How to manage business processes between departments?

Every business process, including complex cross-departmental business, is a workflow. The best business process must have the following three characteristics: reliability, feasibility and efficiency. Reliability means that the business process is under control. It can operate economically and reliably within the specified range. Feasibility means that the business process can be executed according to the predetermined plan. It can effectively operate, produce and supply those expected results. Efficiency means that the money, goods and time consumed in the business process are the least. Managers in charge of cross-departmental business processes under their subordinates need to be very vigilant. They must always be ready to find out those process steps that are easy to have the following characteristics: isolated, divorced from other business process steps, narrow in scope, out of control and easy to quickly turn into emergencies. All these may undermine the reliability, feasibility and efficiency of business processes. 1. Inter-departmental supervision is more influential than information flow. The responsibility of cross-departments is persuasion, which is an important way to prevent business processes from being out of touch. One form of supervision and persuasion is supervision. For this kind of indirect responsibility, one role often does not simply influence the decision and action of another cross-departmental role, but regulates it. Supervision usually involves two roles, trying to keep a balance between the following two aspects: on the one hand, to exert creative initiative as much as possible within the scope of the process, on the other hand, not to undermine the integrity of the process. In enterprises, there are many examples of supervisory responsibility creating value, from obvious quality supervisors to almost all departments involved in business process management. The purpose of this indirect responsibility is to minimize the constraints on other roles and try to help them find alternative measures. Another form of coordinating persuasion responsibility is coordination. The purpose of coordination is to attract the attention of multiple roles in several aspects of the same business process, so that their work can be synchronized and connected. Usually, the heads of various business departments formulate the marketing strategies and publicity materials of their own units. In order to ensure the consistency of brand strategy in the whole enterprise, any role related to corporate brand may be responsible for coordinating with the marketing role of the business department. Second, information needs to be transmitted in time. To understand the harm of conceptual isolation to the best business process, let's take a look at the following examples. A wire factory has three continuous production areas. The factory often runs at full capacity, so the maintenance time is tight, but it is extremely important. All three production areas keep a small amount of inventory to ensure the normal operation of the production line during normal short downtime. Nevertheless, when the downtime of the upstream production area exceeds the allowable period of inventory, the two downstream regional supervisors and maintenance supervisors often complain about it, and they are not informed of the delay in time. Don't you think it's the responsibility of the upstream machine operator to warn the downstream people when something goes wrong? Occasionally, people do this, but more often, they don't. People in the upper reaches are anxious and want to solve the problem. They don't have time to think about the downstream problems, or think it won't take long. And they are not sure whether they have the right to give advance notice. Notification In this case, establishing a notification relationship is enough to completely solve the problem. Once the information is shared, this type of notification responsibility ends. As for how to take action according to the information obtained, it is entirely up to the insider to decide. But the point is that he needs information to make the best decision. Suggesting another form of notification responsibility requires a role to analyze the data, establish an alternative model, and then suggest a possible action plan to another role in another department. This responsibility can prevent narrow-mindedness. The roles that bear this indirect responsibility include financial analysts, compensation experts, legal advisers and organizational development experts. The role responsible for the proposal needs to be authorized accordingly. The main difference between it and the first form is that it makes a broader analysis of the role of accepting suggestions. Similarly, the party who accepts the suggestion needs to decide the next step by himself. Third, decentralization ensures process improvement. For any business process, the greatest responsibility belongs to the manager who "owns" the process; In cross-departmental business processes, the owner is the responsible manager of the business process. The owner role is in the highest management position in the tower business process, and has complete management authority for all roles, and can directly make suggestions on the process. For many business processes involving the whole enterprise, this responsibility can only be borne by the CEO, but many times they are far from the actual process and don't know how to improve it. Therefore, in order to take the responsibility of continuously improving the business processes of subordinates, responsible managers must always delegate some responsibilities to subordinates and get their support. If the change of business process will prevent other subordinates from performing their duties, the responsible manager cannot fully authorize a subordinate to change the business process. However, the responsible manager can delegate the following powers or responsibilities to any subordinate: (1) Collect information about business processes and identify and suggest opportunities for improvement; (2) Set up a research suggestion team to design possible improvement measures and make suggestions to the responsible manager; (3) changing the responsibilities of the functional subordinates; (4) Set up an implementation coordination team to coordinate the work of various functional departments according to the overall goal of the responsible manager, so as to achieve synchronous convergence. 4. Among the indirect responsibilities of emergency instructions, the most powerful is instructions: one role has the right to dominate another role in the peer relationship; You can instruct another person to stop doing something or ask him to take some urgent measures. These responsibilities represent audit and command respectively, and they are important methods to manage uncontrolled business processes. Obviously, this type of inter-departmental control responsibility can only be used in the most serious cases, mainly in the fields of safety, health, environmental protection and quality control. When the safety and health of employees, companies, the environment or customers are threatened by a certain process, it must be clear where the cliff is and who has the right to stop it. When colleagues at the same level obviously exceed the prescribed limit, employees instruct them to stop doing something, which will not disturb the relationship between employees and managers. Remember, it is the manager's responsibility to ensure that subordinates don't cross the line. If the situation may quickly deteriorate into a disaster, it is very important to explain the emergency procedures as clearly as possible in advance and determine which roles can exercise limited power like managers to instruct others (non-subordinates) to obey. This will not weaken the manager's management responsibility to subordinates, because the command right is similar to the audit right, which is limited to a very narrow range and can only be used under special circumstances. The function of instruction can be found in the disaster treatment of hospitals, dangerous goods manufacturing sites and other potential explosion situations. Generally speaking, if a quick, coordinated and planned emergency treatment is needed to avoid serious damage to life, environment or enterprise viability, then it is necessary to show responsibility. However, we can't avoid the fact that we need a clear method to ensure the reliability, feasibility and efficiency of horizontal business processes and cross-departmental working relationships.