Changing Goals: Resetting the Aim for Your Processes

More and more processes today have the ability to change the goals and rules without redeveloping or maintaining the processes flow or case. This means that we will have to keep strong focus on what can change those goals and outcomes of a process or group of processes. There are three major sources of goal changes that would allow for a reconfiguration of the process resources, milestones and tolerances. Those sources are visual metrics, emerging patterns, or business scenarios. The metrics, of course, are the most reactionary and the planned scenarios are more long range focused. The emerging patterns are in the middle to the timing continuum.

Visual Metrics:

Metrics, especially tied to tolerances, that are projected on dashboards to the masses are bound to trigger the need for a change in goals over time. If things are out of tolerance, the speed to change the goals will be fast. If there are ideas around better outcomes over time, the timing of goal adjustments will run a bit longer. There might even be projects started to augment an existing process or resource.

Emerging Patterns:

Patterns of interest, which can range from unusual exceptions to aggregated market signals might initiate a goal change. Any interesting event of combination of events might be analyzed for a goal change or the recognition of an emerging or planned scenario. There is generally more time to react with goal changes in these situations, but when competition heats up timing might become more critical.

Business Scenarios:

Planning cultures tend to seek out scenarios that are either opportunities or threats and generate inventories of awaiting goals, rules or constraints for change situations. Quite often these scenarios are embellished and assisted by simulation software to determine proper innovation and change responses. It also helps if some creative types are aimed at thinking out of the box to identify "Black Swans" to add to the scenario inventory.

Net; Net:

Goal changes are a necessity in a more volatile world and these changes can engender efforts that range from small to large scale responses. Those organizations that have processes that are built for change, will benefit most in terms of time and cost of response. Organizations are encouraged to consider volatility in their process designs and execution of processes.


Additional Reading:

http://jimsinur.blogspot.com/2014/11/is-work-goal-or-flow-directed.html
http://jimsinur.blogspot.com/2014/04/the-digital-organization-is-mult-goal.html
http://jimsinur.blogspot.com/2014/02/business-survival-skill-i-recognizing.html
http://jimsinur.blogspot.com/2013/06/the-new-executive-approach-to-change.html