Jocelyne received angry stares from both Keith and Arneil. Jocelyne had wanted to improve their production process to be more nimble and responsive to changing product needs. Both Keith and Arneil were convinced that their operations were fine the way they were. Sales were steady and in a weak economic environment that was an accomplishment. For her part Jocelyne was concerned that they wouldn’t be able to pivot quickly enough to capitalise on changing markets. The discussion went round and round until tempers flared and the business unit’s ability to function as a team crumbled. They were stuck at the analysis phase as some members of the team didn’t recognise that there was a need to improve the process. 

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:

So often I see organizational change management as a part of the implementation plan for putting the recommendations and new design of a Business Process Improvement project (BPI) into operation in a company.  It should be there, but it needs to start sooo much earlier.  In fact it needs to start with the first phase of a BPI project- namely in developing the charter and doing Process Discovery and Modeling.

A must read for business analysts, business process analysts, business process managers,  business process designers and business architects.

This BPM Salary Survey report outlines a regional comparison across the USA, Canada and EMEA (Europe, Middle East and Africa). It is based upon the data collected in the BPM 2015 Salary Survey conducted by BPMInstitute.org which represented the first such survey and formed the baseline for our future research in this area.

What is the value proposition of BPM and how do I communicate to my senior leadership team is one of the most frequently asked questions on BPM.

In answering this question, the first order of priority is to ensure that people in the organization have a common shared understanding of BPM. In our view, BPM is not just modeling processes, it’s not just launching improvement projects, and it’s not just monitoring process performance for continuous improvement.

Instead, it is all three of these – in other words, the modeling, AND the improvement AND the management of the large cross functional processes in the firm.

Once, a shared understanding of the definition of BPM is achieved, it is then possible to outline the approach, benefits and pitfalls to avoid in BPM to demonstrate the value it can provide.

Some of the key principles and the general approach in BPM are outlined in Table 1 below: