By Harry Hiles
A California lawsuit filed by the Los Angeles Unified School District (LAUSD) over a botched $95-million payroll project was in the news recently. The suit alleged that the new SAP payroll system generated erroneous payroll checks, making a huge mess that cost LAUSD millions of dollars to clean up.1The defendant in this case was Deloitte Consulting, who should have been able to avert these problems had they paid attention to one of the most critical tenets of IT projects—you must first have a well-defined and understood process. They apparently didn't, and the rest as they say, is history.
So, why is it so important to define and understand the process before all else?
ITIL V3 defines a process as a structured set of activities designed to accomplish a specific objective. A well-defined process, then, is one that accomplishes the objective in an effective and efficient manner.
But we need to take the process definition a step further. The outcome of a process, like a service, must add value to the customer, user, or consumer. If it doesn't, it wouldn't make much sense to expend the effort to perform the process.
A process is the most fundamental component of all that we do. Whether we're developing a project plan, cooking a meal, or just brushing our teeth, we're performing a process. Each of these processes has an outcome that is valuable—from improving project performance, to enjoying a good dinner, to reducing tooth decay. How well we define the process determines just how valuable the outcome will be.
Processes don't necessarily need to be written to be well-defined and understood. It would be silly to document a simple process performed by one person such as brushing our teeth. But for more complex processes used by several people, documenting the process allows us to better understand it and communicate it to all involved.
Documenting a process accomplishes several goals. By studying and analyzing the process, you gain a better understanding of how it works. Once understood, you can look for opportunities to improve the process, making it even more well-defined and more valuable. Documenting a process also promotes consistency and repeatability by providing a common reference point for those performing the process.
Getting back to the lawsuit, LAUSD and Deloitte made the mistake of assuming that installing the new SAP software would fix the long-standing problems plaguing the payroll system. They were doomed from the start. By not understanding the existing payroll process and analyzing the root cause of the problems, they increased the risk of failure.
Of all that I've learned during my career, one of the most significant lessons is that you need to fully understand a problem before you can fix it. Unfortunately, very few people appreciate this philosophy and prefer a quick fix rather than investing the time and effort to analyze and understand a process before deciding on a solution.
Had LAUSD and Deloitte invested the time upfront to fully understand the payroll process, the new payroll system just might have worked correctly from the start. It might even have taken less time and money than it did to patch all the problems after the fact. We'll probably never know.
Hopefully, both parties learned from this fiasco and will next time take the wiser approach of first understanding the process. As we finally realize, those who ignore history are doomed to repeat it.
My favorite physicist Albert Einstein once said: Insanity is doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results. To get different (and better) results, we need to change our processes. And before we can change our processes, we must first understand them.
In the end, it really is all about the process...
1 Mitchell Landsberg, Los Angeles Times staff writer - L.A. Unified settles dispute over payroll system. Los Angeles Times, November 27, 2008.
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