Processes & Systems Vs Results

Which one is more important?

In business world, everything depends upon how you did your work and how much you earned. Everything else comes in between. So, what is important?

· The way you do things daily? or

· The results you get eventually?

In my observation, most of the companies are focussed on hitting the expected target. Even the KPI of the employees focus on results or achievements. There is nothing wrong in this, unless we are discarding the importance of processes and systems, while focusing on the results.

To get into an analysis of this, let us dive deeper as how a company runs. A company has certain resources, including people; and certain goals or desires to fulfil. The company has charted out different ways and means as how to get the results they want. These are the processes and the entire set of processes are the system. Since there are different things to be done, functions are divided into departments with clear cut specific responsibility, task and authority. Each of the individual in every department also has been assigned some roles and responsibilities. Seniors look after and guide the juniors as and when the need is seen. All these activities are recorded for future reference for monitoring the output, finding the fault or improvising the process. These are analysed and updated from time to time by the approval of senior management.

In this backdrop, let us see what is important – Following a process or getting the results? Before we embark on our journey, let us recall that the running of a company defined above seems to have a lot of co-ordination needed between people and departments if we want to get the results that the company wants. It becomes obvious that everyone expects everyone else to behave and act in a desired manner as outlined initially by the management. Any deviation from the set process may result in uneven completion timing of work from different individuals and departments, thus creating conflict in the system. This conflict will come as the inputs expected from certain individuals or departments will not reach at desired times any more. Individual employees trying to better the system or to improve their own personal performance for promotion etc will actually make it more difficult.

ISO 9000 series of systems go in far more details about the dependency of the company on processes. A system is a bundle of processes for getting the desired output. Any change in the process has to be carried out taking into consideration about its effect on system as well.

Innovation is fine in R&D, but not on the shop floors. Here timing and co-ordination is far more important. A system has been designed by qualified people, after considering different factors. Any deviation will only create problems.

At times, I have seen senior management bypassing the process, because they feel they know the drill. I would like to remind them as a senior pilot flying commercial aircraft even after 30000 hours of flying, still checks off his list before flying. Confidence is good, but over confidence is not. If seniors do not follow processes, how can they expect the juniors to do that?

Similarly, I have seen even the MDs not following the process they expect others to follow. I find it s very egoistical thing. Processes and systems are for everyone to follow. Any deviation from those can be extremely detrimental. One must understand that the processes are not confined only to a specific department. At times, the effect of one process can affect a process in another department also. The same needs attention while doing any root cause analysis of any deep-rooted problems in the company.

I understand that results are important, but in the long run, we will realize that process is more important than results. The result is just a by product of the processes. But, in today’s world, we are so focussed on the byproduct that we tend to get away from the process. However, it is to be noted that if we take care of the processes, and all other small things, eventually we will get the desired results.