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There have been many studies that suggest outsourcing and offshore staffing models are no longer as cost-effective as many companies had originally thought. Many projects often find that the amount of rework or non-value added activities far exceed the return on investment. However; many managers still claim to have saved millions using an offshore or outsource model and continue to look for new ways to use this approach in other aspects of their organization. So the question remains: which one is correct in their assessment? The answer is BOTH.  If you don’t know exactly how much you expect to save using one of these models, then you shouldn’t be considering it in the first place. The firms that utilize a process-oriented methodology find that work becomes a structured breakdown that is fully measurable.

When organizations operate in an environment where data is reviewed regularly, everyone  becomes an expert. Discussions surrounding exactly what the problem is, what success should look like, and what improvement means to the organization leads to greater performance results for everyone involved. It’s almost like playing basketball without any set plays or basic knowledge of the game – you end up with ten people running around on the court never really knowing when to pass, when to shoot, or what to do with the ball.  Process Intelligence is the art of collecting valuable information about your organization, your process and your resources to establish a set of core competencies that gets everyone on the team playing together in the same game, at the same time, every time.

When you approach project management as a process, you ultimately monitor the “9’s” just as you would with any defect analysis. For example, if you use a tool that captures process intelligence about your project, and someone tells you their projects are on-time and within budget 90.0% of the time, that means they have approximately 100,000 tasks that are behind schedule, out of scope or not meeting expense guidelines for every 1 million tasks they work on.  If the numbers seem extraordinarily high, consider the cost of rework and non-value added activities for even 100 tasks in your organization and multiply that by the number of project managers you have today. Let's say you average 300 projects per year, at an average project complexity of 300 tasks each. Next time someone in the organization tells you they are "on-time and within budget 90.0% of the time,' that really means that you can expect 9,000 past due tasks over the course of the year.  Sound acceptable? We don't think so either.

Organizations that don’t understand variation are easy to spot. Management occurs according to the last set of data or report that was published, there seems to be an incredible amount of firefighting going on all the time, resources continue to find ways to circumvent process, and everyone is so concerned with finding ways to micromanage the details that they often lose sight of their actual roles.  Unfortunately, variation occurs everywhere (consider your average commute time to work as one example) and most organizations can't seem to locate it through key performance indicators, dashboards or balanced scorecards that are outdated. Performance metrics shouldn't be a painstaking manual process every month. It should be organic, it should be automatic, and most of all, it should indicate where your organization should focus on key process improvement initiatives.