The Best Way to Build a House is the Worst Way to Implement a Process

I love analogies, and sometimes a bad analogy can be just as useful as a good one...

A House is NOT a good analogy for a Process, but contrasting the best way to build each of them is kind of fun.

The "best"way to build a house is something like the following:

1. Build the Foundation
2. Build the Frame of the house
3. Add Roofing material to keep out the rain
4. Run the Plumbing and Electrical
5. Drywall the Interior
6. etc. etc.

This is the most Pragmatic and Practical way to build a house, and probably the most cost efficient.

The only problem with building a house this way is that you have to live somewhere else until the house is finished. Nothing in the house is finished. Everything in the house is in a state of flux.

If you've read many of my blog entries you probably see where I am going with this... but let's continue.

There is another way to build a house. It's not used very often, but it does work:

1. Build a room... completely. Foundation, Frame, Roof, Electrical, Plumbing, Drywall, etc. In essence a "mini-house"
2. Build another Room
3. Continue until you have all the Rooms that you need

The advantage to this approach is that you can move into the first room as soon as it is finished. You have a place to live... and you are getting a "return on investment" from all the money that you've spent so far.

There are many downsides to the "One Room at a Time" approach, but I think the most obvious is this: You don't have a "full featured house" when the first Room is completed. Your "mini-house" is not as functional as a "complete" house.

To offset this you should build your rooms in terms of importance. What Rooms are absolutely essential?

Personally, I would build the bathroom first, but that's just me :-)

As you build additional Rooms, in the order of most essential to least essential, your House gets increasingly closer to the "Dream House" that you've longed for. Unfortunately, while each new Room is added you are essentially living in a construction zone. Workmen keep tramping through your living Room (once it's built) and there's a lot of hammering and sawing going on to disturb your peace.

Building a house this way probably costs more too. It's much cheaper to have an electrician and plumber work on the whole house at once then on a room-by-room basis.

For all it's down sides, I think the "One Room at a Time" approach can have a lot of merit when building a House... each Room tends to be more what you really want than when you try to do everything at once.

In the realm of Business Process implementation, I am convinced that the equivalent to "One Room at a Time" is the best way to guarantee success when building a Managed Process. I've blogged about this many times before (Drive the Path )... and I'll probably blog about it many more times in the future.

When approaching a Complex Process, identify the Activities along the most important paths and make them (and their associated Decision Gateways) functional first. When you are done, you will have a Managed Business Process and you can start using it immediately. You may choose to wait until more of the Process has been implemented before "turning it on", but just like the "One Room at a Time" approach to House building, the parts that are complete are ready to use.

This is particularly important when building Managed Processes, because the Business probably does not have "somewhere else to live" while the work is going on. There's a problem with their existing Process, or they wouldn't be spending the money to Manage it. They need something useful as soon as you can get it to them... and ultimately it is their decision (the Business Folks) whether or not to "move in early".

Lame analogy or not, Houses and Processes are both usually built for someone else - and satisfying some of the clients needs as soon as you can is almost always a good idea.

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Another, perhaps more subtle advantage of starting with a Functional Process and adding additional Business Value over time is that it conditions your Business folks to think of their Process as a Continuous Work In Progress. Instead of a Static Process Definition that never changes, they will come to view their Process Definition as something that Improves over time... That sounds a lot like Continuous Process Improvement, doesn't it?