Introduction:

You’ve just been asked by your boss to develop and implement a productivity program to reduce waste and improve quality. Several of the executives are retrenching into a defensive posture: preserve cash, freeze discretionary spending, cut operating budgets X% across the board, accelerate early retirements, layoffs, and sell off non-core assets. Others are advocating more investment in R&D, rolling out new products / services, and even rethinking the business model. Your company’s livelihood is at stake. The expectations for you personally are even higher.

After 3 decades of Total Quality Management, Process Reengineering, Lean, Six Sigma and now Business Process Management, it is mind boggling to observe that only a few companies have an excellent process Governance in place and consistently manage their processes.

It is certainly valid to ask ourselves why we are not doing better and what can we do to remediate to the situation. The literature from the ABPMP BPM CBOK^TM to the different Gartner reports and our understanding of process ownership and governance has certainly improved tremendously over the last 5 years and yet we still count only a few companies that manage by process year after year.

After pondering the question for a while here are a few thoughts on the question and some suggestions on how to approach Governance and Ownership in a way that can lead to better results and a sustainable process culture.

There are few business professionals today who do not know what Business Process Management is or do not have, at least a general idea of what it’s about. The number of articles and papers being written about BPM has increased at a rapid pace over the past five years to the point one cannot open a business magazine or newsletter without some reference to the tools and technologies that are available to make your organization truly process-centric.

Much of the discussion about collaborative methodologies like Lean, Agile and Design Build has, in the past been about creating continuous flow of value, team dynamics, technical practices and even the project management techniques required to get effective and acceptable products delivered and/or deployed. What teams in all environments quickly find out, however, is they are dependent on other organizational dynamics outside their purview, like securing customer involvement, issue escalation, resource allocation, even facility management becomes important.

BPMN 2.0 is almost here.  If all goes as planned, it will be voted on by OMG members in June. Assuming it passes, that doesn’t mean BPMN 2.0 is officially adopted and available in commercial tools, just that it has entered the “finalization” phase when tool vendors can start building it in. Even though the diagram notation of BPMN 2.0 appears little changed from previous versions, it represents a big step forward.