Articles

The Benefit of Cultivating a Process Perspective

Author(s):

David Hamme

Managing Director, Ephesus Consulting

For Six Sigma, Lean, Reengineering and other process practitioners, it is in our nature to adopt what I label a process perspective. Whether consciously or subconsciously, we think in process terms. Every activity is a series of steps and we cannot help but introduce improvements with the passage of time. This pattern of behavior often transcends our work life… and enters into our personal life – sometimes to the chagrin of our family members.

How to Improve Customer Satisfaction with Government Services

Author(s):

Ken Mullins

Senior Principal, MITRE Corporation

“Government managers must learn from what is working in the private sector and apply these best practices to deliver services better, faster, and at lower cost.” – Barack Obama (upon releasing Executive Order 13571–Streamlining Service Delivery and Improving Customer Service)

The Role of Conflict Resolution in Implementing Process Change

Author(s):

Renée Gendron

Owner, Vitae Dynamics Inc.

Corinne was at first very pleased to have been asked to implement a process change. She was the one who first identified a problem in operations and who suggested a few modifications to the procedure. After raising the matter several times over many months with senior executives, she finally received the go-ahead to make the necessary changes.

As Corrinne approached her colleagues with the idea of changing the process, she was at first greeted with support. Her work environment was generally professional and courteous. But the more Corrinne engaged her coworkers about the idea of changing a process, the more subtle the pushback she received. Confused, Corrinne pressed on with figuring out a way to bring the different departments together to have a conversation about changing the process.

Collaboration is Not a Four Letter Word

Author(s):

Brian Stucky

Managing Director, Business Decision Management, Allegiance Advisory Group

Collaboration and agility have always been noted as key benefits of business rule systems – collaborate and be agile! This has typically been discussed in terms of rule management – enabling business user control over an established rule base. But this often overlooks how we first get to a baseline rule base.

Ten Steps To Design A Powerful Business Architecture Practice

Author(s):

Jeff Scott

President, Business Innovation Partners

Most new business architecture teams jump right into defining business architecture models and frameworks. They spend incredibly little time defining the practice itself, what they want it to be, and how they are going to drive results. Yet this is where the challenge is. I rarely see an enterprise or business architecture team that can’t produce great architecture; but I see many that can’t create a successful practice.

Here are ten steps every business architecture team should take to ensure long-term success.

Process Ownership

Author(s):

Andrew Spanyi

Faculty Member, DBizInstitute.org and Managing Director, Spanyi International

The late, great Yogi Berra once said, “Baseball is 90% mental and the other half is physical.” We could say something similar – “process ownership is ninety percent leadership and the other half is management.”

Process ownership was arguably first described by Dr. Geary Rummler and Mr. Alan Brache , in their book ,Improving Performance: How to Manage the White Space on the Organization Chart in 1990. They described the role of process owners as one which intended to “oversee the cross-functional performance of a process.” Note that it did not attempt to “represent a second organizational structure” – instead it was described as a role that emphasized collaboration across organizational boundaries.

The Life Cycle of BPM Centers of Excellence – Part 2

Author(s):

Shelley Sweet

Faculty Member, BPMInstitute.org and President, i4 Process

In Part 1, I discussed how one BPM Center of Excellence (COE) started as a centralized organization and then after 2 years moved some of the BPM Practitioners into specific operational units and disbanded the centralized group. Part 2 continues with the life cycle of this use case in its second stage, ‘decentralization’ and then continues to a third stage.

Building the Modern Business Architecture, Decision by Decision

Author(s):

Gagan Saxena

VP Consulting & Principal Consultant, Decisions Management Solutions

How your organization makes decisions drives the rest of the business environment – processes, events, data and the org-chart. A decision-centric view of Business Architecture is an essential organizing principle to deal with the data-driven, knowledge-based economy of the times.

First, clarify the ‘modern’ view on Business Architecture

There is no generally accepted definition or common understanding of business architecture because it is essentially a set of ‘views’, ‘perspectives’ or ‘lenses’ that consider how a business operates. Some views are common, like a process-based view – and others not as much, like an event-based view. The choice of business architecture views to be created and managed is generally dependent on current business priorities or concerns. And this practical approach to business architecture is certainly appropriate and prudent.

How Do I Know This Is The Right Process?

Author(s):

Glenn Smith

President, BPMPros LLC

If you have been involved in very many BPM projects you have inevitably seen some which progressed through the entire development lifecycle with no major warning signs only to fail when put into production. They fail because the delivered system does not solve the problem which the business needs solved. They typically go through a complete lifecycle with verification at each stage. The Business writes its requirements. Business Analysts turn these into a functional requirements document, approved by the business. The development team creates then implements designs and finally QA tests the system and verifies that it satisfies the documented requirements. Yet in spite of all of this, the resulting system is not usable for its intended purpose.

Eliminating the Strategy Execution Gap with Business Process Management

Author(s):

David Hamme

Managing Director, Ephesus Consulting

In today’s corporate circles, strategic planning and its execution are commonly identified as two separate endeavors – one is built in the boardroom, the other completed at the ground floor of the business. Leaders routinely express frustration about what is termed the strategic execution gap – how the strategy they created is rarely executed smoothly or as it was intended. At the ground level where the strategy is to be deployed, employees complain that the strategy is so vague as to be unactionable or else it is altogether misdirected. The result of such failures is strategic stagnation and lost opportunities to gain market share. While a host of theories have been proposed as to how to minimize the strategy execution gap, I believe the best approach is to eliminate it all together – to make strategic planning and execution a concretely connected endeavor using a Business Process Management toolset.