Improving Performance: How to Manage the White Space on the Organization Chart

13.6. Managing an Organization as a System

Everything we've covered up to this point addresses the first part of Phase 4, which relates to actions we might take to manage and continuously improve a single process. At some point, all of the individual Process Management efforts have to be integrated with each other and with the goals at the Organization Level. We call this integration "managing organizations as systems."

Before you begin managing your organization as a system, you should build a logical system to manage. We will illustrate the process with Computec, Inc., the organization we have used frequently as an example. Computec's top managers were concerned about the plateauing of the company's revenues and its loss of market share. They ...