Cap and Trade - In Process Management

What does cap and trade have to do with process management? Recently, I was reading an interesting article about cap and trade for carbon in the eco-debates. And, whether you are for or against it, there, I started to think about how useful it could be in our workplace and with our customers.

The “cap” part is really like a constraint. It can be imposed on us by customers (we want x in y days) or by our own internal limits (resources, automation, knowledge). The “trade” part is exchanging available resources to help us meet the cap.

In todays environment, when companies are laying off workers, customers,looking for greater value in everything, are going to place even more demands on the business. If we can understand what those demands are, develop a method to measure them and understand and define our own internal constraints, then we can create process based upon roles, rather than people, look to see where available resources are, leverage those resources to make sure our constraints are working at their maximum potential. Then, when our internal constraints are struggling to meet the cap, we should elevate the constraint so that it can meet that cap… assign more resources to the same roles.

So, to do this, we need to understand what caps are imposed, what constraints we have internally, what our roles need to be to leverage those constraints to meet those caps and the exchange roles within the organization so that our most constrained points work toward meeting the caps. When companies are laying off more workers, roles and processes need to be better disciplined so that customers don’t go elsewhere.