Managing Change Enquiry and Action

□ Introduction

As discussed in Chapter 10, it is apparent that as organisations grow they begin to formalise the way in which business is conducted. This is because all organisations reach a size at which an informal approach is no longer tenable. Everything from recruiting staff and choosing suppliers to designing products and managing quality can be described in terms of the sequence of activities involved. The larger, more established and more complex the organisation, the more formal the documentation of such activities can become, and many large organisations have lengthy documentation setting out the way in which tasks are accomplished. Whilst this is sometimes necessary for accreditation purposes, such as ISO 9001, such codified specification of tasks can be cumbersome. Partly because such documentation is long and detailed and has a number of interconnects with other aspects of organisational life, it can be very challenging to introduce change. Change to approved, accredited or simply familiar ways of doing things might need to involve multiple stakeholders (see Chapter 7) and can be time-consuming.

This chapter focuses on how to approach changing the sequence, location and timing of routine tasks. These bundles of tasks are often described as processes, or business processes. This view of processes as the operational mechanics of day-to-day business is an important aspect of managing change and draws on literatures that are rooted in computing science and operations management. This is quite a separate body of work from the process literature in strategic management, which more typically refers to longitudinal studies of strategy-making processes (see Pettigrew, 1992). The 1990s saw a trend whereby large numbers of organisations tried to maximise the efficiency of their business processes (see Hammer, 1990). This chapter reviews the origins of process mapping and introduces two mapping techniques that can be used to capture a description of a process.