Ask senior BPM professionals what “managing by process” means and you will receive a variety of responses. 

     “It becomes a strait jacket that inhibits improvement and innovation.”

     “Most organizations don’t understand managing by process…they approach it in a vacuum, disconnected from the most important goals of a company and other key practices that support a company’s strategy.”

Yet, those same experts voice common threads of agreement.

Managing by process is about:

Do you wonder why some BPM efforts seem to proceed more smoothly? Stakeholders have provided clear directions regarding improvements. The project manager has the pulse of all the activities happening on the project. The process owners and technical experts are collaborating and making changes to processes that will enable the organization to improve its operations substantially.

No this isn’t someone’s dream, and it does happen, albeit rarely!

Project members’ poor communication is one of the reasons business process efforts aren’t more successful. In fact, failure is virtually ensured if just one of these groups doesn’t communicate clearly. 

Good communicators know before they open their mouths what they want to convey. They are clear about the message they want to communicate. Accomplished communicators are specific and use words and language that resonates with their listeners.

I learned the importance of metrics and predictive analysis from an unlikely source in an odd place — the McDonald’s near my college — yes, the place with the golden arches! When I started working there, I didn’t know about Ray Kroc or his revolutionary idea about portion control. I simply wanted to earn money to cover my car and insurance payments.

Everything was measured at this store, from how long the fries were blanched to how long burgers were grilled to the amount time food was allowed to wait in the warming area. In addition to the process measurements, the store’s managers and assistant managers were responsible for recording the day, the date, the weather, special events within a ten mile radius, hourly sales from each register, hourly numbers for each item sold, and amount of items sent to waste each hour.

Perhaps you recall my recent article: Culture Matters. Included in the article were approaches that my colleagues and I had used over the years to support change and transformation in a variety of organizations. I had listed various approaches and the first bullet in that article was:

Over the last year much of my thinking and conversations with colleagues have involved an examination of corporate culture and how it affects various initiatives and attempts to make organizational changes. Enter “corporate culture” in a search engine and you see millions of links to classes, articles, academic papers. All of them discussing, explaining, or positing about corporate culture.

What do can you do when process improvement is needed and there is no executive sponsor available?

As business process management understanding matures within organizations, new challenges will arise. Sometimes it helps to know how other disciplines have addressed similar issues as it avoids the “reinventing the wheel” syndrome. For the last decade forward thinking organizations have conducted reviews of their business processes and taken steps to streamline them, i.e., minimize the “handoffs” between business units. For publicly traded companies, Sarbanes-Oxley has increased the complexity of business processes and prevented the streamlining of certain processes.