I work in a very large, albeit fairly newly formed, organisation. As a result,we have fairly immature processes - some of which were put in place during crisis mode as we exploded in size and worked to meet our initial product launch deadline. Think in terms of: lots of critical operations outsourced or lay with external vendors, and most departments have doubled or even tripled in the space of a year, most in-house staff tenure is under a year, etc. At this employer, every department is set up on a supply line (P&L) basis.
The problems resulting from our huge expansion and immature processes (at all levels) are numerous.
Low morale has been highlighted as a recognised issue at the last staff update (as an area management will be focusing on), and turnover/having to resort to contractors to plug staffing gaps is noticeably worse than the industry norm.
One of the sources of some of the bigger issues is that everyone is working in silos - I've heard this flung at every employer I've worked at, but here it's scarily, scarily so. Different departments have wildly different ways of doing things, creating lots of busy work, stepping on each others toes, missed opportunities, and a bit of a blame culture as people defensively put up barriers around their "part" of the business unit.
An example of this from my own department: Team A needs ad hoc, complex, manually produced reports to feed into their operations reporting. This is created by Team B. In turn, the actual raw data is obtained from Team C. Except Team A, B and C all present the data in different ways, meaning throughout the delivery pipeline, humans have to spend a lot of time translating the data/manipulating it but adding no real value to the end consumer of the report (Team A). It also introduces significant potential for error. I can't provide an actual example without outing myself, as it's so specialised - but think of it in terms of Team A working on £s, Team B working in Euros, and Team C working in $s - yet the figure Team A cares about is the relative cost of products, not their actual value - and all this pointless work is done in converting the currency values as each team does their "bit".
Another example - today I found out that a department next to mine has hired specialised training for their team in something, as a "new sort of training we could offer in the company"... yet I know another department on the floor above us had something similar done a month ago, and there were places available, because a friend of mine asked if I'd like to go along to fill up bums on seats!
Another example, when Purchase Orders get raised, we log them in 6 (yes, six!) different systems. As a result, people try and take shortcuts, opening up larger ones than they need ("to use the leftovers the next time I need one for that supply line"), which ties up funds for weeks. (It's not against the rules, it's just bad practice as budgets look spent but they're not.)
I could name so many inefficiencies at this company, and I'd like to do something about them. At the moment, everyone's so busy doing their "actual" job that I don't see anyone really making progress in sorting out these types of company-wide inefficiencies. I don't even know if it's anyone's role to be focusing on sorting out these types of things, cross-teams/cross-functions... as a Middle Manager myself, I don't see anyone obvious other than Senior Managers, who are so far removed from the ground work that they probably wouldn't know about half of them if you asked.
So, I was thinking about this on the train home this evening. Normally I guess this sort of thing would be highlighted by super expensive Management Consultants (from what little I know of them), but surely there are organisations that have.. well, overarching business improvement staff?
Does anyone know if such a role exists? Do you have any experience of this sort of thing in your organisation? What would they be called? Internal consultants of some sort? Or do we just have bad Senior Management and I'm expecting too little of them?
Senior Management have made it clear that they want to reduce staff turnover, increase morale, reduce "working in silos", increase productivity, and I see this as a real gap in the company I'm in.
I've no idea if I'd even want to do such a role even if anyone listened to my suggestion.. but how would you go about proposing this sort of thing? My own line manager is a "get in a 9am, watch the clock, out the door by 5" type woman (nice but just not interested in making waves), so should I go to her boss (the MD!)? Or should I put together some sort of proposal documentation and set up a meeting to run through it with HR?
Basically, I think I see this gap but I don't know where to take it :( Or even if it's a good idea - because surely they'd have already tasked someone with these sort of "efficiency" tasks across departments - it must be someone's job already here?