Roger Tregear delves into the intricacies of Process Excellence – The Art & Practice of Process Management in this engaging video. Explore his enlightening insights for a deep dive into effective process management strategies.
PROCESS DAY is an annual event aimed at enriching knowledge in the field of business process management, highlighting specialized topics and developments in the administrative field. It provides an opportunity to strengthen relationships and share experiences among leaders in both the public and private sectors.
Participant Questions & Speaker Responses
1- Process excellence, as best practice do you prefer to be a part of COE or PMO?
If the question is “where should the Office of BPM be located in the organization structure”, I would not think of it as being part of any other office or service. For example, to say that the OBPM would be part of the PMO would be to confuse process and project management. The OBPM might usefully be collocated with other internal services that manage projects, strategy, and quality, but none of those should be seen as part of any other.
Given a choice, I would have the OBPM reporting to at least a second level executive, if not the most senior executive, as a well-defined and separate unit. The Office of Strategy Management, the PMO, the Quality Management Office, the Innovation Enablement Office, and similar services would usefully report to the same executive. They would work in collaboration, not competition to assure the correct execution of organizational strategy.
The interrelationship between strategy, processes, and projects is illustrated in Figure 1.
2- What is the difference between business architecture & process architecture & when are they required to be created?
There are many variations on what people consider to be a “business architecture”, indeed there are also different terms that may (or may not) mean the same thing depending on who is using them. Of course, the same can be said about confusion in terms related to process management.
Generally, business architecture is seen as a larger view of an organization’s operating model encompassing many aspects such as strategy, stakeholders, policies, rules, regulations, capabilities, value chains (processes), products/services, decisions, information, projects etc.
If you document high-impact processes to include related data, information, systems, applications, roles, strategic objectives, stakeholders, performance targets and actuals, etc., and you derive the process architecture from strategy, and you actively manage the high-impact processes, then the need for business architecture development and maintenance is questionable.
See also https://youtu.be/MwFtgY_ueGw and https://youtu.be/AVko–ixEeY.
3- How can we link between organizations strategy and processes?
There should be a very strong and direct link.
The strategy describes the promises the organization makes to its customers and other stakeholders. Those promises are delivered through cross-functional business processes.
When developing a process architecture, I start with the statements of strategic intent (vision, mission, mandates etc.) and I identify those promises and to whom they are made. From that we can discover the highest-level core processes. From there we decompose down as many levels as are needed.
This means that strategy and processes have a direct and unique connection since every process has a direct line of sight to the strategy.
See also https://youtu.be/a_o8ArMmeIM and https://youtu.be/VbroqDCoNYE.
4- How can we select the important process to manage?
Selecting the high-impact processes (HIPs) to actively manage is perhaps the most important decision we make in process-based management. And it’s not a one-off decision. The list of HIPs needs to be reviewed and challenged regularly.
Each organization will need to select its own set of HIP selection criteria and create a repeatable mechanism for applying the criteria. However, they might include considerations such as:
- customer impact
- staff impact
- Impact of failure
- regulatory demands
- frequency of execution
- current performance level
- cost of execution
- variability of context
- strategic impact
- major project impact
- resilience demands
- …
You might also use the standard pain/gain analysis tool (Figure 2), but that can’t be applied to hundreds of processes, so some form of prior shortlisting is needed.
See also https://youtu.be/EIT0WTlMfig.
5- How to measure the outcome of BPM office?
I like this question because it is very important that the processes of process management and improvement are measured and managed in the same way that the Office of BPM encourages everyone else to do! 😊
The first step then is to be clear about the processes by which the OBPM delivers value. Somewhere in the process architecture there needs to be a process such as Improve Process Performance – in my process architectures that’s a level 2 shared management process.
Then we need process KPIs and targets for those process management processes. So that brings us to the specific question.
In my opinion, the main role of an OBPM is to raise the process management and improvement capabilities of the rest of the organization.
It is not enough to just measure the number of processes that have been documented, or the number of process improvement projects completed. These are important activities, but we need to measure their impact, not just their existence.
Consider PKPIs such as these:
- # of processes under active management
- increase in the assessed BPM maturity level
- % of processes achieving target outcomes
- # of PIPs completed without direct OBPM involvement
- performance improvements delivered through process improvement projects
See also https://youtu.be/AMJjQzKUA4Q and https://youtu.be/sJmPx_l3MT8.