Getting Honest Data
During a current state audit, it's crucial that you have the most accurate, up-to-date picture of how a process, department, or business unit actually works, and how it interacts with other stakeholders in the process. The struggle I have seen companies run into time and time again is that when you ask people how things work, they usually tell you how they're supposed to work, say "it varies", list out the problems/improvements without explaining the process, or simply misrepresent what is occuring. Getting to the truth of how things are working currently requires a combination of approaches; I've outlined a few below for you to try out for yourself.
Let's talk quickly about why people often fail to give an accurate depiction of the day-to-day operations. At its root, usually one of the following:
a fear of judgement or blame
loyalty to colleagues who had a hand in building the system
uncertainty about whether it's okay to say something critical
strong opinions about what's wrong without a desire for a secondary analysis
too little experience with the system to see the issues
too much experience with the system and the dysfunction has become the norm
One way to head off these problems in general is to prompt each conversation with a reminder that this is a communal effort to find improvements that help employees and the company as a whole, and it is not a process designed to point blame or find scapegoats. However, some combination of the below techniques often helps in ensuring an accurate representation of the current process.
Technique #1: Interviewing Across Levels and Tenure
Two "demographic" splits often cause disparate views of process. One is level, with leadership seeing strategy, frontline workers seeing reality, and middle management landing somewhere between the two. The other is tenure, with the reasoning behind certain processes getting morphed over time like a giant game of telephone. Finding a good mix of personnel to discuss with and cross-referencing what they perceive is a great way to strip away a lot of the bias that different roles may provide. Always interview the two people closest to the work, especially the one that has been doing it for the longest, and at least one person who is in a middle management role that understands what the strategy and overall goals for the department or process are. While the person closest to the work almost always has the most useful information, understanding the why behind the process can sometimes take a bigger picture perspective.
Technique #2: Ask About Workarounds and Edge Cases, Not Problems
After you get an initial walkthrough of the process, the usual instinct is to ask "what's broken?". This can put people on the defensive, so I find that asking about workarounds often works better. For instance, "When X hurdle (that they mentioned during the initial walkthrough) occurs, how do you get around it? Does anyone else need to get involved?", or "Walk me through what you do when Y doesn't work the way it's supposed to", or "For Z edge case, what changes about the process?". Workarounds and edge cases are maps to dysfunction - as is often quoted, 20% of situations usually cause 80% of problems, so follow where those situations lead. Every informal workaround or edge case represents a place where the official system failed. While I have some cautionary tales about overdeveloping the future state process due to edge cases, for now in the analysis phase we really want to discover every way the system can break.
Technique #3: Observe and Shadow
While interviews can reveal a lot, there is always something that people forget to mention, either because it is so ingrained that they don't think anything of it, or simply because it falls outside of the scope of questions you asked. Everyone has a preference for shadowing before, after, or throughout the interview process. Usually I prefer to blend it into the interview process, especially on larger projects where there is a significant amount to cover and I like having the interview on the relevant segment occur close to the shadowing session. Sometimes in departments with particularly entrenched or defensive work cultures, I'll shadow first, to avoid as much of that defensiveness as possible. No matter when you observe or shadow, whether that be sitting in a handoff meeting, a daily standup, a client onboarding call, a sales pitch, a manufacturing process, or a different process, the gap between what people describe and what you observe is almost always instructive.
Technique #4: Make It Safe
As I said at the beginning, giving people an environment where it feels okay to be honest and critical is key. Diving a little deeper into that, some techniques that can assist in that, besides prompting every conversation, are: a general memo that the goal is to understand the system, not evaluate the people; anonymization where appropriate in reporting; private follow-ups with people who seemed like they were holding back or uncomfortable saying something in a group setting; and finding some low hanging fruit to take action on during the evaluation process before even moving to a future state map. The last one is really effective in workforces where people feel like nothing will change because it never has before. What you do with the information that people give you determines how much more they're willing to share.
Technique #5: Triangulate Data
The best way to avoid bias in this process is to take everything with a grain of salt. Look for (usually) a minimum of three accounts that align. These can be across different shadow sessions or interviews, but look for at least 3 people that align on what actually happens. In very small departments, this number can be lowered, and usually you want to adhere to what the person who is closest to the work believes. In short, look for patterns, both in what is said / observed, as well as what people avoid talking about or leave vague.
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The quality of a current state map is directly proportional to the quality of the information that goes into it. Getting data is a combination of creating a safe environment, assuming that all individual statements carry some degree of bias, observing the process in action as a supplement to interviewing personnel, and cross-referencing all that data at the end to come to at least a reasonable degree of accuracy within the current state map.
