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Wiring Diagrams - a blueprint for operational success.

The truth is that most businesses do not value process understanding. This is an amazing realization because in many ways understanding and facilitating people's performance of process is what management is!. Process understanding or the lack there of is behind why as many as 80% of CEO's who were successful in the company they grew up in are less successful or unsuccessful in their next role.

If this truth was not enough the process thinking or what I prefer to call the "how will it all work" thinking is omitted or done poorly in most major projects and in particular information technology projects. We get what the system can do but what we don't get is how our people will get it to do that or which part of that we actually need done to deliver our services and products.

Information technology exists to enable process.

If we do not understand fully the process we are seeking to enable then the system will dictate some of the process and the cost will be more than some organizations and their people can bare. We all know that the help that was meant to come from the new system is always: late, usually at best partial and always at more cost than the business case for it. Then we set about making it work.

If the business is people working in processes then people need to learn the new process along with the new system that is enabling it. The system needs to work for the process and the people.

Wiring Diagram
What is a wiring diagram?
  • It is a high level flow chart but with all the detail in it
  • It is a knowledge map not just tracking task but tracking all information and information channels that initiate the next task in the process
  • It is a job description of every role in the process
  • It is an indicator of value adding and non-value adding steps, waste, rework and cycle time
  • It is a representation of the whole delivery 'end to end' that all innovation can be tested against.
  • It is current state map of the way we work now and when its companion future improved state is drawn, it is an implementation blueprint and a change management guide.
Analogy

The wiring diagram is like a 'do it your self' heart transplant guide. If you plan to put an improved bit in, you can test the overall contribution by updating the wiring diagram. If you have arteries and veins unconnected after the 'improvement', the wiring diagram can reveal why the new heart might be better but why the patient would not survive the procedure. Better to learn that before commencing the operation.
In Change - never leave home without one

We were involved with a major ERP System implementation after it started to go wrong. Once we had wiring diagrams of the present and desired future state, the third party implementer remarked, "if we had these from the beginning this would have cost $60 Million less and would have provided for fewer iterations of implementation"

  • You wouldn't commence work on a building before you had permitted blueprints.
  • You wouldn't commence hiring and firing before you knew what you needed each individual to do.
  • You wouldn't train anyone in a new system before you had worked out how they were going to use that system and to what end.
  • You wouldn't attempt to diffuse a bomb before you understood its design, mechanisms and all of its triggers and traps
  • You wouldn't tackle a project without having established a critical path and:
  • You should never plan or embark on change without having captured an end to end understanding of how everything is done now.

The wiring diagram is an accelerated learning tool for analyzing how things get done. It is the closest thing to a simulation on paper when it comes to architecting a new way to work and when seen against the back drop of a current state map, it is a visual guide to change management and implementation planning.