Many firms are just doing isolated one-time process improvements with little consideration to deploying the sustainable improvement and management of their large, cross-functional business processes. They don’t realize that the fundamental concepts underlying BPM are all about customer focus and value creation and that requires a different leadership mindset.
How can a company realistically serve its customers if it doesn’t even measure what matters most to them in a disciplined way? How can a company hope to perform for its customers if it does not put the right governance in place to assure clearly defined accountability for the flow of value-added work that crosses traditional organizational boundaries? How can a company provide its customers with enduring value if it doesn’t have a schematic that puts the customer center stage and depicts the company’s activities in serving customers?
The ongoing management of a company’s end-to-end business processes is far more difficult to establish and sustain than a simple, one-time improvement effort. Not only does process management require a fundamental shift in leadership values and beliefs, it also requires executives to work collaboratively on the definition, improvement and management of critical business processes. What’s more, it requires IT professionals to think in terms of how technology enables performance as opposed to the context of siloed applications.
Your View of Process
Are you taking too narrow a view of “process”? Simply answer the following five questions.
- Are you defining process improvement efforts largely within departmental
boundaries? - Are you taking a technical view of process?
- Do you hear people say things like “process slows us down” or “process stifles our creativity”?
- Are you launching too many improvement projects, and failing to focus on the critical few areas of performance improvement?
- Are you assigning process owners only at departmental levels and failing to improve and manage the firm’s large, cross-functional business processes?
If you answered yes three times or more, your view of process is probably too narrow. Don’t misunderstand. There’s a lot more to business success than the customer-centric, workflow view of the world represented by process management. We don’t need more “process” evangelists. Instead, what’s needed is a balanced perspective on process as a management discipline. Most firms are working hard on managing business units, managing departments and managing products or services. Isn’t it time that they also worked on learning how to improve and manage their large, cross-functional business processes which create value?
What’s involved in the transition from working on isolated one-time process improvements to deploying BPM as a management discipline? My new book, More for Less: The Power of Process Management, outlines this journey and why measuring and managing “process” is the competitive battleground of today, and how a process orientation may well be the sustainable competitive advantage for the 21st century.
