The IPAPI CEM Method™
Can a process-approach solve all my problems?
No... but you’ll probably be surprised at what the CEM Method process approach can solve.
In our jobs we are faced with many challenges – and one of the most prominent of those challenges is reducing costs. Cost reduction will remain on the organizational agenda forever.
If we are experiencing growth or seeking to improve response times for specific areas of our operations we may be faced with increasing capacity or throughput.
Often times we are part of an initiative to increase revenues for a line of business, product line, or even as an enterprise initiative.
Then you may even be tasked with improving customer satisfaction!
So what are you challenged with? What’s keeping you up at night? Is it Cost Reduction, Increasing Revenue or improving Customer Satisfaction? Are these the kinds of challenges you face?
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? It could be your task is to support changes decided by others.
Sometimes the most important issue faced is dealing with tasks and projects that just never seem to work out as expected. Are you spending a lot of time trying to make things work after you already thought they were done? 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 IPAPI help with all of these problems?
Let us tell you.
The philosophy of IPAPI takes a unique approach to how we deal with the many challenges we are faced with everyday in our working lives. Our philosophy gives us an approach that guides us to identifying the very causes of work.
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. It is unintentional work but it is still work.
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 (from the IPAPI perspective 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 uncover the causes of work existing within it. 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 affects) 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 the IPAPI approach and other approaches to process improvement. Rather than continuing in a cycle of affect-fixing (that creates more and more affects)... we identify and eliminate the very causes or work. 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. But that can never work. We must base our efforts on the intended purpose of each process if we are to achieve value creation; to do that we must step back and get a broader perspective on each process. Unfortunately the degree of detail we typically use to describe processes is far too much for us to ever get ourselves into this perspective.
IPAPI CEM Method™ – Optimize
With the IPAPI CEM Method™ we take a unique approach to getting that 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.
Identifying and eliminating the very causes of work is how we optimize processes with the CEM Method. Using this approach we eliminate both the non value-add activities of a process along with many of the causes of unintentional work in our organizations – the work that often consumes over half of our employees work efforts!
Customer Alignment and the Customer Experience
The IPAPI CEM Method™ 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 define outcomes based on customer alignment – and organize around their delivery - the existing metrics we are judged against (which are implied by or shapes these business issues we currently face) often become 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.
This immediately produces a critical change in our working lives. While the CEM Method won’t solve your problems for you, it will make it much easier for you to successfully address these issues with entirely new levels of success. You still have to do the work, but the results from that work are at least an order of magnitude beyond what is happening now.
It’s actually taken us some time to get our heads around some of the affects of the CEM Method. But we have gotten that now and this is what we have learned.
It is easy to think of CEM 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 CEM applies to practically everything we do.
The Customer aspect (Align) in the IPAPI CEM Method™ 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. We may still keep 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.
If we are really “getting it” we may even make the transition to placing the organization’s needs and concerns into the 3rd person perspective. That is a daunting transition for many of us but it is happening more and more. You see... organizations that drive everything they do by the needs and wants of their customers produce so much customer value that they shine like the sun in customers’ eyes. They create intense loyalty, powerful word of mouth viral marketing, and customers that come to them without even considering their competition. They dominate markets, are healthy during trying times and flourish during better times.
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
The IPAPI CEM Method™ 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 using the simple process activity modeling (Process Activity List) technique to build 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 models of their experiences with us – the processes from their eyes – compared to the ones 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 the CEM 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.
Process Innovation – The source of Competitive Differentiation
What happens when organizations seek to innovate for customer value creation? It’s not easy is it? Of course not. Innovation comes from facing the challenge of thinking about things differently, from many different angles and perspectives. Innovation must move outside of our current perspective of what we do and how we do it. But we are surrounded every day by our current perspective and it that places a very heavy influence on what we are able to consider as possible changes we can make to increase the value of what we do to our customers.
With the IPAPI CEM Method™ we challenge our existing perspective of customer-facing processes by the one thing that affects our customers more than anything else – the existing Moments of Truth.
But the act of challenging these Moments of Truth in and of itself won’t push us into the “state of innovation.” What do we mean by that? Innovation occurs when we are faced with unique challenges that force us out of our current context.
We have to find ourselves in a place where all of the easy answers are “used up” leaving us with no choice but to start drawing on completely different perspectives and approaches to the problem. This condition forces us into an extremely high state of cognitive behavior, one that expands the “possibilities” we consider exponentially. This state of innovation is much like exploring new territory, territory we have no experience with at all. We become explorers considering our world (the process) as if seen for the first time.
From this state of innovation come new perspectives, new ways process could be shaped to change the customer experience. Some of those new shapes may be changes that are too much for us right now. Some may only hold a minimal degree of new customer value. Some will represent immediate new levels of value and some will fundamentally change the market we are in forever...
The IPAPI CEM Method™: Optimize – Align – Innovate
The elimination of the very causes of work – both non value-add and unintentional is the optimization we seek within the CEM Method. The alignment of process to our customers – from their perspective – is the alignment we care about in CEM. Innovation that drives us into an advanced cognitive state that produces new process shapes ranging from improved customer value to radical value creation that remakes entire markets is what we care about in CEM.
If you would like to know more about how we can help you apply these concepts in your own organization we suggest:
