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In the business process management (BPM) world the ability to simultaneously grow revenues, reduce costs and improve service is called a Triple Crown. It is a direct consequence of implementing advanced process management.
A 21st century company shifts attention from ‘doing things right’ to ‘doing the right things’ and as a consequence, much of the work taking place within a company becomes ‘dumb stuff’ when tested against the KPIs based on the previously mentioned Triple Crown. This ‘dumb stuff’ can be eliminated and typically will result in cost reductions of 40-70% within three to six months after implementation across traditional business processes.

A large slice of reduction is in the potential effort to run a process – the people. It also includes considerable swathes of information technology, now no longer required to manage the significantly simplified ‘Outside-In’ processes.  Saves are also available across the enterprise from reducing the need for ‘outsourcing’ that does not explicitly contribute to the delivery of successful outcomes. Progressive 21st century companies such as IBM, Google, Apple, Gilead Sciences and Southwest Airlines actively redeploy staff to the benefit of the bottom line – making more with less. Service improves and revenues grow.

“BPM wins the ‘triple crown’ of saving money, saving time and adding value. BPM is delivering both short-term return on investment (ROI) and long-term value. One example is an insurance company that was able to reduce its claims processing cost by more than 20 percent. We are currently seeing uptake in BPM use and benefits in government, banking, health-care, transportation and travel industries” said Janelle Hill, research vice-president at Gartner. 

There are many Customer Expectation Management methods available that are easy to implement, as well as very inspiring tools for meaningfully aligning your revenues, costs and service strategies quickly. For example, the CEM Method offers effective tools for analyzing the successful customer outcomes (what your customers really need), moment of truths (customer interactions), breakpoints (internal hand-overs) and business rules. That information is put together and observed through the Outside-In lens, which reveals all the pain points in business processes and customer experience of the organization. After that, innovation tools are used to redesign those processes to meet the customer needs and organization’s strategy, which will lead to getting BPM’s Triple Crown.

Get Janne Ohtonen's latest BPM book for free at http://addvalueto.me/download-a-free-process-leadership-book/

The innovation management process has become an important part of the operations of many businesses, as the recognition of the importance of initiatives towards innovation has become much more common.
That said, while many companies do attempt to have a solid approach to creativity and innovation, too few actually focus on it as a single function. Instead, they seem to hold many separate activities in isolation, such as brainstorming sessions, pilot projects and campaigns, and vague communication with the market, and simply keep fingers crossed that it will come together in the end. While this has worked for some in the past, it is far from the ideal way of performing this important task. Instead, the best way to accomplish this is to have a set innovation activities which integrates the activity into the regular cycle of your business. The list below shows the phases in innovation management process, which will help your organization to put it all together as one process.

Setting the goals for the process

Innovation always begins with a goal in mind. It is many times based on finding the solution to a problem. Once you have this goal, it should be discussed among everyone in the problem solving team. This team may consist of you and another person, a group of people, or may even be all of your organization’s employees. It may involve others such as your customers (who can provide suggestions and feedback based on their own experience with your product or service) or other stakeholders in the business. When you establish the team for this process, make sure that you have someone representing all the parts of the process from start to the end.

Cooperation

The innovation team should work together so that instead of trying to come up with an idea separately, they can bounce ideas off one another and create a collaborative solution. This can include the use of online tools, attendance of events such as trade shows that can be inspiring and informative, or simply consist of brainstorming sessions. You might  consider having a trained business coach facilitating the discussions. There are many online tools available for real-time document sharing that might help teams that are geographically separated to still have intense cooperation.

Combination of ideas

Once the ideas are in, choose the best ones and then consider whether they can be combined to create an even greater idea. Often, strong ideas will be complementary to one another and will join well to create an even better result. As you know, the whole result can be bigger than its individual parts. And for this combination to work well, you need representatives of all parties involved in the process, because they for sure have ideas that people from other departments could not come up with. Business coaches may be useful here for making sure that all the angles of innovative aspect are covered.

Evaluation of innovation

This is an important and yet all too frequently overlooked aspect of the innovation management process. When the best ideas have been combined, fine-tuned, and polished, it is time to subject them to evaluation based on peer reviews. This helps to ensure that any ideas that have a promising veneer but that are poorly thought out will be identified before resources, funding and time have been poured into them. It also helps to select the ideas with the greatest potential from among several that appear equally capable of being successful. It is cheap to change your innovation at this stage compared to later stages. Each step you take forward will cost you more…

Testing the ideas

Once the ideas with the greatest potential have been identified, they can be tested so that they can be better developed. One of the most common means of testing a product or service idea is to create a prototype or test group. This allows the team, as well as customers and investors to have a better look at how the product will function and what changes can be made to it so that it will be even further improved. Make sure that the product or service not only raises interest but is able to generate orders also. If people say that they are interested in it, then ask them if they give you the order right away.

Execution of innovation implementation

The ideas that survive the testing process can be further developed and altered until they are ready to be executed as a part of the business offerings. The execution of implementation is a step that is unique to your business and, unless your new product causes you to have to drastically alter the typical way that your go-to-market strategy functions, then this part of the innovation management process should be relatively commonplace in your organization. It should be easier for you to move from testing to execution if you were able to generate orders already in testing phase.

Assessment of innovation life-cycle

After the execution of an idea, its implementation needs to be carefully monitored and assessed in terms of a number of milestones that should be set. Should a milestone not be reached, then changes will need to be made or the idea will need to be shut down. Remember to keep always customer in your mind also in execution phase and design your measuring systems so that they measure added value for the customer (you get what you measure and customers weight you based on that!).

The next step in the process is simply to start again, always finding new needs, inspiration, solutions and taking them through the cycle until they can be offered by your company. Here are some reflective questions that you can use to evaluate innovation management process in your organization:

Change strategies are not a new discussion topic, but still they keep people talking about what are the most effective change strategies available and how are they best deployed.  Thurley and Wirdenius identified some key advantages and disadvantages of change management already in 1973, which was summarized by Lockitt and 3T Productions Ltd. (2004) as follows:

Directive change strategy. This strategy highlights the manager’s right to manage change and the use of authority to impose change with little or no involvement of other people. This approach may lead to valuable information and ideas being missed and there is usually strong resentment from staff when changes are imposed rather than discussed and agreed.

Expert change strategy. This approach sees the management of change as a problem solving process that needs to be resolved by an ‘expert’. This approach is mainly applied to more technical problems and will normally be led by a specialist project team or senior manager. There is likely to be little involvement with those affected by the change.

Negotiated change strategy. This approach highlights the willingness on the part of senior managers to negotiate and bargain in order to effect change. Senior managers must also accept that adjustments and concessions may need to be made in order to implement change. This approach acknowledges that those affected by change have the right to have a say in what changes are made, how they are implemented and the expected outcomes.

Educative change strategy. This approach involves changing people’s values and beliefs in order for them to fully support the changes being made and move toward the development of a shared set of organizational values that individuals are willing, and able to support. A mixture of activities will be used: education, persuasion, training and selection, led by consultants, specialists and in-house experts.

Participative change strategy. This strategy stresses the full involvement of all of those involved, and affected by, the anticipated changes. Although driven by senior managers the process will be less management dominated and driven more by groups or individuals within the organization. The views of all will be taken into account before changes are made. Outside consultants and experts can be used to facilitate the process but they will not make any decisions as to the outcomes.

Which one is the best and how is that change strategy deployed?

Well, you might want to ask yourself, which advantages and disadvantages do you want to have? It is quite clear that in this imperfect world there is no perfect change strategy available. However, the participative change strategy seems quite compelling especially because some of the disadvantages found by Thurley and Wirdenius can be overcome with recent methods such as the CEM Method. The benefits of this approach are that any changes made are more likely to be supported due to the involvement of all those affected, the commitment of individuals and groups within the organization will increase as those individuals and groups feel ownership over the changes being implemented. The organization and individuals also have the opportunity to learn from this experience and will know more about the organization and how it functions, thus increasing their skills, knowledge and effectiveness to the organization.

Get Janne Ohtonen's latest BPM book for free at http://addvalueto.me/download-a-free-process-leadership-book/

I have heard some representatives of big companies saying that it is easy to change small companies, but changing a big one is difficult to do. Still there are several big companies like Best Buy, Apple, Microsoft, Google and IBM that are huge and still succeeding well. One thing that is common to them is that they are managing their customer expectations actively.
So, maybe it is not impossible to make big companies change their course also?

IBM is an interesting player on the market, since some years ago it sold its laptop business to Lenovo and decided to start focus their business more to higher profit margins by expanding aggressively overseas, seeking sales, low-cost engineering talent and quicker organizational response.

That did not happen by itself; big credit goes to Samuel J. Palmisano, who functioned nearly a decade as a chief executive in IBM. His time in IBM has been a textbook case of how to drive change in a big company (and there are many books and blog articles about him). Mr. Palmisano has explained in interviews that his guiding framework has been these four simple, but important questions:

Mr. Palmisano formulated those questions in the months after he became CEO in March 2002. In meetings after he took over, Mr. Palmisano told colleagues that IBM was still good, but that it was not the standard-setting corporation that it had been when he joined in 1973.

The four questions, he explains, were a way to focus thinking of the company beyond its comfort zone and to make IBM pre-eminent again. He presented this four question framework to the company’s top managers at a meeting in early 2003. He said: “This needs to be our mission and goal, to make IBM a great company”, according to executives who attended the gathering.

The pursuit of excellence in those four dimensions shaped the strategy of IBM. To focus on doing unique work, with its higher profits, meant getting out of low-margin businesses that were fading. IBM’s long-range technology assessment in 2002 concluded that the personal computer business would no longer present much opportunity for innovation, at least not in the corporate market.That is why they sold their PC business to Lenovo in 2004. They were not anymore the biggest PC provider in the world, but they made up elsewhere. That included acquiring other companies like PWC Consulting and others. Today they are doing bigger business than ever!

“The hardest thing is answering those four questions”, Mr. Palmisano says, “You’ve got to answer all four and work at answering all four to really execute with excellence.” These four questions are important for smaller companies also, but they are crucial for bigger companies to change their course. And as IBM has shown, it is possible. Steve Jobs did the same for Apple and it is easy to see the similarities in customer focus of these companies. If you start to focus on the customer in big organizations, that will eventually turn the big ship around.

Get Janne Ohtonen's latest BPM book for free at http://addvalueto.me/download-a-free-process-leadership-book/