From Insights to Understanding: Making the Miracle Visible

After the first month of special project meetings, the special project team meetings had produced almost 60 different insights about the hire process. At this stage, the PCC and FinServ team members faced the challenge of communicating these findings—and the method that had generated them—back to their organizations.

What would it take to make knowledge that was implicit in the minds of the PH researchers—how to use the handbook—explicit for others to see and understand? How could what they had done as a team itself be clarified, organized, and presented to others?

The MIT Researcher, responding to PCC's and FinServ's requests, developed a way of showing how to generate alternative processes. He created a systematic way to consider a set of alternatives to take into account when redesigning a business process. This framework, which became known as the Cafeteria Menu, yielded 72 alternatives for considering the basic choices in a process.

This is only one way of using the Cafeteria Menu approach. It can be used with any combination of dimensions and alternatives the participants in the process think will be useful. For more details and examples, see Malone, Crowston, and Herman (2003) and Malone (2003).

Much of the special project team's research work was based on delving into the complex details of an analytical process. It had been hard for the non-academics, like the PCC Consultant and the FinServ Designer, to completely follow what the researchers were doing. It was even harder for them to figure out how they could tell others what they did.

Working one-on-one with the researchers, the PCC Consultant looked for a simple way of describing how to use the PH. The researchers each had their own slightly different ways of explaining and using it. The PCC Consultant sought a description that encompassed all of their methods.

At different points, team members attributed the creation of the Process Compass to different members. Retrospectively, people have agreed that the MIT Researcher was its creator. The PCC Consultant, however, created the conditions for its development.

PCC Consultant [MIT Director] and I worked very closely, and I also kept going back to [MIT Affiliated Researcher] at [another university]. I'd have a meeting with [MIT Researcher] and then say, "I think this is what he is really saying. Now, would [MIT Affiliated Researcher] view this in this way?" I'd bring what we had come up with to [MIT Affiliated Researcher] and get his perspective and then I'd go back that night and digest it and say, "Let's try and think of the framework that unifies these different views." I actually ended up being a broker for people who had used the tool, coming up with a framework that we could all buy into. Those were the people that needed to be connected, that hadn't been connected before. All I did was internalize it in a way that I could understand it and spit it back out. There had been no mechanism for that. Not having been involved in true research before, I'd never been in a situation where you just went along a path and saw where it led. I did not expect to have to pull all this together. I thought MIT would be saying, "This is how we use it." Even though [MIT Director] had told me all along it was research, I didn't think it would be as loosey-goosey as it was, or that it would be up to the sponsor to create the framework. [MIT Director] and [MIT Researcher] probably always had this in their minds, but we were pulling it out and making it explicit so that we and our client could understand it. That is what ended up happening. It was just a question of getting it out of their heads and putting it down on paper.

These ideas for using the PH came to be called the Process Compass. Like a navigational compass, the Process Compass is a device to help orient users as to where they are—in this case, the choices they have in developing alternative processes. It was based on a visual icon that helped people decide what "direction" to move in (see Sidebar: The Process Compass).

This kind of "translation" was something that 21C sponsors had wanted for some time, but were unable to develop themselves. It was the drive of the PCC Consultant, not the structure of the special project nor initiative of the researchers, that reconciled and synthesized the various views from which the Process Compass was created.

The Cafeteria Menu

The Process Handbook helps people redesigning business process make choices in their new process designs. Considering and evaluating a large number of choices, particularly when you want to be sure that you have considered all reasonable options, can be a daunting task. The name, a "cafeteria-style" menu, was developed to describe the possible choices. The Cafeteria Menu provided a systematic way to consider possible design choices. Using a Cafeteria Menu, a process designer chooses among options for each subactivity to generate process alternatives in a manner similar to choosing courses from menu choices in a cafeteria.

Using this framework generates a total number of 72 (4 by 3 by 6) possible choices. Activities are considered based on the who, how, and why (3 dimensions) and the when, where, what and how much (4 dimensions) of a process. The range of possible alternatives form a 3 by 4 matrix. The matrix is expanded by considering six possible coordinating actions that can be taken—create, destroy, modify, preserve, combine, and separate. For each subactivity all 72 alternatives may not be appropriate for consideration, nor worthy of extensive evaluation. The figure below illustrates this point in that it shows fewer than ten choices for each subactivity.

Figure 11.1: Cafeteria Style Menu of Options: Commodity Hires Trade Off Matrix

The Process Compass idea had different values for different people. That value seemed to depend upon the depth of PH understanding that a person already had.

	MIT Student We talked about the compass and the directions for maybe ten minutes in the beginning of the meeting, and then for the rest of the meeting everyone referred to "northwest" or "south." As a metaphor it took hold quite quickly.
	FinServ HR Planner [PCC Consultant] really helped give a language to [MIT Researcher] and [MIT Director] about how to describe the handbook. There was a real logic to the compass that I found quite useful. We did not use it when we were working, but once she came up with it, everything seemed a lot clearer in retrospect.
Metaphors still need to be "embedded" to be useful. Those who were familiar with the Handbook now needed to replace the "lattice" metaphor with the "compass".	MIT Student In the last meeting, we were talking and sort of conceptualizing what direction we could move in, and somebody said, "Well, that would be in the northwest direction." I thought, "Oh, okay." But you still had to have this mental image firmly in your head for that to make sense. To me, it wasn't that new. It was something that [MIT Director] always talked about as "the lattice," and it basically just represented the dimensions of the lattice.[1]
	MIT Director Using the Process Compass you could cycle around in almost any order. You could get a quick, even an intuitive, sense of what the deep structure was. Then immediately jump to, "Between these three things we thought of, which is best?" Then go back, and think a little more deeply about what the real essence was, identify some more alternatives, be more systematic in combinations, and keep cycling around at many different levels. It was very much like a brainstorming or creativity technique. In fact, one way of thinking about the whole thing is to say it is exactly a creativity technique applied to business processes.
[1]The "lattice of abstraction" which the MIT Director refers to is an extension of the "ladder of inference" described by Chris Argyris (1990, pp. 88–89) in two dimensions.

The creation of the compass was an important step in the process of making the "miracle" of process redesign visible. It described the way researchers used the Process Handbook and provided a way for the PCC Consultant to communicate what had been learned to FinServ and PCC.

The Process Compass

The Process Compass provides a clear and concise way to communicate the PH approach to redesigning business processes. The compass uses innovation and the generation of novel ideas as the starting point for re-engineering. By shifting time and attention away from detailed analysis of existing processes ("as-is" analysis) to innovation, the focus shifts to generating new processalternative ideas. Those new ideas then become the focus for evaluating process improvements over processes the organization is presently using.

The Process Compass implements the PH concepts, representing them with a graphic that is easy for people to conceptualize and use as the basis for choosing among alternative redesign activities. It proposes starting with existing processes and moving in one of the following directions to generate alternative views of a business process:

1. North is more abstract by aggregating activities into their parent activities.

2. South is more specific by decomposing activities into components. (The north-south dimension concerns the parts of an activity, and represents the detail at which a process is examined; what has traditionally been referred to as functional decomposition.)

3. East is more specific and examines alternative types of coordination mechanisms and activities.

4. West is more abstract and represents the process and its purpose. (The west-east dimension concerns types of an activity, and represents the abstraction at which information-flow-based and decision-making activities in a process are examined.)

Figure 11.2: The Process Compass

The Process Compass helps people use the PH by suggesting that they move north and west to find the essential "deep structure" of a process, and move south and east to generate a palette of candidate surface structures from which a new process design can be selected. At any point in the redesign process, people can use the Process Compass to help them choose the "direction" of their examination based on their intended emphasis—generating alternatives or specifying optimal choices.