One of the key insights behind defining the processes and ensuring their successful execution in India is to first and foremost, define what exceptions to the process will be and how will exceptions be made.
There is so much anxiety amongst Indian managers about the process, of it being some kind of a bureaucracy..... designed to curb their independence or restrict their agility or decision making. This contributes to a lot of inertia toward adopting processes and ensuring compliance.
It reminds everyone of the Indian bureaucratic red tape uses the processes and policies to harass them and extract bribes/delay work.
So for example, if you are defining a loan approval process in a bank... the loan processing team has to do the following due diligence to process a loan...you also need to define which criteria maybe waived off if the seniors approved it, or which criteria can be waived off for a certain type of client....
SME Clients often boast off the fact that their cheque was passed, without any balance in the bank account, by the bank manager and the bank manager personally came to collect cash at 830 PM , after office hours from them.
In certain types of businesses it is important to budget/allow for exceptions. Say if you are an IT service provider, and suddenly your client wants more bandwidth due to unexpected surge in traffic on their website...you would have to allow the department head to approve this request , ad-hoc...without following the established process.
An important insight is how some top clients/customers derive pleasure from their ability to circumvent/violate processes. And this feudal attitude is not going away in a hurry. The culture of corruption and exercising power by position/wealth is a fairly familiar norm amongst influential Indians . Since they can get away , literally from murder in doing so ...Indians expect exceptions to be made.
So for the sake of organizational buy-in, customer responsiveness and in some case ego-massage of some high value customers...organizations must define exceptions to their process. They must also define how to regularize these exceptions, or bring them back into the process fold, after a defined time period. Regularizing an exception is really critical so that these exceptions do not tend to become the rule.
For example, one may waive off certain requirements and sanction band-width immediately to the website client but after a day/week, the client must sign off on a different subscription plan. Or that the cheques may be passed without funds on the discretion of bank manager for top 10 clients, but they have to be accounted for with a cash deposit on the same day...
There is so much anxiety amongst Indian managers about the process, of it being some kind of a bureaucracy..... designed to curb their independence or restrict their agility or decision making. This contributes to a lot of inertia toward adopting processes and ensuring compliance.
It reminds everyone of the Indian bureaucratic red tape uses the processes and policies to harass them and extract bribes/delay work.
So for example, if you are defining a loan approval process in a bank... the loan processing team has to do the following due diligence to process a loan...you also need to define which criteria maybe waived off if the seniors approved it, or which criteria can be waived off for a certain type of client....
SME Clients often boast off the fact that their cheque was passed, without any balance in the bank account, by the bank manager and the bank manager personally came to collect cash at 830 PM , after office hours from them.
In certain types of businesses it is important to budget/allow for exceptions. Say if you are an IT service provider, and suddenly your client wants more bandwidth due to unexpected surge in traffic on their website...you would have to allow the department head to approve this request , ad-hoc...without following the established process.
An important insight is how some top clients/customers derive pleasure from their ability to circumvent/violate processes. And this feudal attitude is not going away in a hurry. The culture of corruption and exercising power by position/wealth is a fairly familiar norm amongst influential Indians . Since they can get away , literally from murder in doing so ...Indians expect exceptions to be made.
So for the sake of organizational buy-in, customer responsiveness and in some case ego-massage of some high value customers...organizations must define exceptions to their process. They must also define how to regularize these exceptions, or bring them back into the process fold, after a defined time period. Regularizing an exception is really critical so that these exceptions do not tend to become the rule.
For example, one may waive off certain requirements and sanction band-width immediately to the website client but after a day/week, the client must sign off on a different subscription plan. Or that the cheques may be passed without funds on the discretion of bank manager for top 10 clients, but they have to be accounted for with a cash deposit on the same day...
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