You’re in Operations, ultimately responsible for implementing your organisation’s strategy; generating revenue if you’re a commercial enterprise or delivering service if you are in the state or not-for-profit sectors. And you know about change: change for change’ sake and change that improves the way you go about your work. And you know exactly what culture you want to engender in your department. Further, you have the authority to say, “Yes”.
Now, in achieving your objectives, you will be working with three major players in your organisation: HR, IT and Finance, all of which have considerable influence on your decisions. You have an idea of what they do but how do they see your work? Because sometimes their perspective is difficult to fathom, as many state organisations in New Zealand are discovering to their chagrin.
Human Resources
HR will be looking at your work from the perspective of organisational structure, job titles and position descriptions. Their assessment of the work you do is one, or even two, steps removed from the people actually doing the work and their recommendations and conclusions more often than reflect that. Their interest is primarily to ensure that job titles match position descriptions and the jobs are “sized” correctly for remuneration purposes. They also have an almost compulsive desire in seeing the hiring and firing processes are followed rigorously. Crucially, they have the ability to say, “No” (it is not for nothing that the HR Manager in a past client was known as “the Queen”)
But we know that the titles and descriptions rarely reflect the work done, that money is not actually a very good motivator and the hiring process is more often than not so complicated that the person you want for the job loses interest and goes to a competitor. Friend One.
Information Technology
IT, on the other hand, will be looking at the work you do from a process perspective. This is already a shift in the right direction but, as we all know so well, the processes they are considering are the results of the work you do, not the actual work done (I have written extensively on the ill-effects of this abstraction process elsewhere). IT operates at a level of abstraction that permits them to see the generic process but they either lack the insight you have, or have no desire to understand, how that generic process is instantiated. And with the ongoing clamour for “global best practice”, they are less inclined than ever to really understand the processes that work for you, and why. Who knows? You might just be sitting on a prime example of “organisational best practice” that is about to stymied in the desire to “improve”. They, too, have the ability to say, “No”.
But we know that if we don’t start from a detailed understanding of how things work around here, and why, any change we make will be neither an improvement nor sustainable. No matter how “vanilla” the implementation and no matter how beautiful the process diagrams may seem. Friend Two.
Finance
Finally, Finance. Finance has the unenviable task of assessing business cases for change and thet play a crucial role in this. They also have the unenviable task of reducing everything done in the organisation to the common factor of… dollars. This can lead to Cashflow from Operations taking a back seat to cashflow generating activities that are more under the control of the CFO. But is your core business that of a financial institution? Curiously, they have a very strong influence on your department’s culture; perversely through the rules around financial delegation. So while you might be seeking to implant a culture of customer service and decentralised decision-making, Finance’s rules are essentially telling everyone, “we don’t trust you”. More curiously, it falls to you, the Operations Manager, to reconcile these two incompatible perspectives. Like their HR and IT colleagues, Finance also has a very well developed ability to say, “No”. Friend Three.
Who, really, is in charge…?
Finance, HR, IT each reduce the organisation to simple (some might say simplistic), easy to understand concepts: dollars, job descriptions and the competencies needed to match them and generic processes. None of which really has much to do with the work that is done. And even less about helping you to become more effective nor efficient for the simple reason that they don’t actually know what you do… Yet, strangely, their influence and ability to say, “no” often far outweigh your own desire and ability to influence the improvements you can make. Is this backwards?
Yes, it is. Especially when you consider that the primary purpose of Operations is to improve the way you do things, whether it be generating revenue, delivering service or producing better social outcomes.
With friends like these…
