Managing Organizational Risk II: Controlling The Systems Flow Process

A significant source of organizational risk is not having sufficient control of the activities and processes within your department or organization. In today's fast paced and rapidly changing environment, significant parts of any process have to be broken down and delegated to various people, often with disparate sets of skills and experience levels. Having several people simultaneously making changes to specific parts of a process in order to make the entire process responsive to a sudden change in the environment can be quite a difficult task; and if not handled properly can (1) result in duplication and waste of valuable work hours, (2) create confusion and breed hostility in the workplace, (3) cause the organization to fail to respond to the crisis that prompted the process change exercise, or even (4) muddle or damage the existing process. The steps below provide a generic approach to manage changes in the organizational systems flow process:

Figure 4.1 : Controlling the systems flow process.

Step 1
The first step is to baseline the processes within your organization. Accumulate documentation on existing processes. If documentation is lacking, interview the relevant people and ask them to document their processes. Make sure that these documents are complete and detailed enough for other people to execute. Create a master document of how these processes work together(i.e., The Master Strategy document).

Step 2
Any change to the process (or part of a process) should only be initiated via a written request. Subsequently, The request's feasibility and viability should be evaluated after it has been received, granted that requests for certain processes would go through a more rigorous evaluation than others. It is not a good idea to make changes to a process, or part of a process, without some sort of a document trail.

Step 3

After the request has been received and evaluated, the next step is to determine whether your department has a pre-existing methodology to handle the change request. Often many of the change requests received are of a recurring nature, your organization may have an existing methodology to handle the change. This is another reason why documentation is important.

Step 4a

If a methodology exists for the change request, you need to verify whether it is sufficient for the request. You may need to make minor modifications to the methodology to adhere to a specific request.

Step 4b

If a methodology does not exist, you need to develop a new one to manage the change request. When developing the new methodology, you need to be cognizant of the fact that it may affect methodologies belonging to other systems, and even require you to develop additional methodologies. Also, you will need to design tests for the newly developed methodology to ascertain that it provides accurate and consistent results.

Step 5

Once you have tested and are fairly confident about performance of the new methodology, the next step is to execute it within the process and validate the outcome. Inform other stakeholders about the changes that have been implemented within the process.

Step 6

After the change request has been completed, the next step is to update the Master Change document. The Master Change document maintains a continuous list of changes that are made to any of the processes for future reference.

Step 7

Determine whether the change request should be part of a broader strategy.If so, update your Master Strategy document.

Step 8

The final step is to develop and execute a post implementation validation plan for the new strategy. The purpose of this plan is to make sure that the outcome of the new changes remain accurate and consistent over time.