Managing Sideways

Managing sideways - a Book written by Price Pritchett, gives a different perspective to Management. Most people often think management means managing top to Bottom, i.e. Bosses, Subordinates, Stake holders, customers...all people..but never look sideways...i.e. managing horizontally.

Indeed when we look at sideways you also find other functions which are not line functions such HR, Finance, Sales, IT etc etc...; which enables the business operations. When we shift by 90 degrees, we also find no of processes which enable peoples job.

This gives new way of looking sideways and lead to Process oriented culture, this book is guided by "Rummler-Brache Process Methodology" .

Most of the process failures are decoded to be "Hand-Offs" failures between process steps, we often do not see the white spaces between them. There no of ways to identify these process improvements such as 6 Sigma, Lean, Kaizen etc etc...to eliminate non value added steps or improvise the hand-offs. Price advises that one needs to rethink their role as manager, one got to unlearn old practices and learn new ways to manage the white spaces.

This would improve the flow better and gives enough room for the people to think and do bigger complex jobs aligning with the bigger job, instead of wasting in transactional flows. ultimately leading to job satisfaction and higher retention.

Interesting definition, you come across here....think people are reporting to customers...then all fall in place and align towards customers. It suggests that the value seen by customer should be the process perspective and often we focus on quality of our products but not on quality of our processes. That is where you see the best turn around companies in the world like GE, Motorola, Toyota are successful in producing quality processes thus quality products.

Processes require measurement systems..right measurement system tells you how to drive your processes and people.

Focus on fixing the environment rather than people, I agree and I add that most of the time culture drives the behaviours and behaviours drive outcomes and we must fix the behaviours in people to produce good results.

Process improvements require to manage the change and we enough learnt in my other blogs how important change is in an organizational life.

Indisputably all these needs a robust communication patterns and balancing all process sub components. The best way Price puts it " Plan, Perform, Measure and Manage" .