13 Questions a Global Process Owner Needs to Ask

Each day we hear of a new recruit to the ranks of Global Process Ownership. Welcome! You have joined a group of professionals keen to use their special blend of subject matter expertise, change management acumen, business awareness and internal connections to realize improvements.

This article is designed to help you zero in on questions you should be asking yourself, those around you, and the business.

1. What is the vision of the role? If this hasn’t been spelled out, meet with your customers. They need to tell you what the scope of the role looks like, from their perspective, and what their ambition is, that you can help enable.
    
2. If you have an engineering function, be sure you are not duplicating roles. Have you connected with that team to see where the lines of responsibility are?
    
3. Is your remit end to end? If not, why not? One good argument against it concerns scale. But if you are not a huge organization, there are few viable arguments to keep a GPO functionally focused.
    
4. How is your performance and effectiveness measured? Do you have a GPO scorecard? If so, to what degree does it mirror, connect with, or differ from the shared services scorecard?
    
5. What is the GPO’s prioritization? And are you allowed to make this determination? It’s important to have the head space to strategize on this, and not be in a constant mode of delivery/reactiveness.
    
6. How are you gathering customer feedback – what’s your method and what’s your sample size? Do you use the same sample every time, so you have a consistent benchmark? And who is your customer – the payer, the user, or both? Many GPOs are measured on customer satisfaction. The best way to determine what features a customer should score you on, is to ask the customer to choose the criteria.
    
7. How involved in operations are you? Some GPOs are deeply involved. This may work for you so long as significant time is spent designing process improvement and overseeing its adoption. It’s a hard balance, though. The operations part will always get your attention first as it’s usually urgent but not important. Process improvement is conversely very important, but not always urgent. Being a GPO who's running operations will mean improvement programs will be relegated to evenings and weekends, and this will prove an inadequate investment.
    
8. To what degree do you align with company strategy? Indeed, how well do you even know company strategy? You will need to get close to the executive team, and be prepared to educate them on your role, ask them informed and incisive questions on their objectives, and use their answers to help you prioritize your projects.
    
9. How should you best liaise with your outsourcing partner? How regularly should you connect, and should you have the same metrics, KPIs and scorecard?
    
10. What is the ideal structure for governing change requests? Does this structure exist today? If not, how can you promote it, so it is adopted? What does the flow of decision making look like? To what degree are you, the GPO, empowered to stop, or mandate, a program?
     
11.  What’s your access to budget? If a GPO has goals and objectives, budget – or access to budget – is crucial.
     
12. How do you work with your Project Management Office? Do they report into you on your projects? If not, what is the extent of your influence to get projects delivered?
     
13. To what extent do you make use of tools like league tables or activity based pricing to drive process compliancy? Some call it the good guy list and others the bad boy list – either way, league tables capturing, for example, PO compliance, can prove to be highly effective.

I invite you to add to the list by emailing Susie.west@sharedserviceslink.com with other questions GPOs should ask themselves. We will add your question, and cite you