The purpose of any process is to deliver value to customers and other stakeholders. The purpose of managing the process is to optimize the value delivered to everyone. That’s a multi-variant task to be achieved in a dynamic environment. We need a multi-variant balance of responses. We need Balanced Process Management.

More at http://bit.ly/dsOlKw.

It’s 10:15 on Monday morning and you’re alone in the elevator heading for your 10:30 meeting. As you think through your material for the meeting the lift stops and, to your surprise, the CEO joins you and presses the button for four floors below. Your meeting is five floors below.

To your even greater surprise, the CEO says “I hear that you are really keen that we take on this BPM thinking across the organisation. What’s that all about?” This is your big chance. An opportunity not to be missed. You marshal your thoughts and begin to say “Well BPM provides us with a great opportunity to del… “ Ding. “Sorry”, she says, “this is my floor – some other time perhaps”. You sink to the floor, crawl into a corner and adopt the foetal position! What a wasted opportunity. With some well chosen words you might have changed a moment of polite, if disinterested, small talk into a decisive opportunity to galvanise the CEO’s interest in BPM. If only …..

Then you wake up to the sound, not of the elevator bell, but of your alarm. It’s 6:00 am and it was all a dream.

This has been a troubling dream though. If you are to avoid being frightened of entering lifts for the rest of your life, you’ll need to polish your “elevator speech” about BPM. After all, you hope that someday the CEO will actually ask you that question. Best to be prepared.

Process thinking and doing is not something to be done by a specialist group, it should be done by everyone. It’s not something we do once a year as part of an annual planning cycle, everyone should be doing it every day. Continuous improvement means exactly that – continuous. Most changes will be quite small, occasionally they will be large. The objective is to nurture an ecosystem that is continuously and actively self-correcting. There is an important role for a central group of process specialists. Their role is not to “do process” to the rest of the organisation but to be educators, coaches, auditors and thereby support the development deep and wide process capability. We don’t want 5 process analysts, we want 5,000.

The only reason for discovering and analysing the stakeholders of a process is to find out how they measure its performance.

Modelling, analysis and presentation tools are important but they are useless without a sympathetic audience for their outputs. If you have the right mindset it’s a reasonably simple matter to choose the right toolset. The right mindset means that key stakeholders, especially senior decision makers, are convinced that process-based management is a compelling approach and that there is an urgent need to make it happen. To achieve a truly process-centric organisation you might spend 90% of your efforts on ‘mindset’ and 10% on ‘toolset’.

If process improvement projects only find the same changes any problem solving approach would discover, then what’s the point? We need to know that we’ve found the best ideas, ones that are occasionally remarkable. Process improvement and management is much more than traditional problem solving. It takes more effort, changes can be harder to implement, there will often be more resistance – in many respects the process approach is more challenging than isolated problem solving. There needs to be a return on this investment. We can’t expect it to happen every time, but, if the process approach is to have any credibility, occasionally the results of our process improvement projects need to be remarkable. Nobody is impressed by discovery of the obvious.

The essential message of Business Process Management is this: we (mainly) design, manage and reward our organisations by functional performance, yet we deliver value to customers via cross-functional processes. Getting the right balance between functional management and process delivery is at the heart of organisational performance.

Where the emphasis is on functional performance alone we create silos that optimise functional outcomes, perhaps at the expense of end-to-end process performance. Neither is organisational performance optimised by focussing on process tunnels at the expense of functional operations.

We don’t want to replace functional silos with process tunnels.

What are the most important questions in Business Process Management? The answers to which questions would let you leap towards ‘process nirvana’? Is it possible to agree a finite set of key BPM questions to guide our thinking, writing, analysis and development activities? What would those questions be? Before we worry about the answers, we should agree the questions.

[Disclosure. Since blog/forum posts that are overt marketing thinly (and often poorly) disguised as personal networking really really annoy me, let me disclose an interest in this discussion lest I commit the same crime. My company is running a seminar series in Australia in March where Andrew Spanyi, Professor Michael Rosemann and I will be addressing what we think are the key BPM questions (see list below). So I have two motivations for this post. I’d like everyone to come to our seminars so I can become fabulously wealthy and retire to some pleasant spot. Thank you. Failing that, I’d also like to work with lots of people to see if we can agree a definitive list of The Tough BPM Questions. My emphasis is much more on the second than the first, but you have been warned!]

Here’s our set of tough BPM questions. We have 27 of them. What would you add, delete or modify?

Theme A: Creating a shared understanding resulting in practical action

1.  How would my organisation be different if we implemented process-based management?

2.  What is the link between organisational strategy and business process management?

3.  How do I create exciting BPM visions to lead to entire new process visions for my organisation?

4.  What are the compelling reasons for my organisation to adopt process-based management?

5.  How can we capture executive attention and transform it into commitment?

6.  Why should my organisation invest now in developing a process management capability?

7.  How can we develop a critical mass of people interested in BPM?

8.  Why should our day-to-day operational managers care about process management?

9.  How can we make the ‘idea of process’ highly contagious?

Theme B: Modelling, measuring and delivering process improvements

10.  How can I use process models for improved engagement and communication?

11.  What are innovative ways to model beyond complying to dominant process modelling standards?

12.  How do my process models best inform the software development lifecycle?

13.  How can we measure things that are difficult to measure?

14.  Can we justify the cost of measurement?

15.  How can process performance be integrated with financial, unit and individual measures?

16.  How can we make sure that the To Be becomes the new As Is?

17.  What are the current limitations of, and future prospects for, BPM Systems and related technology?

18.  Are you seriously suggesting ‘continuous improvement’ with all the disruption that will bring?

Theme C: Creating an environment that sustains business process success

19.  What does it mean to be ‘accountable for process performance’?

20.  How many process owners does it take to change the operational performance of a light bulb?

21.  How can I be accountable for the performance of something that I do not control?

22.  What is the ROI for a Process Centre of Excellence?

23.  How do we integrate BPM with other management disciplines?

24.  What is our realistic pathway to increased BPM maturity?

25.  How can we make process-based management truly sustainable?

26.  How can we create and maintain a process mindset throughout our organisation?

27.  If it takes 3 years to raise BPM Maturity, why are most organisations still at such low maturity levels after so many years?

If we had the answers to all these questions, would we know everything?

 In my BPTrends column this month, I attempt to clear up the confusion caused by the proliferation of jargon surrounding BPM Governance. I present my perspective on the five key elements required to establishing effective BPM Governance and the 7 Deadly Sins to be scrupulously avoided in implementing and maintaining a BPM Governance program. Read my column at this link:http://tinyurl.com.au/2y

Process ownership can’t be centralised. Support for Process Owners via a Process Office should be.

The steps are simple to write – and hard to do:

1.  Identify the processes in a hierarchical enterprise process model – first two or three levels is a good start.

2.  Agree how the performance of each process will be measured making sure that the measures are aligned. Objective, quantifiable measures. Be sure you have a reasonable measurement method for each measure.

3.  Decide who will be accountable for responding to poor performance (or trends towards poor performnace). These are the process owners and they can be anywhere EXCEPT in the central process office. These people must be of the business and in the business.

4.  A process owner is also responsible for the performance of all sub-processes, even if there are other process owners appointed, permanently or temporarially, at the lower levels.

I’m less engaged with the question of what to call the process owner position – coordinator, sponsor, dictator, manager, steward, overlord (thanks Craig Westbury!)  guardian, supervisor, controller, director, custodian, principal – than with what people do in those positions and how they held accountable. You need a title that works in the organisation but there’s a danger that we argue about the title to avoid discussing the core issue of accountability.

Accountability is not about taking owners out to shoot them every time there is a performance problem. It’s about requiring process owners to be in ’sense and respond’ mode in relation to their process. Process ownership, particularly at the higher levels of the process architecture, is more about influence than authority since the process owner does not own all, or perhaps any, of the functional units involved in the process. This doesn’t make them any less accountable. The process owners accountability is to monitor process performance against agreed measures and when problems arise to investigate their root causes and make suggestions to correct the proble, escalating the issue as required.

With good suuport from a Process Office and organisational commitment to the process view, the process owner role is quite straightforward and easily managed by people of suitable seniority.