I was chatting with Alexander Peters and he mentioned an interesting statistic. “…more than half of business process pros operate with immature management practices. Only one-in-five respondents said that their change initiatives fulfill the maturity criteria for managed and optimized initiatives…”

This is quite concerning considering business professionals are charged with ensuring their business unit succeeds.  Yet, it shouldn’t surprise me. Continually, peers tell me about some new process they have to jump through hoops to satisfy a checkbox while hurting their business unit by consuming all available resources. It appears middle management doesn’t understand the fundamentals of constructing and managing processes.

Process management is a repeatable, iterative practice to optimize an entity’s workflow(s).  The basic goals are leaner, greater efficiency, and agile processes. While it is safe to assume, ensure the processes to be optimized / created are set to accomplish the entity’s objective(s).

In the Information Service related-industries, many can find the following three root causes: human error, lacking stakeholder focus, and miscommunication. Personally, I utilize policies, mechanisms, incentives, and / or assurance to provide a stable business unit foundation.  Do not think of process management as the golden egg to solve all woes. One will want to concern their efforts with sustaining and enhancing an entity’s assets and core operations.  

Others have reinvented this wheel numerous times. Reinventing the process methodologies wheel has lead to three different framework classes:

• Horizontal frameworks deal with design and development of business processes. Resources are focused on technology and reuse.
• Vertical frameworks focus on a specific set of coordinated tasks.  Resources are focused on pre-built templates, which may be readily configured and deployed. 
• Lastly, full service process frameworks have five basic abstractions and distinct resources:
• ·       Scoping processes and project(s)
• ·       Designing and modeling processes
• ·       Rules engine
• ·       Flow engine
• ·       Testing and simulation 

Instead of wasting your two minutes of attention, in later posts, we will be covering each specific abstraction.