Management: the shift-age alternative to departmentalized thinking
Strategic processes align activities and people to maximize the customer’s total experience, deliver top quality, and control costs. It is a shift-age alternative to the industrial-age practice of functioning as a collection of departments that are often more focused on defending turf than on the customer’s perception of value or the company’s bottom line. In most organizations there are four strategic processes. Once a decision to move towards process management is made, the first activity is to decide where each strategic process begins and ends.
Following is a value-streamed example of the “greeting and retaining customer” strategic process. The flow might start with branding, then on to segmenting the market, creating a profile of the ideal customer in each segment, adding customers who fit that profile to our radar screen, getting ourselves on their radar screen, qualifying and prioritizing, then developing a sales strategy for each targeted prospect. This strategic process might end with an order—where the “Serving the customer” strategic process takes over. I find it helpful to metaphorically describ a strategic process as a row of filing cabinets. Each cabinet will contain “task processes ” (a check list for each activity—complete with performance measures).
Strategic processes and their task processes (check lists) can be placed on a shared drive so that everybody can access a description of their assignments plus what should happen before and after. The answers to fequently asked questions can be stored in a file at the beginning of each strategic process.
The four generic strategic processes:
- Getting and Retaining CustomersB.
- Delighting Customers
- Serving the partner Chain
- Forward Thinking
Tomorrow…How strategic processes are managed to promote a total company perspective and how they link with traditional organizational structures to assert compliance and accountability