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How to Know When it’s Time to Abandon Your Process
I recently found myself advising a company to skip its process. It’s not that the process was bad. It was an excellent process — I know, I wrote it. However, in order to achieve their goals they had to abandon the process.
They had only a few people who could do their proposals. They could handle two at a time. Maybe three. But the real problem was that when they had multiple proposals, they couldn’t do anything else. They had two RFPs in hand and six due any time within the next 30 days.
They were caught in a classic conflict. Work on the RFPs-in house, or prepare for the ones that are coming? They could not do both. The conflict came to a head as they reached the date the process specified for reviewing their readiness for the new RFPs.
I knew nothing had been done. In fact, the review date had already been rescheduled because last week they hadn’t done anything. Reviews are kind of pointless when there is nothing to review. It is probably incorrect to say “nothing.” The process specified a series of reviews that answer specific questions, with the goal being to be prepared at RFP release. Questions had been answered, just no new answers had been filled out since the last review. They had done some preparation, they just hadn’t followed through, completed the paperwork, and taken it to the next step.
The issue they faced was one of priority. Should they take some risk on their future bids in order to focus on the RFPs in-house, or should they take the risk on the RFPs in-house in order to prepare for the future bids? This is a question that only the executive sponsor, with profit and loss responsibility, can answer.
My advice to the executive sponsor was to focus on the goal. In the case of the future bids, the goal is to be prepared. The process paperwork supports that goal, but it’s the action items (teaming, positioning, bid strategy development) that really matter. I recommended instead of forcing his staff to complete the paperwork, then interrupting them with a meeting to review it, that he instead take a few minutes and talk to them about what they had done and still needed to do on each future bid. And to help them prioritize their workload. He could use the process documentation as a cheat sheet, to help formulate questions. But he could significantly compress the time it takes to achieve the goal, bid readiness, by skipping the process steps. And if they couldn’t even achieve the goal, at least they could prioritize where they were going to take on the risk of failure.
Process discipline is a virtue. It’s a virtue that is in short supply. However, there are times when your process no longer serves your goals. In these rare moments, you should focus on the goal of your process and not the process itself. The difficult part is knowing when those moments have arrived.
In the case of insufficient resources, it arrives when you are near the breaking point where resources can’t possibly be stretched any further. When you reach that moment, you need to identify where you can fulfill the goal by abandoning the process, and prioritize where you want to take on risk. Abandoning your process does not free you from constraints. There is a right way to do it. In effect, there is a process for it.
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