Before summer I went through the ‘heads and tails’ of an invoicing process with two clients. The ‘heads’ client was new and, before carrying out the service, the person who was going to manage my invoice contacted me, explained the invoicing process, apologised because it was very complex and, with exquisite kindness, walked me, through several e-mails, throughout the whole journey of registering me as a supplier, with all the necessary signatures and sending of documents. The ‘tails’ client was a different case: I held a session for them more than six months ago and my invoice payment was still pending. I contacted them by email to find out the status of the invoice. The person who was supposedly responsible for managing the invoice payment did not reply to a single one of the numerous e-mails I sent (one per week, for several weeks) and when, concerned about the ghosting I was receiving, I contacted the person who had contracted my service (who was not the same person who managed the invoice), she spoke to me about ‘issues with internal processes’ and she herself took charge of processing the payment following a parallel process. I never found out why the invoice had not been paid on time. The moral of the story is that there are people who make things happen DESPITE the processes, and other people who simply hide behind the processes and don’t bother to act (or answer supplier emails).
We have all complained endlessly about processes and tools. I am the first one doing so. According to Jung, I have a tendency towards extroversion and emotion that makes me feel a certain rejection towards everything procedural. Despite of this, I acknolewdge that, at a certain point, establishing a process or implementing a certain tool can be a great help in an organisation. However, we would all agree that designing good processes or implementing really useful and user-friendly tools and software is still one of the unfinished business in today’s tangled corporate world. Precisely for this reason, I don’t have high expectations from processes or tools, but I do have high expectations from the people who use them. You may not have the option of NOT USING that process or tool, but you do have the option of deciding how to use it or how to anticipate problems so that in the end a positive result is achieved and things move forward. When I see people who shrug their shoulders and make the limitations of processes and tools their excuse for things not happening, I think of the huge cost, financial and reputational, to their organisation. And I also think how terrible it must be for their colleagues to work with someone like that.
As things stand today, no organisation should be allowed to have people who don’t use their brains while working and believe that the essence of their job is to stick to the process. Well, it should not be allowed to have badly designed processes either. But that would be another post.
