process artefacts and other outcomes, which may prove useful in solving problems in the future.
Structuring the organization as a knowledge and experience fac- tory around project teams in which peoples’ specific competen- cies can be leveraged and developed, offers the company an opportunity to learn from every project. This way as the com- pany matures, it constantly rejuvenates and reinvigorates itself, with a constant flow of fresh insight and learning. Over the long term, this supports the evolution of the organization from task based, where all activities are aimed at the successful execution of current project tasks, to knowledge and learning capability based. Knowledge and learning based capability endows the company with continuous energy for improvement and change.
In other words it makes it adaptive and resilient to its environ- ment.
● administrative processes – processes that do not produce out- puts that customers want, but are still necessary for running the business, e.g. strategic planning, budgeting and perform- ance measurement.
Typically, operational processes produce goods and services that external customers consume, while administrative processes gen- erate information and plans that internal groups/processes use.
The two, therefore, must not be considered as independent and unrelated activities. They must be aligned and mutually support- ive if the organization is to function effectively. Unfortunately, there is usually a preoccupation in improving operational processes but a neglect of supportive administrative processes.
The outcome of this unbalanced focus often leads to only mar- ginal performance gains.
Behavioural processes
Behavioural processes capture patterns and features of the orga- nization’s ways of acting and interacting. They represent the com- panies ingrained behaviour. Examples are decision-making and communication processes. The underlying patterns are usually so deeply embedded that they are displayed by most organiza- tional members, often without them consciously recognizing the patterns. Behavioural processes also have strong permanency about them and are capable of withstanding turnover of person- nel and many organizational upheavals.
In themselves, behavioural processes do not possess an inde- pendent existence. Nevertheless they are important because they feature permanently in all processes. They are generalized pat- terns of the accepted way of doing things, forming a collection, movement and interpretation of information, through people. In most cases, behavioural processes define behaviours that are learnt informally through socialization and on-the-job experi- ence, capturing cognitive and interpersonal aspects of the work.
This makes them difficult to identify yet highlights their impor- tance. For example, many new product development processes of different companies roughly share similar work flows yet still involve radically different patterns of decision making and com- munication. These underlying patterns often determine the effec- tiveness of the operational process, and its ultimate success or failure.
The most important three behavioural processes are:
● decision-making processes
● communication processes
● individual learning processes.
Organizational change and learning processes
Organizational learning is a critical facet in the struggle for long- term organizational survival. It involves the creation and acquisi- tion of knowledge and rests ultimately on the development of sharing. Companies often approach this challenge in an abstract and ad hoc way but, as we elaborate in later discussions, within knowledge management processes there exist persistent underly- ing patterns in the way an organization can and does approach learning and change. Over time these approaches become institu- tionalized as the organization’s dominant mode of knowledge and learning.
Managerial processes
Management is simply the art of getting things done. The reality of the work takes into account that organizations are complex social beings with widely distributed responsibility, resources, politics and power imbalances. Managers spend a large amount of their time working through this maze to get the employees moving in the desired direction. Managers must win support and allegiance from individuals, and harmonize competing interests and goals to get things done. Indeed, it is the actions and mechan- ics of implementation that constitute the heart of the process approach.
Three broad managerial processes can be defined:
1 Direction-setting processes. Direction-setting, is one of the most common managerial processes. It involves mapping the future and then mobilizing support and ensuring alignment to this agenda.
2 Negotiating and selling processes. To get employees to move in the charted direction, managers must negotiate, persuade and sell the processes necessary to get the job done. These processes need to manage and exploit both horizontal and ver- tical inter-linkages. Various ways can be used to elicit support, including creating dependence, providing quid pro quo exchanges and appealing to compelling organizational needs.
3 Monitoring and control processes. Once operations are up and running, managers then need to engage in a set of processes designed to ensure the processes conform to requirements.
These control processes are necessary to maintain equilibrium and also to ensure that processes are efficient and effective. To a large extent these are information-driven systems for detect- ing and controlling process perturbations by initiating correc- tive actions to restore the organization to its state of equilibrium.
The problem is that many companies fail either to adopt a process perspective or, even when they do, their attention is con- fined primarily to work processes. Focusing narrowly on work processes without interlacing with all other processes, needless to say, will continue to deliver suboptimal results.
A common problem processes face, even when they are redesigned to represent the state of the art, is when they fail to deliver upon the promise. The sequence often witnessed is that when the process is redesigned there is initial enthusiasm but, once the revised process is documented and the people trained to use it, corporate commitment quickly drops off. You now have a well-designed process but the problem that it is not used. This lack of commitment is often the symptom but not the cause of the problem. The cause usually is that the corporate culture embraces aneventperspective rather than a process perspective. Once the process manuals are distributed and users trained, the job is con- sidered done. The failing is that companies often do not realize that the process is an ongoing, culture-embedded, continuously improvingliving system, thus leading to situations in which the redesigned process merely limps along.
One common way of looking at the process mode of organiza- tional structuring is simply as a series of interlinked activities co- ordinated and reviewed periodically by management. A better way of looking at processes, however, is also to see them as com- pany-wide decision-making systems. A process is a human-based system that incorporates all business disciplines. It is both defined by the corporate culture and made up of it. Processes enable a company to tap its full potential by engaging the skills, talents and intellectual capabilities of each of its members.