The process deadlock
When a company is small and young, work is often done in a seemingly ad hoc fashion. People briefly discuss and then do what appears to be the best solution for the task at hand. As the company is small and most people in the company have a good idea what is important and what is not, this approach tends to work quite well. Sometimes, a wrong decision may be made but in general, this sort of ad hoc approach works quite well.
But when companies grow, this approach often reaches its limits. The number of employees grows and this type of ad hoc communication does not scale that well. Not everyone working for the company can distinguish relevant from irrelevant anymore. They were not part of the company from the beginning and may lack the bigger picture as specialization starts to grow with the size of the company. While the first employees are usually more all-rounders, later employees are often hired with a stronger focus on a certain area of expertise.
All this leads to an increase of subpar or even wrong decisions. Something needs to be done as bad decisions not only damage the company’s reputation. Sometimes, they also lead to revenue loss. Not good!
Hence, the company decides to replace the ad hoc approach by a more organized one.
Enter business processes!
Business processes as scaling means
Business processes define how work should flow through the company and what everyone is intended to do. Several roles are defined, and starting with either an internal or external trigger, it is defined who is doing what and which kind of artifacts are passed from one person to the next until the required result is produced.
Typically, the process descriptions are accompanied by a set of role descriptions that define the tasks and responsibilities of the persons along the process steps. Additionally, templates are defined that describe form and content of the artifacts handed over between persons. Hiring all-rounders and partial all-rounders is replaced by strictly matching the applicants’ skills with the description of the role in demand. And so on.
At least in theory it is possible to scale a company efficiently with this approach: Define all relevant processes (and support processes that augment the main processes) including the needed roles and templates. As a result, everyone knows what to do when. No bad decisions anymore as all essential decisions have been made upfront when defining the processes and roles.
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