Business Process Tangles
1An Introduction

Tangles are a common problem. They stop life being
straightforward, they make it difficult to complete
official forms, they leave you spending ages on
telephone calls to poorly trained help desks that don't
care about your problem, even though for the last
fifteen minutes you've been waiting for your call to be
picked up while listening to atrocious hold music and
hearing 'your call is important to use, please hold' every
two minutes.
These tangles take up time, money, cause frustration
but are too often part of our everyday lives

Tangles are not designed, they just happen.
When a small company starts producing a product and everybody
in that company knows what they're doing, because
communication is good and objectives are clear, customer
requirements move through logically and without delay from
order to delivery.
For example, a fast food outlet such as Subway will take your
order and provide it within a couple of minutes. Each step in the
production line adds value (e.g. choice of roll, filling, topping)
that you want to pay for. The capability (provide what you want)
and capacity (provide it without excessive waiting time) of that
process meets customer demands unless too many orders are
received at once.

As a company gets bigger, sells more products to more
customers who want different things in greater
quantities, processes may start to fail.
The causes of these failures are generally invisible
visible. Typically, processes are only investigated when
things go wrong.

Recognition of problems
5
I think that we have a problem here.
Everything was fine but now:
• Sales are down.
• Deadlines are being missed.
• We’ve spent too much on overtime.
• Customers are dissatisfied.
• We’re losing key staff.
• Warranty costs are up.
• But I can’t see what’s wrong.
I need some help here old chap!

Processes are like clothes - organisations can outgrown
them as the get bigger.
Eventually they just don’t fit an start to tear apart. Once
an organisation gets to more than 150 people (the
Dunbar Number) people, structural silos tend to develop
and ways of working or SOPs need to be formalised,
documented and controlled.

When processes failProcesscapability
Start up
(small group, learning fast, flat structure)
Growth
(additional staff, procedural knowledge)
Process capability meets
requirements
Transactionvolumeandcomplexity
Process capability
overloaded
Tipping point
Process capability failing. Profits and
sales reduced
Mature
(clarity, agility, confidence)
Process capability meets
requirements
Processes managed by ‘firefighting’.
Starting to go out of control.
Managed by firefighting and Band-Aids
Required transaction volume and complexity

Here’s a simple example.
When one person is ordering one to three hamburgers at a time, the
process works. If more than that is demanded, the process fails.
But this is a simple process failure which is easy to understand and
rectify. More staff could be taken on at busy times (if there is
sufficient working space, equipment and resources are available for
them) or orders could be limited. The choice is between increasing
process capacity or limiting demand to what can be managed.
When demand outstrips capacity, tangles happen.

Putting it simply
Pass
Fail
Process meets demand:
Process unable to meet demand:

But when more people are involved, and some of these
are external to the organisation, there’s more chance of
failure and its more difficult to see what’s going wrong.
Poor process management can result in a catastrophic
result within a system
More than one thing going wrong - this is chaos.
Do you remember Network Rail Engineering works
overrunning during Christmas 2014?

Impact of tangles can be massive!
11
• New hardware put into
use without testing.
• Train drivers shift periods
reached maximum hours so
trains abandoned.
• NR signalling contractor
took 10 hours to do 2 hour
job due to rework and
rechecking.
• Inadequate risk management
and contingency planning
• Finsbury park not suitable
for overflow.
• Optimism over reality.
Full report at
http://tiny.cc/6um9wx
The Guardian Sunday 28 December 2014

Or just irritating
12Graphic: https://openclipart.org
Sorry Love, can’t fix your
boiler today. My supervisor’s got
me double booked. Have to
make it tomorrow. OK?
No it’s not OK. I’ve had
to take a day off work!
And don’t call me Love!!

Tangles may grow up over a long period. Sorting
them out may mean changing working practices that
are grown up during this time. Some people may
benefit from the confusion, and the opportunities for
employment and status that they provide.
Ambiguity and internal politics mean that sorting out
a tangle may be more than applying logic!
Look at what is going on in the rich picture that
follows.

What happens in tangles
14

Tangles may provide jobs and status for those who
‘can get things done’. This creates a dependency on
these people who may then resist any change
Process improvement should release people to do
more important and more fulfilling work. It will be
resisted if it is perceived to lead to job losses.
should not result in job losses
People may get benefit to from tangles. The man at
the desk wants to keep his job until going until
retirement, the salesmen wants to make his sale and
then the job is done as far as he is concerned.

Spontaneous Knotting of an
Agitated String
16
REFERENCE: "Spontaneous Knotting of an Agitated String," Dorian M. Raymer and Douglas E. Smith, Proceedings of the National
Academy of Sciences, vol. 104, no. 42, October 16, 2007, pp. 16432-7.
Winner of the 2008 IgNoble
Prize for Physics.
Tangles depend on:
• String length
• String flexibility
• Points of contact
• External motion
The logo of the
Ignoble Prize

The ignoble prize celebrates unusual, peer reviewed,
scientific research. Notable winners have included
Physics Category 2003 ‘An Analysis of the Forces
Required to Drag Sheep over Various Surfaces.’” and:
Safety Engineering Category Year: 1998 “for developing,
and personally testing a suit of armor that is impervious
to grizzly bears.”
But Spontaneous Knotting of an Agitated String has
value in understanding process tangles.

Implications for business processes
•String length
•The more steps in the process the more that can go wrong.
Motion and transport in Muda.
•The probability f tangles is proportionate to length of
process (number of process steps, physical distance
travelled.
•String flexibility
•Processes must have the flexibility to respond to new
opportunities demands, but within controlled limits.
•Points of contact
• Minimise the points of contact: reduced number of
templates, forms, approvals, IT systems, tools etc.
•External motion
•External motion - customer requirements, new technology,
legislation etc will act as agitating forces. Be aware of them
and ensure that you are ready to respond to them.
18

Where do you start?
• Who are the customers and suppliers at the free ends of
the tangle? What do customers want and what do
suppliers provide?
• How many free ends are there and where do they go -
what processes do you need/can you use?
• What can be isolated or removed as no longer needed?
• What has to go from where to where? Some tangles
may be impossible to remove.
• Use Need a planned and budgeted approach.
Throwing people at the problem may result in short
term, undocumented workarounds that make things
worse.
• Know your stakeholders - who is at the other end of the
cable? (these are the customers and suppliers - their
information will inform how the process should work.

Don’t feed the Tangle Monster
20
The Tangle Monster loves it when:
• No one owns or maintains processes.
• Processes are difficult to find on a company
intranet.
• Processes are only seen as requirements for
ISO9001 certification, not as business support
tools.
• Internal politics get in the way of effective
working.
• Management silos prevent effective handover
between processes.
• Information is difficult to find, ambiguous or
imcomplete.
• Inadequate and bureaucratic change controls
prevent controlled process changes.
• Short term thinking.
• Processes from acquisition companies are not
effectively incorporated into the host organisation.

Key points
• Find and catalogue your business processes and allocate
them to a process framework. Make sure there are no missing
bits of the jigsaw.
• Use a classification and numbering scheme which clearly
defines your processes and their relationships.
• Establish a process glossary - there will be various ways of
describing the same process - need to standardise.
• Establish process ownership and accountability.
• Documented processes are tools that need to be maintained
to keep them sharp.
• Make continuous improvement a way of life, not just a slogan.

Contact details
email:
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linkedin: uk.linkedin.com/in/brianhunt
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