<!––>As a workforce consultant, I’m constantly bumping into ghosts: processes that once made sense but are now well past their use-by date. Some of these ghosts are carry-overs from a time when planning in silos was the only way to cope with complexity.

Take, for example, a company whose employees must complete a certain amount of refresher training each year. First, the planning department carefully spreads the training requirements over the course of the year in its tactical plans. These plans are then passed to the rostering department, which frequently overrides the training allocation in its operational plans. By the time December comes around, the rostering department is faced with the unenviable task of fitting a year’s worth of training into a few weeks – training the planning department thought had been completed months ago.

Many companies embark on their attempts at business process improvement by assuming that the person or department with the problem knows exactly how it should be solved. This is an extremely limiting assumption. In the example of the planning-rostering silos, the company had no idea that tactical and operational planning could – and should – be integrated.

Companies that do what they’ve always done – with minor improvements – get what they’ve always got, with minor improvements. It’s easy to see where incremental improvements might come from. It’s much harder to spot opportunities for breakthroughs.

In my experience, anything less than a radical re-evaluation of existing processes is a missed opportunity to add significant value to the business. Acknowledging the fact that the most valuable opportunities aren’t always the most obvious is a great first step towards real business process improvement.

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