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.

I reviewed the book BPMN Method & Style by Bruce Silver at the BPTrends website.