Zone to Win: Organizing to Compete in an Age of Disruption by Geoffrey A. Moore

Author:Geoffrey A. Moore [Moore, Geoffrey A.]
Language: eng
Format: epub, azw3
Publisher: Diversion Books
Published: 2015-11-03T07:00:00+00:00

The Six Levers

Centralize. Having identified the process to be reengineered and socialized the idea to get support for the effort, your first step is to centralize its governance under a single individual who has both the responsibility and the authority to set new policy and enforce it, end to end. Reengineering is an unpopular act that does not lend itself to democratic decision making. To be sure, at the front end during the design phase you want to engage collaboratively to determine how best to reform the legacy process, but once that effort is under way you need to take a command-and-control approach to see it through the execution phase. Put your commander in place at the beginning, establish executive sponsorship for the person and the role, and then support the heck out of him or her whenever the inevitable rebellion surfaces. Backsliding during a reengineering effort only serves to diminish the rewards while extending the misery.

Standardize. Established enterprises typically grow through multiple mergers and acquisitions, so “standard” operating procedures end up varying substantially across equivalent functions. Such variations reduce agility, impede mobility, increase cost of maintenance, and invite errors. Talent gets trapped just compensating for systems that do not talk to each other well. Standardizing to a single instance attacks this kind of waste while establishing a baseline from which all future changes can be launched. It can be a bit draconian, but when disruption strikes, there is no time to pussyfoot around.

Modularize. This is an act of creative imagination in which you decompose the process targeted for reengineering into its functional component elements while ignoring the organizational boundaries that govern its operation currently. Your goal is to reexamine each step in terms of how it changes the state of the workload being processed. Every desired state change deserves its own step, and every step should deliver a desired state change. Note that you are not reengineering yet. You are just putting the value-adding activity more clearly in view while simultaneously identifying as waste those procedures that do not contribute to any desirable state change. That’s where the scarce resources you are seeking to liberate are trapped.

Optimize. This is the execution phase, the one where you implement the redesigned process to eliminate waste. Typically it involves merging some tasks, eliminating others, automating repetitive operations, enabling self service where appropriate, leveraging technology solutions where available, predicting and preempting bottlenecks and breakdowns, and providing an SOS button to push whenever something doesn’t work. Occasionally it may involve completely revamping the process to leverage a next-generation system that addresses the task in a completely different way. The critical goal here is not to save money nor to be more efficient, although both are likely to occur. Rather, it is to make yourself more effective by freeing up resources you need to repurpose for core. If you do not accomplish this goal, you will have wasted your time.

Instrument. There is a law of diminishing returns when it comes to optimization. At some point

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