Center of what?

Dear Bob …

I need an outside perspective on a situation, but I can’t describe it in much detail — my manager is touchy about a lot of things, and if you print any specifics I could get into trouble.

So here’s a sketch of my situation:

My manager came in one day having decided one of our core IT processes was broken. It’s one of the ones ITIL makes a big fuss about, if that helps at all. Anyway, rather than asking those of us responsible for or involved with the process to look into it and develop a plan, she brought in one of the big IT punditries. You’d recognize the name, but I won’t mention it — I’m sensitive to the laws governing defamation of character.

And I’d be defaming their character because after we spent a lot of money getting their advice they came up with this: “Create a center of excellence (COE) to focus on and manage the process.”

Which we did. It immediately became a bureaucracy. Mostly, it conducted audits, which led to piecemeal solutions, many built around a piece of software they selected to manage the process but hadn’t yet installed. Talk about a Catch-22: We don’t pass the audit unless we used the right software; if we tried to use the right software we’d fail the audit because we wouldn’t have any process at all, seeing as how the right software isn’t yet available.

Am I nuts, or should this have happened differently?

– Seeking diagnosis

Dear Seeking …

Are you nuts? How should I know. Do I look like a shrink? I think you’re asking a different question, though, which is whether your reaction to this situation is a symptom.

No, it isn’t.

The pundicrats made two fundamental mistakes. First, they walked in knowing the answer before asking any questions. That’s clear on the face of it. (For consultants reading this answer: There’s a big difference between walking in knowing an answer and knowing the answer. The former is essential. The latter creates disasters.)

More significantly, they tried to fix a broken process through a reorganization. Anyone who knows anything about organizational performance understands this is exactly backward. You have to design the process first. Then you have to put it in the context of all the other processes required for success. You design the organizational structure so the most important processes cross the fewest organizational boundaries.

One of the surest routes to bureaucratic paralysis is to create an organization first and give it authority without responsibility, which, from your description, is exactly what transpired here.

Or should I say “expired”?

Anyway, the first mistake having been made, your “Center of Excellence” compounded the felony by starting with an audit rather than starting by defining a process and then conducting training for everyone responsible for participating in it.

It comes down to a fundamentally misunderstanding of what it means to be excellent. The word doesn’t mean lacking flaws — that’s the total-quality-management definition of “quality.” Excellence conveys something entirely different: The presence of top-notch attributes. You can’t create these through an audit process.

– Bob

——–