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Aligning Business Process Performance to Business Strategy
In 2006 the Babson Process Management Research Center defined Strategic Alignment as the continual tight linkage of organizational priorities and enterprise processes, enabling achievement of business goals. Phrased differently this means linking strategy goals to operational goals and linking operational goals to process goals. This equates to defining a method for improving alignment among the organization’s performance measures, strategic plans, improvement projects, and budgets. It assumes that the organization employs a method for defining its business strategy such as a Balanced Scorecard (BSC). Using the BSC as an example one must first examine it to determine how BPM can be integrated into the BSC approach. BPM specifically focuses on improving the Internal Quadrant of the BSC. The Balanced Scorecard approach does the following:
Establishing a Business Architecture Practice: A Practical Approach
Once business architecture gains enough traction within an organization, it is important to formalize the practice. Having clarity of purpose, structure and intention for business architecture activities ensures that the team functions efficiently, is appropriately recognized, and can scale to meet the needs of the organization.
As a business architecture practice matures, the value it can deliver increases in strategic nature, scope and complexity. Establishing a successful, sustainable business architecture practice is a journey which takes time, particularly for large organizations. This article provides a practical perspective on how to establish and mature a practice over time considering the realities which many organizations face.
A Common Reality
Demonstrating the Value of Business Architecture before Determining a Business Architecture Tool
State of the Practice
As Business Architecture emerges as an Agile business practice, practitioners are still struggling to demonstrate how valuable their unique perspectives and modeling efforts are inside their organizations. Many practitioners address this by spending their initial efforts crafting titles, defining governance, and searching for software to create and maintain highly detailed capability models. While organization, charters, and tools are vital to success, they are irrelevant if there is no team to govern or customer willing to listen to your business research insights. An obsession with detailed capability models or enforcing documentation standards without taking the time to understand culture and adoption, will end up being counterproductive. This approach often frustrates our customers, slows the overall adoption of the practice, and alienates us individually from the business.
Business Analysis Paralysis
10 Steps to Becoming an Agile Business Analyst (Part 1)
10 proven approaches for transitioning from a traditional business analyst role to an Agile business analyst role (Part 1 of 2)
Making the switch from traditional software development approaches to Agile methods can be a challenge for any IT professional but it is especially challenging for business analysts. Although there are thousands of resources available to guide Agile teams, relatively few of them are written specifically to answer the Agile business analysts’ most common questions:
- What is my role on the Agile development team?
- What is the most effective way for me to work with Product Owners?
- How do I make a smooth transition from writing detailed requirements specifications to crafting succinct and powerful user stories?
And, most important, how do I get started?
The Politically Savvy Business Architect: Lessons from the Field
When people ask me what I do for a living I often joke that I manage chaos and keep people aligned. In other words, I deal with the politics that plague every organization. It feels like I spend the majority of my time clarifying what was actually said, convincing people that they agree with each other, and just trying to keep things moving forward. Some refer to this as herding cats. A key skill for a business architect is political savviness, meaning the ability to successfully get things done in a maze of egos, competing priorities, and organizational bedlam. So how do you develop political savviness? Let’s look at this from two different perspectives.
Science
The Digitization Agenda
Digital Freedom
The world has changed. Mobile devices combined with cloud apps have freed us from the traditional 9-5 commute to an office. “At work” is an activity and no longer a location or time in the day. This is explored in a recent article “Daddy are you still at work“.
And that change has happened in the last 5 years. It is a digital revolution, rather than evolution.
I am sitting under an umbrella outside a Peets Coffee shop on my super-light Macbook connected to free wifi with access to all my apps and content through a browser – on a public holiday.
I can buy almost anything online and get it delivered the next day. I can stay in touch to friends, family and work colleagues no matter where in the world they live. It is easy to connect and collaborate.
As-Is Modeling is Over-Rated
Most process design methodologies start by modeling the As-Is processes before proceeding to define the To-Be processes. In our experience, many projects spend more time than is necessary modeling the As-Is, when they should be working towards the future. Time and resources spent modeling the As-Is delay the delivery of the final project, and should only be done to the extent that they add value. In this article, we will discuss the purpose of as-is modeling, common pitfalls which lead to excessive effort and concrete guidance on how to improve results with less effort and expense. While studying, current practices can be valuable, the current process must be flawed or you wouldn’t be replacing it. The last thing you want to do is replicate the flaws of the existing solution.
Why do As-Is Modeling
Once Again: Process Work is Strategic Work
A question that forever nags at thinkers and practitioners of BPM is its relationship to strategy. In a recent book entitled Questioning BPM?*, one of 15 questions explored in the book was “Is BPM a strategic tool?” Eleven authors agree there is, or should be, a strong relationship.
The most common viewpoint among them is that BPM is necessary to an organization’s ability to execute its strategies. No matter what the strategy is or how it came into being, it simply sits on a shelf gathering dust unless there are actions taken to carry it out. And as soon as you enter the realm of action, an organization’s business processes are essential in executing the strategic intent. To carry out a corporate-wide strategy necessitates doing so through a company’s large-scale end-to-end processes, and that in turn requires recognizing, designing and managing those processes, which is the essence of BPM.
Business Architects Are Data Scientists
A 2015 McKinsey report states that advanced analytics will be used three times more often in 2020 than today. That’s just 4 years from now. The report also states that insight-driven companies out-perform peers. But the trick lies in not just distinguishing relevant from irrelevant data or translating these data into insights. Those are simply “table stakes” and companies are expected to do those activities well at a minimum. What separates the achievers from their peers is their ability to translate these insights into “impactful frontline actions.”
We have the same goal as data scientists to provide actionable insights. We often hear this mantra of “actionable insights” from business architects. If not, you should familiarize yourself with this term right away. “Actionable insights,” we shall mutter with every breath we take.
Managing a Process Innovation Portfolio
Process improvement efforts have historically aimed at improving the quality, increasing the throughput, reducing the cost, or improving the predictability of a major process. Today though a considerable number of process thought leaders are pushing process improvement theories and practices into new areas – most prominently strategic planning. Processes represent the unique way an enterprise creates value for consumers. It follows that by adjusting an enterprise’s processes, products can be adjusted to deliver enhanced value for a consumer. By leveraging this direct relationship, an enterprise can define its strategic intentions in terms of its plans to adjust processes. This approach forges a solid link between strategic intentions and the eventual outputs.
5 Questions to Ask Before Adopting Agile
Tell me if this sounds familiar…
We have a mission critical project coming up and after putting together the requirements document we were told that the 2 years the project was going to take to complete is too long. But wait! I heard that Agile delivers projects in a much faster timeframe. All we have to do is change our process to something called Scrum; then we will get what we want in 6 months instead of 2 years!
Let’s do it!
Slow down…before we go invest stock in sticky notes, blue painters tape and index cards, there are a few questions we should consider to see if we are ready to embark on our Agile journey.
1) Do we have anyone internal to our organization now who has decent experience with Agile?
Taking Operational Excellence to the Next Level
Best in class companies understand that Operational Excellence (Op Ex) is the means to an end and not an end in itself. Yet, many organizations dedicated to Op Ex focus mostly on assuring that the core skills of Lean and Six Sigma are in place and that people understand work as a process. In some cases, companies choose to deploy Op Ex along departmental lines and fail to take full advantage of removing the non-value added steps residing in cross functional handoffs. While building the foundation for Op Ex is important, it’s not enough on its own. A company intent on taking Op Ex to the next level may wish to consider the following four tactics.
Real Business Architecture in Action© Part 4 of 4
This is the fourth and final article in a 4-part series of articles on architecture presented by the BAInstitiute. If the reader has not read the previous three articles in this series, the reader is encouraged to begin the series in its proper sequence.
The Business Architect Collaborator
Business architects don’t control large budgets nor do they command large groups of people. With little money and less authority, business architects’ success hinges on their ability to create value through others. In pursuit of that goal many business architects attempt to implement governance mechanisms with little success. One of the biggest lies analysts and other BA pundits tell us is that governance is a best practice. A best practice is something that works for a significant number of people in a wide variety of circumstances. Given that business architecture governance is something tried by a large number of people with little success, maybe we should call it a worst practice. Gaining senior level support in hopes they will direct others to follow our lead isn’t much better. Successful business architects recognize that collaboration is a key element in reaching their goals.
Business architects collaborate with a wide group of people:
3 Reasons Rules Architects Are Adopting Decision Modeling
Rules Architects are increasingly using decision modeling as part of their business rules management system (BRMS) implementations. This article will explore three key benefits of using decision modeling and a BRMS.
- Business Engagement
- Expanded Traceability and Impact Analysis
- Using agile not waterfall to write the rules
Report Series: Business Architecture Tools of the Trade
About the Report Series: Business Architecture Tools of the Trade (BATT)
BAInsitute.org has commissioned this one-of-a-kind report series to provide practitioners with the perspectives they need to understand the tools landscape.
BATT Overview Report: Determining the Right Business Architecture Software for Your Journey
This Business Architecture Tools of the Trade (BATT) overview report will provide guidance in selecting the right tool for the right job by categorizing and matching tools to practice segments within your organization.
This Report:
Collaborate Around Processes
Most of us see a business application (say an HR system) and email or any other collaborative application like Sharepoint as totally separate systems, although we use both to get our work done. One reason could be that the two applications are used at different times for different purposes- for example; a company might see email as essential but not invest in an HR application until they reach a certain size.
Using BPM to Meet Today’s Supply Chain Challenges
In today’s demanding business environment that prioritizes flexibility, speed, quality, efficiency, effectiveness and innovation, a competitive supply chain strategy and its operational execution is critical. Business Process Management (BPM) helps an enterprise achieve these characteristics in its supply chain strategy – and in its execution of that strategy. Applying the BPM discipline achieves process improvements that lead to organizational performance improvements – such as a Supply Chain.
Supply Chain & Logistics Challenges
Business Architecture: From Startup to Sustainability
In this webcast, Jeff will pinpoint the critical challenges of starting a business architecture practice and identify the specific steps you can take to move from startup to sustainability. Jeff will talk about the current state of the business architecture profession, roadblocks to avoid and best practices from successful business architecture practices.
