switch so that annoying little quirk is actually fixed and you don't end up with just a list of irritated people who keep going on about the same problems but never see any results.
Speaker 2:So it's that little shift from.
Speaker 3:I've been told to do something. Let's do that to. Instead. What is it that's going to yield some results for business, that's going to make people's lives better on a micro level, but also a micro level. You know, looking at what the cxos wants in broad transformation terms, when you get into the business side, I think one of the biggest successes is when you've got a real process culture, live in an organization where people they've got a day job, you've got your head of accounts receivable, you've got your S&OP lead, you have all these seniors across your business.
Speaker 3:They're making sure a bit of the business is ticking along just right, but they're recognized as a process. Underneath that there's an approach to doing accounts receivable, accounts payable, whatever it is across the business, and they need to be accountable for that. They need to be accountable for how that process is done, how people understand it, how effective it is. So I like to think of process ownership not as a discrete role, but as a role that's implicit in being a leader in a business that people take accountability for how it works, how effective it is and making change happen.
Speaker 1:I feel like now, just even hearing that the next time I put in a job description, it is going to be process ownership, because I think you, you nailed it. I think there has been this. Initially, there was this real big shift in anything technology related lives with your it team. I did not come through the ranks with that assumption. If this is my function, if this is my role and this is the tool that I'm being given, I need to learn about this. I had a mentor that told me when I brought on, when I onboarded a new technology, he said you now need to understand this technology more than anyone else in the company.
Speaker 1:This is going to be what you use in your role. You should know it more than IT. You should know it more than the people that are consumers of the information, and you should have that emphasize that enough that it's not enough for us to come into the workplace and just do the one thing that was asked, the actual, the tangible thing that was asked of us. We need to think about the bigger picture. How are we doing this? Why are we doing this? And what you alluded to earlier, which I love, how is this going to affect other people? Because if you develop a process and we are selfish beings I want to say by nature, but I don't even know if that's human nature we are selfish beings when we come into work. I want my work to be easier, so I'm going to do it this way. Even if our link in the process creates a kink downstream, well, why do I have to change it for them? Well, now you're not talking like you're a part of the company, you're talking like you're a party of one and really recognizing that your picture that this involves all of us. We're you're not part of this project team, you're a part of this organization. The smoother you can make your work and everybody around you, the better the engine is going to run, you know. So I love your diving into there.
Speaker 1:And just to make sure that we're getting our listeners on board BPM business process management. You know, understanding your company's BPMD, I believe it's a business process management. Discipline is what that was. When I saw that I read in my mind I said business process doctor, bpmd. I thought that was fantastic genius, because you are there in essence to diagnose a little bit more of what their problem is and create those solutions where, in some cases, you may have a client that is going to tell you to your point what they need, but the execution doesn't quite follow. They have an idea of what they want in the future, but they don't really know how or what the appropriate path forward is.
Speaker 2:In that sense, Oscar, I was just going to add too.
Speaker 2:You know we've been talking a lot about the driver for the change.
Speaker 2:I was just going to add to you know we've been talking a lot about the driver for the change and also you have different business functions that have a different, I would say, application of a certain software for their own process, and so sometimes I think in a lot of work that we do, people get confused with process being like this is the way that I do things for my department versus this is the IT application and I don't own the actual administration of that.
Speaker 2:And so there's a little bit of like entanglement between the two, right, because there may be things that you want to change in, like an enterprise application, but you don't necessarily have the administrative privileges or rights to do that, and so, like you said, if you change something here, you're actually impacting other people that may be using a similar function elsewhere. I'm curious, liam, in what you see with your clients, why does that tension happen where you see organizations misjudging their ability to build these internal capabilities, when you have people obviously using applications in a different way, but also the person who's actually using the process is not the one who's the IT owner of that software?
Speaker 3:Yeah, there's definitely a disconnect. And I talk process ownership and a really emergent kind of topic now is product ownership, and you've seen product management come more and more before in a lot of thinking organizations and it's almost like there's a little bit of juxtaposition there. You can have someone owning the products and someone owning the process. In a lot of companies that's not the same person. Great, someone's going to shape the product, shape the IT, shape the systems behind it, but that person isn't the person who's going to take ownership of how that process works. There's something of a disconnect there. For me, I think ultimately it comes down to what's your perspective on the organization. If you're taking a very IT-centric view, you start to look at what are my systems, how do I get someone on each system? If you're taking a very traditional, functional view, you start to put people on functions. You have your head of supply chain, head of finance, whatever that may be, and it cascades down in traditional seniority.
Speaker 2:But what?
Speaker 3:that does is it stops people thinking across the boundaries, and it's usually the boundaries where the problems really lie, oscar, before you mentioned, when you have people who are doing their own thing and it's causing problems up and downstream. You see this all the time. I worked for an upstream energy company a little while ago and we were brought in to work with the finance team, work with the finance IT team, to automate a little piece of a backend using an RPA bot on invoice matching. We had a high invoice auto-match failure rate and we had this big backlog building. We wanted to build a bot to quickly pass some information and do the match. We said great, okay, we can do that, we can manage this backlog.
Speaker 3:Why is it happening? What's the bigger picture? What's causing this backlog to happen in the first place? We can fix it, but sure you've got to look at the problem. You've got to be a doctor and diagnose it.
Speaker 3:And it wasn't finance causing it and it wasn't customer services, it wasn't fulfillment. It was way upstream. It was right at the very front end. It was when the procurement teams were logging in their details. Some were logging in the details, perfect. Some were skipping a few fields and filling some things in not quite right. Tiny tiny tweak in data validation and data control at that upstream point was causing a hell of a lot of pain downstream. So, looking at it from a purely product management perspective, you're looking at a silo, you're fixing a problem, you can be very quick and agile and fixing it, bringing automation, bringing everything you need. But you've got to look at the bigger picture, the broader process, the broader business. So that's one of the big fan of process ownership as a concept Try to bring it out, to look at it across functions, across systems, so you don't have these little silos of excellence and massive chasms in between.
Speaker 1:I love that description in between. I love that description. I mean, you're one of the examples that I would give. You know, my son, who's three is that you have this big train with multiple cabooses attached to it and you're finding that it's not really running the way that you wanted it to. And you find out that very first one actually has like an anchor hanging behind it because something wasn't quite done, something wasn't. You know, it was really lazy. And when you're oh, it's just a date. You know there's when, when you're disconnected from the bigger picture, everything is just a little data point, it's just a-paste. Oh, this was just a little issue here.
Speaker 1:But that thing continues to snowball because as these processes move from step to step, inevitably they not only change hands into other departments and other. We're not going to get away from being cross-functional by nature across multiple domains within these organizations. These projects are now becoming more complicated. They're involving more individuals and more functions from functions that didn't even exist. You know, now we have AI functions, now we have leadership in AI and transformation, et cetera. So I get it.
Speaker 1:It is hard. You come into an organization and you're told to just basically stay in your lane and you say what does this even have to do with the bigger picture? You should start asking, because understanding that bigger picture provides more value to what you're bringing to the table, and I think that there's also a responsibility for leadership, whether it's leadership within that team or that function, or leadership for the organization, so that people truly understand your work that you're starting down here. At the ground level, there is some sort of input that is happening by the people. It's not going to magically just manifest itself. It's being recorded, it's being uploaded. Somebody at that organization is inputting this initial information, this initial data, this initial data point, and making sure that you understand the criticality of all of those things and if you find that things are not really critical to the end, get rid of it. That's just an extra step that you're adding.
Speaker 1:You're finding out now that, now that you understand the high level picture, there's a subset of things that you're doing early on that have no value. You know the idea of collecting data for the sake of data Not something that's useful here. I love looking at if it's functionally managed, if it's managed through an IT-centric sort of system or organization. You're going to have different pros and cons. You're going to have challenges, and I think that for me, functionally is where it makes sense, because you are a subject matter expert and now you have systems and processes in place specific to the unique function. That is the work that you do. Not somebody that has a technical background in systems and software necessarily can tell you what is good or what is not.
Speaker 2:I'm more thinking about this from what Liam said about functional versus like the IT.
Speaker 2:I would say expertise is more common, that we actually see internal capability being built around people that actually own the process within their companies, versus, if you do need expert help with some sort of software application, that you bring in external consultants to really understand the vision that you have for how the company is supposed to work. And maybe that's where you do the split and deciding when to bring somebody in, because you have an idea of where you want to go but you just maybe you don't necessarily know how to configure the software to kind of build that feature in. And I would imagine that some companies maybe they think they are the experts in configuring the IT application and they just royally screw it up and then they bring in consultants to advise on how they should run their process from a functional level and then you leave other people to influence how you should run your business, versus the other way around. Do you see that often and what do you tell people when they get into that situation?
Speaker 3:So I think the whole kind of birth of consulting came from that whole space where there was a lot of corporate mergers back in the 60s-ish and what ended up was a lot of kit builders being brought into single organizations. People who'd done new, exciting, different things were all being in the same homogenous organization but wasn't the same kind of spread of experience within single entities. So then broken this gap up where there's companies who haven't done things they need to ask to talk to some people, work with some people who have done those things, who have that experience and can bring that to the fore. That's where consulting is kind of birthed out of and being able to take your experience as an individual, as a group of people, and take it to companies who've not had that experience before. If you've been through an M&A, how do you take that to an organization who's not yet done that and make sure that they're learning from those bumps, from those scripts, from those mistakes that you've made? And that same sharing of experience, sharing of capability that organizations don't have, is still where I think the most valuable consulting services are today. So if you take BPMD, for example my company we have set up 70, maybe 80 different organizations now in helping them to build a process team, helping them to implement the tools that support that. And when we did our first one and our second one and our third one not best, but they were they had a lot of areas we could do better. There's a lot of room for improvement and you know, as you get to 10, you start getting a bit better. When you get to 20, even better still by the time you get to 78, to really have that nailed down to a fine art, you've taken all those learnings, all those things that can go wrong and have gone wrong, and you've baked those into your capability, into your approach. You bring it to an organization who it might be the first time, second time or third time, but it's definitely not going to be the 70th time they've done this type of program and they can learn from your capability and they learn from your experience, all those hard-fought lessons. They don't need to fight those battles, they can just pick those up and build off the shoulders of that experience.
Speaker 3:No-transcript, I don't think you should have a really core critical capability like the ability to change, be entirely outsourced in perpetuity. It's a really key capability. Companies do have to have some ability to do that themselves. They can't have this massively critical differentiator for them just sitting outside of their team, even if they only have one, two, three people who know what they're doing in that space and they use externals to supplement that with capacity. I think that's the direction you're heading. You have to recognize change is critical. Recognize you might not be the expert at doing it. Bring in the experts to build your capability. Keep that little piece in-house and when you do need to supplement that with capacity or a new skill, again look outside. Bring that in and use that for what it's worth.
Speaker 1:Amen to that. I want to be able to put that on a nice placard and just put it on the interstate so folks understand that it's not trivial to make this change, to succeed in it, and there's more than just understanding a software or the bigger picture. How do you get people on board with that change? Even in my recent experience, there's a shift from Zoom to Microsoft Teams and the number of people that are essentially up in arms with it and it's clunky, it's going you know these, when we're doing change like nothing is going to fit like a glove right away, and I think that there are expectations that need to change in the mindset of people that are in this space that like, hey, things might be a little bit bumpy for one quarter, maybe two, but then at the end of it there's no more manual generating reports, there's no more manual generating presentations. We have a system set up that provides a dashboard, that provides a notification, that sends this, that does this, that connects that department's work now to your work, so that you have this direct line of information that you don't have to go back and search and try to call.
Speaker 1:Who was the one working on it? Can I get in touch with them. I don't understand this blah, blah blah. You know there's so many aspects to getting through that fix. So I'm in line with you in the fact that this is a capability build that has to happen in order for you to start really taking those things internally. What you do end up seeing is really smart people. They probably know the technology and they're tapped to fix something. We need you to come and fix this. Now what they have done, maybe in their group, is probably specific to that. It's their people, it's their language. They understand each other more. They've been working together more and this was just a little side project. I could kind of massage it whenever I got through, but now you have certain issues that you're trying to resolve that are not in your group, that are not with the people you've been working mostly with that do not speak the same language.
Speaker 1:You do that are not in the same function. Getting through that in and of itself, you have to build that. You have to understand what that challenge brings outside of just a technology. The idea of cross-functional work is not just being at a meeting with people from different functions, it's bridging these chasms, as you put it, that have grown so large. It's actually slowing the organization. Before we start to wrap up, do you have a story that you could share where a company was deciding should we do this internally or should we get Liam to come in with his team and rock this?
Speaker 3:So we use Process Spotlight big digital transformation programs at the moment and there's a few similar clients I'm working for at the moment Some I can name, some I can't A little bit sensitive sectors, but what I'm thinking about I can't really go into too much detail on One of the big blockers this is certainly true in the UK market I absolutely couldn't speak to the US is across businesses. As you said, there's this big resistance to change, especially in some of the more traditional industries and this organization I was working with. They have bucket loads of this resistance. They tried to launch a digital transformation program. They had to change it the whole ERP and they tried to go and talk to the business and shape what that change looked like, get the requirements, get people bought into a new way of working, shape what that change looked like. You've got the requirements. Get people bought into a new way of working.
Speaker 3:And it's really hard. You go with this list of things that are new, great and different about the system you're bringing in, about the transformation going to be inflicted, and people get scared. If you go in with a 300-page feature list, if you go with a system blueprint, it's quite intimidating. It sounds like there's this massive quantum of change. Everything's going to be shifting. Your whole wave of working is gone, and one organization I was working with tried to launch a digital transformation program and it failed because they couldn't get that buy-in. So what we wanted to do was use process to get that buy-in right from the outset. So what do we need to do that? Well, we need to make people understand what that change looks like, and not from a list of all the different bits that are going to change Practically, how is your process going to change and what's in that for you.
Speaker 3:So let's work with them. Let's understand the current process and what we can do in that new system. Let's translate it from a system blueprint into a process, into something they can engage with, and the change feels much more real. And we're working through this with them. Now. We're creating this landscape of what the current process looks like, showing the change in real terms.
Speaker 3:What's actually going to practically change for you? Not every single feature, function button, but instead, how is that going to affect your way of working? What's a benefit for you? What's it going to take off your plate? What are those pain in the ass moments that you have but you're not going to have tomorrow. And you get such better engagement, you get people to buy into this new way of working, get people to approve this shape of the process, and they don't need to approve every single technical requirement. So we're on this journey with one organization right now. We've done it for others, like Philips and a toy manufacturer. We're on this journey with as well, and the best moment you can get is you have that moment where the tricky stakeholder gives your approval, thumb goes up, they're happy with it, they understand what the change looks like and they're now an advocate for it.
Speaker 1:Yes, I can echo that this is something that is very prevalent in our industry in the States. I've even had some clients that have referred to themselves as converts because after working with them they're you know, Oscar, you've converted me. This is amazing, and you're exactly right that there's software, there's hardware, there's systems out there that are absolutely magnificent, but wow they are feature, feature, feature, feature, feature, feature, feature, and what you're describing is feature versus solution.
Speaker 1:Take them on the journey for the solution. This is where we are now, and you hate this. You don't like it here, here, here and here. This is what introduction of this system is going to allow us to do. We're not, and I think what's a little bit challenging too and this is something that I'm currently writing in a book that will be launched later this year that you're seeing leadership that is so excited about the potential, the possibilities, but that immediately takes them out of the lens of who this is really supporting. Yes, you want it to support the business, but who's going to do anything for your business? It's the people. If this is not directly affecting their work. Now, if you're going to tell them, oh, it's going to look like this later and then it's going to have this and these bells and whistles, and you'll be able to see and slice and dice the day like that is a lot to take in for something that we cannot see that will occur in six, nine, ten months.
Speaker 1:I love that approach. Take the process, get them aligned on the process, do you agree? This is what it is, and I have created some processes that go end to end, that were so large. 99% of the folks involved in that process just sat there with their jaws open and said I can't believe this is what we actually do. Yeah, you guys have let it get to here and this is why things are slow. You have bottlenecks one, two, three, four, five, six, seven across nine different functions, because research is not just one team. Research is many different disciplines, many different people and individuals, administrative, scientific, leadership level, et cetera. Like this is why it takes so long to get from here to here, and I think the power to bring people along really sits in showing them. Showing them on paper on a canvas, digitally, showing them on paper on a canvas, digitally, whiteboard, whatever. This is where we see your pain, we see the challenges, we see your pain and what we're going to do is leverage this system to alleviate this pain.
Speaker 2:And it's going to look like this the only thing I'll say and I'll push back a little bit is the them part. You really have to be convincing the right people, because, liam, you mentioned a tricky stakeholder right About there are people that are in the process, but they're not necessarily improving the process. They're just in this thing at work and they're driving this particular business process to get their stuff done, and so, in our experience, what's been more effective is, once you start an engagement where you are working with a client that is looking to modify their product or processes, who are what we would call the key person of influence in this engagement. There are going to be individuals it may be the project sponsor, or it may be some other executive who has a lot to gain from a potential improvement, who has a lot to gain from a potential improvement, and they're probably very enthusiastic about driving this whole thing. And then you have a lot of other people that are maybe resistant to change and they can really drag down your project.
Speaker 2:And so what we try to do is really, once we get there, to figure out who are those people in the game and who are the players involved, and you have to make sure that the people that are going to really catapult your project to new heights is the person you want to be best friends with, and then the people that are going to drag you down. You got to make sure that. Okay, what is the problem here? Why aren't you coming along with us? And you kind of have to be compassionate to some extent to understand what it is that they're resistant of, because a lot of it is just it's a fear of. I just learned how to do this and now you're changing this way of doing something and you have to build some sort of alliance to make sure that they're also going to support this initiative that you're going to do, or it's going to be a very painful next couple of months for everybody, right and I see you're laughing at this because you probably have many stories of situations like this definitely.
Speaker 3:I think you always find there's always going to be some blockers. What you don't want is those blockers to be the ones who are accountable for the process, the ones who are driving the way it's shaped, the way it performs. I mentioned process ownership before and I really like that as a concept because, yeah, you have someone who approves changes. You have someone you're holding to account for it working. So if this digital transformation fails, it doesn't change the way this area runs. They're going to fall behind the market. It's them who are going to be held accountable for that performance. So, process ownership they know they need to do better, they need to make that process better and if they're still blocking digital change, then that's going to raise massive questions over whether we're quite the right fit for that kind of position. Ideally, you want to get to a process culture where you have people accountable for change, wanting to change, wanting to be excellent and not being those blockers Preach preach.
Speaker 1:I love that. So, as we're getting toward the end, what have you seen from these organizations? And we all have to recognize something too that change doesn't exist just in the build. It's the consistency that happens afterwards. You can't just pull in major systems and expect that one to two trainings or an email blurb or maybe a Slack message that goes to the company is going to be enough to make people feel comfortable and confident that they can execute this with the new version. So, for those organizations that, to your experience, really been successful in driving the change and continuing this engine to excellence, productivity, what have you seen, is a feature of those organizations and teams that are successful.
Speaker 3:To get change rolled out. You mentioned before, you know, appealing to the individual. When you get people to adopt new way of working, let's get it so that people see what's in it for them. Let's make sure that it's also easing there's get it so that people see what's in it for them. Let's make sure that it's also easy. There's good guidance. Or, if you're really on the cutting edge, you can look at some interesting tools like digital adoption platforms. We don't have to come out of the system to find your guidance Things like onscreen and walk-in fantastic tools. But you've got to make it easy so people know what it is that they need to do. I think that community around the process where people might need a bit of guidance and they know who to go to. They have that open channel to raise questions, raise concerns and have that back and forth. It's really important building that community where people want to help others do things in the right way and then, if you want to make sure that it's staying excellent.
Speaker 3:We did some work with Philips Domestic Appliances and they're a superb case of this. They are the most excellent process and quality team and what they do is they use process to support a whole host of things across the business. They were part of the major ERP role and they had fantastic coverage of the business and describing the new way of working. And now they've taken all the pain from the audit and they resolve that through process. Now that manages documentation that gets from that audit accreditation and they have this fantastic platform to go and tweak and evolve the process. They have a good mechanism for engaging the business and finding where there's problems and affecting that change and evolving the process around it. So it's about people engaging, building a community, being valuable for them and making sure that when you are trying to affect change, you're doing it in a way that is actually useful and not change for change's sake.
Speaker 1:Make it easy, folks. This is the industries that we're working in are already complicated. Don't make it overly complicated. Make sure people know who is the subject matter expert. Make sure that your process ownership whether it's a single person within a function or a function in and of itself they should all be on the same page. When we look for opportunities to upskill our workforce, it's these. It's these opportunities that allow the people at our organizations to grow alongside the growth of the organization, and it will pay back in dividends. So, Liam, what's one piece of advice you would give to leaders navigating this now? What's one thing that you would tell them to help them through whether or not they should take on or tackle smaller exchange, process improvement, or they should seek external expertise.
Speaker 3:You can't start a process team because you need a process team. You can't start operational excellence because you need operational excellence. It's an enabler. What's your problem? Find your challenge in the business and build a team to solve that challenge. If you're bringing process into the process, they're going to create models, not going to be useful. If you're bringing them in to drive better engagement across your organization and customer experience if you bring them in to make onboarding more successful, less painful. If you're bringing them in to accelerate audits, fantastic, right from the get-go. Everyone knows why they're there. It's valuable. Start with your problem, start with the value and build from there.
Speaker 2:Yeah, that's an excellent point, and I think a lot of people, like you mentioned before, end up starting these things for the sake of starting these things, and then they wonder why didn't this work? And it's because, well, what's the problem that we're solving? And they get into a situation where you're wasting all this time, money and resources and everybody is questioning well, this is just as painful as it was before and nothing has actually changed um, you get started on something that is not a sprint and you get people hitting mile six going.
Speaker 1:Where are we going again? What is the? What is the point?
Speaker 2:of this.
Speaker 1:I'm tired, I'm going to go on vacation and I got other work to do. This isn't even my real job. You nailed it. Find the problem. Find the problem that has enough value for you to care about and approach that. Liam, how can our listeners learn more about you and the work that BPM does? Bpmd excuse me.
Speaker 3:So best place is on LinkedIn. So I try and post fairly regularly by process and all the things that go around that. Otherwise, we've just rebranded to our website. It's looking a little bit prettier than it was a few months ago. So that would be BPM-Dcom or Liam O'Neill on LinkedIn.
Speaker 1:Thank you so much for joining us Fantastic conversation. I look forward to the next one.
Speaker 3:Thanks for having me Cheers.
