Patrick Dowdle is the Program Director of the ATI/CAM-I Process Based Management (PBM) Program, which is conducting leading edge research in Process Based Management, including the recently published CAM-I book, “Process Based Management: A Foundation Of Business Excellence.” He is also the President and a Process Architect with Process Advantage, which focuses on helping organizations improve customers services.
Pat Dowdle’s main message is about Process Based Management (PBM), which is different from BPM. PBM is about how businesses supply services and products to customers. The problem, according to Dowdle, is that most organizations do not understand or manage their processes, or they do so in isolation so they don’t really manage their products and services. Dowdle maintains that it isn’t enough to have a BPM initiative. If you don’t understand process-based management, your BPM effort will probably fail.
Process Based Management focuses on:
- Promoting a process-based culture
- Managing end-to-end business processes to continuously improve cost, time and quality of products and services delivered to customers
- Understanding and meeting customer expectations
- Integrating diverse initiatives into a process-oriented approach
- Linking incentives and compensation to process performance
One of the key findings of the case studies was that executive engagement and commitment is critical. Process-based management needs to be part of the management philosophy of the organization. A mindset shift is required. There needs to be a different way of looking at how work is performed, how employees are managed, and how performance is measured. The traditional view of management is top-down, with separate silos of information and departments. The process-based view shows the processes running across the organization.
Process owners are required at a high level because they have a key role in the process infrastructure. PBM needs to be embedded in the strategy so that it becomes more than just another initiative. It affects the focus of the organization. There even needs to be a process for process-based management because this defines the direction of all the initiatives.
Integration of the initiatives is crucial for success. There are many different initiatives and there is always competition for resources. Aligning all the initiatives gets them moving in the same direction.
There are a lot of management tools available now. Dowdle showed a list of twenty-five including ABM, CRM, TQM, outsourcing, reengineering, core competencies, strategic planning and many others. The problem is choosing the right tools for your organization’s specific needs.
PBM has multiple entry points because of various business conditions and the different initiatives that are in place. The size of the organization does not matter, although the complexity increases with size.
The PBM shift requires a long term perspective. There is a basic and fundamental change in how work is performed and how the organization will be managed. It requires the organization to stay focused.
Process performance measures are critical because:
- If you can’t measure it, you can’t manage it
- Tell me how you will measure my performance, I will tell you how I will behave
- Teams need to be involved in developing measures
Process maturity and Metric maturity need to be synchronized because as processes mature, the measures must evolve. Measures have to be developed to manage and monitor the process and how well it is doing.
According to Dowdle, this is all leading toward:
- The process based management loop provides a process for evaluating implementation progress
- The philosophy of process based management will continue to evolve as organizations become more process-centered
The next step is to create a process based management program and an implementation framework for process-based management that includes a roadmap, assessment, training, and certification.
