A manager who refuses ownership of a process

Dear Bob …

Our internal help desk has a manager who is currently trying very hard to refuse ownership of any process he doesn’t like. These aren’t new things in the works — they’re processes that have been in place a very long time, in some cases longer than he’s been in the position.

Here’s the kicker. He’s asking for changes to the processes at the same time he’s saying he’s not the owner.

My boss is trying to formalize the project processes and so I’m using his templates and workflows. But since the help desk manager is saying he’s not the owner I don’t technically have an approver. I will be asking my boss on how to deal with this but my instinct is to say we won’t make any changes until an owner is defined. I don’t see that working but would be interested in what you’ve seen in these situations.

– In the middle

Dear Middling …

Not sure how to answer, because it depends on the process, and on your role in all this. A few thoughts that might be of help:

• Nobody gets to refuse ownership of a process because they don’t like it. They might refuse to follow a process they don’t like. They might insist on changing a process they do own and don’t like to a process they like better. But refusing ownership because they don’t like the design is a logical non sequitur.

  Offhand I’d say the Help Desk manager’s boss needs to intervene by explaining the nature of delegation and an organizational chart. It defines this manager’s responsibilities — including the processes he owns — and the last I looked, this isn’t considered optional.

• If your boss is trying to formalize processes and you’re involved, I’m going to guess you’re in a process improvement role. Something we’ve found in our consulting is that process improvement doesn’t happen until after the process owner is familiar with and has embraced the practice of process management. This practice includes and depends on the ability to develop appropriate process metrics.

  So once the Help Desk manager’s boss has explained the facts of life, the next step is to make sure he gets proper training in process management, and whatever support he needs to develop the metrics. If he thinks the process is bad, the proper order of events is to:

• Define goals,
• Then define metrics that measure performance with respect to the goals,
• Fine-tune the metrics so they can’t be “fooled,”

• And only then to propose changes to the process that will improve the metrics (without torpedoing someone else’s success by doing so … subjects I cover in Chapters 2 and 3 of Keep the Joint Running: A Manifesto for 21st Century Information Technology, and I hope you’ll forgive the plug).

• If the Help Desk manager insists that no matter what the design, it still isn’t his process, then you, he and his manager should sit down to figure out whose process it is … and, depending on the answer, whether there’s any role left for the Help Desk manager.

If the process in question is incident management, I’d say the Help Desk manager is all wet. If it’s end-user training, on the other hand, the question of process ownership (really, practice ownership) depends on what the CIO and HR Director jointly agree to.

• Your role and your boss’s goal: Is it really to formalize the processes? In our consulting experience, this achieves little without first turning process owners into process managers, as already noted, and without at least starting the effort of instituting a culture of process in the organization.

Without performing those steps first you’ll be, to use George Burns’s phrase, trying to play pool with a rope.

That’s how it looks from here, although as I said at the beginning, I’m making quite a few assumptions giving this advice.

– Bob