CEMM : Can a Process-Approach Solve all of my Problems?

No... but you’ll probably be surprised at what the CEMM Process Approach CAN SOLVE.

What’s keeping you up at night? Are you responsible for optimization that produces Cost Reduction? Maybe you have to figure out how to increase capacity or throughput? You may even have Increasing Revenue in a particular area as your prime objective? Or (oh my) you’re accountable for improving Customer Satisfaction?

Or perhaps you have a less ominous challenge. Perhaps you’ve got responsibility for improving internal problems? Like making it easier for somebody else to do their job? Could be you simply have to support changes decided by others and you aren’t really a part of the “big picture?”

Maybe you’re simply tired of things not working out as expected. A project manager who’s tired of seeing all their best efforts still fall short of the goal they thought they would achieve?

We’ve even talked to people who are tired of doing things that just seem to fall short of being the right thing to do. So perhaps what’s keeping you up at night is that you're just plain tired and frustrated with the way things are?

How does CEMM help with all of these problems?

Let us tell you.

CEMM is a unique approach that guides you in identifying the very causes of work.

STOP. Think about that a minute.

Causes of work are the very nature of what shapes the things each of us do everyday. Of course we need to do work so that doesn’t mean that all work is bad but it’s not hard to imagine that much of the work that gets caused – and that people do – is non value-added work. In an ideal world we would eliminate all that non value-added work.

Non Value Added Work

Non value-added work comes in two types. The first type of non value-added work is work that is created when something doesn’t occur in the way we intended it to.

Because “process” is a convenient and popular way to talk about the work an organization does we can approach this problem by identifying the causes of work that exist by process (in the case of CEMM any form of process definition works).

But how do we do that?

It turns out that there are three things we can identify in a process that will enable us to identify the causes of work existing in the process. These three things are Moments of Truth, Break Points and Business Rules.

Moments of Truth exist any time a customer touches a process or a process touches a customer. Break Points occur anywhere a hand-off of any kind occurs in a process and Business Rules are the explicit and implied rules of the process that form or influence the behavior of the process. We call Moments of Truth, Break Points and Business Rules Process Diagnostics.

Each and every one of these Process Diagnostics is a cause of work. Why? Because at every Moment of Truth, Break Point and Business Rule there will be things that go wrong – what we call a deviation from the intended or designed process state. And no matter how many times we engineer and reengineer these causes of work they still have deviations. That’s because we can’t engineer flawless processes: the very act of trying to do so (fixing effects) makes our processes more and more complicated...

And it also introduces more causes of work!

The Number One Reason why Process Initiatives Fail

If you did a study of how processes in your organization changed over time using our Process Diagnostics, you would find that in general our organizations are actually engineering more causes of work into our processes all the time. This is also the number one cause behind the increase in complexity that is making our lives so difficult.

Yet the only way we can significantly reduce the non value-added work in our organizations is by eliminating causes of work. That’s the difference between CEMM and other approaches. Rather than continuing in a cycle of effect-fixing (that creates more effects by the way)... we eliminate causes. The difference in results from these two basic approaches is profound.

The second type of non value-added work comes from how we choose to think about the work that we do. So often we focus our efforts on changing aspects of a process without really understanding what the overall nature of that process is and the purpose it is intended to serve. To do that we have to step back and get a broader perspective on the process. Unfortunately the degree of detail we typically use to describe processes is way too much for us to ever get ourselves into this perspective.

With CEMM we take a unique approach to getting the broader perspective. We describe a process as a simple model of activities. We don’t want to “capture” workflow or any of the other “as is” modeling artifacts because they only get in the way of identifying causes of work. What we need to do is create a simple process model that we can all agree represents the process at a high level.

That kind of process model gives us the broader perspective we need to identify other non value-added work. Why? Because with a simple high level process model we can suddenly get a real sense for how the process is structured to achieve its purpose. And with that insight it suddenly becomes very obvious what parts of the process are problematic or fail to contribute to the achieving of the intended purpose. What have we found? More causes of work, and once we know they are there we can take action to begin eliminating them.

Customer Alignment and the Customer Experience

CEMM also deals with Customer Alignment and Customer Experience in respect to defining what the Customer should expect from the organization, then making sure the organization can deliver on that expectation reliably.

When we can do these things, the existing metric we are judged against (which is implied by or shapes the business issues we face) almost becomes irrelevant. That doesn’t negate having knowledge and skill in our given discipline, it augments that knowledge and skill. We become more effective and productive at whatever it is we do.

CEMM won’t solve your problems for you, it won’t make the reason that you're up at night go away, but it will make it much easier for you to successfully address these issues.

It’s actually taken us some time to get our heads around some of the effects of CEMM. But we have gotten that now and this is what we have learned.

It is easy to think of CEMM as a Process Improvement Technique or a Business Process Management Technique. The focus on process (but anything can be a process!) just makes that connection really click. However CEMM applies to practically everything we do.

The Customer aspect in CEMM is the first technique to explicitly move us from “inside-out” thinking to “outside-in” thinking. It is outside-in thinking that brings us into the Customer Universe and that changes everything.

Outside-In Thinking

It’s hard to tell you what “outside-in” thinking really is because most of the words that fit are so overused that they are pretty much worthless. What seems to help us understand the concept of outside-in best is the marked difference between the 1st person perspective and the 3rd person perspective.

The 1st person perspective is that of being there, an active part of what is happening. The 3rd person perspective is the role of the observer who remains at a tangible distance away from something.

Inside-out thinking operates with our 1st person perspective being the wants, needs and concerns of the organization while the customer is referenced into that from the 3rd person perspective.

Outside-in thinking brings our customers into the 1st person perspective as our primary motivator but keeps the needs and concerns of the organization in the 1st person as well. This creates a powerful balance where we serve our needs within the bigger picture of serving our customers' needs.

When we have the outside-in perspective we end up with a first person relationship with the Customer. We act on the customer’s behalf because we really understand our customers’ needs.

Successful Customer Outcomes

CEMM uses outside-in thinking to align processes to our customers by articulating what our customers would see as a Successful Customer Outcome (SCO) from our processes. We also capture a good deal of context to help us get the SCO right with SCO Mind Mapping.

Once we get that clear understanding of what the process should be delivering we can assess the current state of the process against that goal, again using the simple process activity model (Process Activity List) but this time building the model from the point of view of the customer.

Can you imagine how different the process models would look if our customers created the process model of their experience – the process from their eyes – compared to the one we have for doing our work? Try it and see! Pick a documented process then get a customer to give you their perspective. Chances are it will be difficult to tell that the two models are even talking about the same process! If you don’t have a customer handy then try describing the process as if you were the customer. If you play the role well the difference will be obvious.

So CEMM (Customer Expectation Management Method) also addresses the disconnection with the customer, helping us to achieve Customer Alignment and to improve our ability to deliver a reliable customer experience.

The elimination of the very causes of work and the alignment and delivery of customer success - that’s what CEMM is all about.

If you would like to know more about how we can help you apply these concepts in your own organization we can suggest: