Shared services is a terrible idea in organisation 1/
Shared services, separated from value creation, tend immediately to focus on process 2/
Often this process is designed not to replace or minimise the bureaucratic work, but to pass it back to the people in the org for whose benefit shared services were set up — you end up doing their work on forms they have prepared for you 3/
Shared services, separated from value creation, are often incapable of relating to or offering practical solutions to specific on-the-ground issues and opportunities, and instead can propose only impractical ‘solutions’ to drive compliance to rules based on exceptions 4/
Shared services are experienced by users as impractical, unhelpful, aloof, impersonal, unempathetic, soulless — and this happens very quickly when shared services are created 5/
Shared services quickly come to have skin in nobody’s game therefore no incentive to add real value, just demand compliance with value-destroying rules 6/
And this happens very quickly — within months of shared services being formed 7/
Centralised shared services are dehumanised and dehumanising for users — disabled staff are treated as risks to be managed rather than as talent to be nurtured 8/
New business ventures, new teams are treated with annoyance as anomalies, as inconsiderate and non-compliant challenges to the system, as ‘extra work’ 9/
Shared services can very quickly become incapable of adding value or enabling the business, and as they do so they demand greater compliance to exception-based rules as their raison d’être 10/
So really troubling to see ‘change and improvement’ being defined as a ‘function’ and inserted in the ‘portfolio’ of centralised shared services — imagine ‘change’ as a remote, bureaucratic, process-centric, non-value-adding, unempathetic and dehumanising compliance junky? Fin/
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