Technology ROI: process mapping

(I want to thank Kathie Topel for her contribution to this article).

The state of project management

In 2015, a survey by portfolio management provider Innotas showed that 55% of IT projects had failed in the past 12 months. By 2017, just two years later, the numbers had improved and only 6% of projects were considered failures. Today’s IT projects are delivered on time and on budget, yet up to 24% are considered “underperforming”; projects that do not provide the necessary business benefits. Frankly, projects that don’t deliver commercial benefits might well not get implemented in the first place. The money spent on those projects could have been better used elsewhere.

So why is this “underperformance” occurring?

One of the key elements is the lack of executive sponsorship. Too often, a large multi-year project is started with great fanfare and with the laser focus of the executive sponsor. Unfortunately, a crisis occurs (could anyone have predicted Covid-19 in 2020?), Or some other major event and the executive sponsor loses its focus on the big project.

But there are ways to minimize, if not eliminate, this from happening.

Business alignment

When a company is aligned, that means that all levels and players are clear about the purpose of the organization and make decisions accordingly. The resources, strategies, management systems and communications of the company are aligned with that purpose.

You would think that any IT project would align with the Business, but this is not the case. I think this happens because it takes a lot of work to really understand how IT features and capabilities can enable a business to achieve its strategic goals, and this hard work doesn’t happen. While the executive may be quite knowledgeable about the technology, it is the vendor and front-line workers who best understand the current process and the capabilities of the new software or system.

However, the front-line worker may not have a good understanding of how software capabilities can help achieve key business goals.

The key to a successful IT project, one that greatly benefits the business, is to take the business drivers, the critical success factors, of a company and discover how these drivers can be broken down into metrics (key performance indicators) that will drive the business forward. Metrics that can provide clear actions that need to be taken.

Each industry has its own critical success factors; We will examine two industries below.

Let’s take the example of an airline. One of the key factors for the profitability of an airline is the response time at the boarding gate. Why is this important? The faster the aircraft change occurs at the gate, the more aircraft can use that gate. The more planes use that gate, the more flights will take place. More flights mean more profit. In addition, a faster response time increases customer satisfaction from departure or landing on time.

In the case of a fast food restaurant, drive-through duration is a critical success factor. Customers don’t want to sit in a drive-through for 20 minutes. It doesn’t matter if there are 3 cars or 30 cars in the drive-through, no customer wants to wait more than a few minutes. Experiencing a long wait time means that the customer will go to a different fast food restaurant next time. The shorter the length of service, the more customers can be served and the more profitable the restaurant will be.

First step to business alignment: creating a process map

Let’s dive into the fast food restaurant illustration. Fast food restaurants (also known as quick service restaurants) get more than 50% of their income from drive-through, so shortening the duration is key to a successful restaurant. The first step in reducing transit time is to map out the current transit process. At a high level it is:

1. Taking the order

2. Taking the money

3. Preparing the food

4. Delivery of food (giving it to the person).

So how do you shorten the drive-through time in these 4 areas? Would service time decrease if the cashier were twice as fast? While it may be desirable to have a faster cashier, the amount of time saved would be negligible (along with the greater possibility of error taking orders). The best approach is to step back and look at the process holistically using process mapping.

The process mapping along with the duration of each process will reveal that the order taking process can be divided into two subparts. 1) The customer decides what he wants 2) verbalizes the order. The second part is pretty quick for most clients. Whether 3 or 6 items are ordered, the time difference is slight. But the first part, for the client to decide what they want, especially if it is a family with young children, can take many minutes. With a single tour, the entire line stops, until Junior decides if he wants a Happy Meal or a Big Mac (in the case of McDonalds). But with two lanes for self-service, Junior (lane 1) can take as long as he wants. People in lane 2 are happy as they are not lagging behind and can jump in front of the junior because they ordered first.

Anything that contributes to critical success factors should be viewed as an area for improvement.

In future articles, we will discuss how technology can be used for critical success factors.