Stop and smell the process

I have a love/hate relationship with process.
As a fractional Project Leader and recovering COO, I’m often in the business of building process. Having the right steps to follow and appropriate checks and balances can mean the difference between success and failure, even life and death.

But process can also be the death-knell for creativity and strategic problem solving. It can suck all the fun out of your day. It can bog down businesses - even whole industries (ahem, insurance). You can start to focus on the how instead of the why.

That’s why I love working with start-up companies and programs. When you’re designing processes for the first time, you’re whole purpose is to uncover the why and build the right framework or system to support it.

Last week, my team and I huddled on a current client project that feels particularly unruly. Our stakeholders are hungry for a solution, have visions of how well a robust, mature system will work, but we don’t (yet) have a clear definition of success. Without the right process - and a well defined problem statement - we’re at risk of boiling the ocean.

It’s at times like these when I love to go back to the basics and define a process. Not to constrain our client or the project, but to help a chart a clear path forward.

Years ago, I led health plan operations for an association of freelance workers. We were responsible for the healthcare and pharmacy benefits of 20-to-30,000 New Yorkers at any given time.

We had a member-centric philosophy that meant you could email the Founder and CEO directly, and our members availed themselves regularly. Often, they were simple problems to solve or opportunities for customer service improvements. But one email was a day-changer.

The writer (who lived in my neighborhood and that of my CEO), sent us family photos of his wife and their three young daughters. She had recently been diagnosed with stage 4 breast cancer, he told us, with limited life expectancy. She was a perfect candidate for an experimental European drug that was being denied by our health plan.

The Founder and I looked at each other - how were we supposed to make a decision about experimental health coverage while looking at our neighbor’s photo with her three young children?

It was process that saved us - and her. Even though we ran the health plan, it was not our decision to make. There was a process for this. We expedited her case to an oncologist familiar with the European study, confirmed that she was indeed a perfect candidate and had the treatment approved by a qualified medical professional.

That day, the process saved us.
1) There was a process in place to let members self-escalate when something urgent needed leadership’s attention.
2) There was a process in place to direct medical decisions to qualified doctors.
3) There was a process in place to authorize program over-rides when the right decision-makers were involved, and to set precedent for the next case just like it.

We had no idea, when we launched the ‘problem resolution team’ program that we would receive an email as powerful as this one. But I’m sure glad we thought to create feedback loops and oversight processes that were there when we needed them.