Initiateprocessimprovement

A progressive organization should always take process improvement and optimization as a journey.

Organizations become over-complex and interdependent, thus, business processes are also becoming complex, dynamic, and nonlinear. Process complexity should be analyzed comprehensively once the processes have already been selected for improvements. Process improvement should happen in the business’s daily life, and it’s a continuous journey.

Business process management as a thinking tool -a philosophy or a strategy: Process underpin capability; capability enables strategy execution. Business process should actually be born out of a strategy. Without process, strategy is a mirage; without strategy, process is in darkness. Almost all companies do have business process management as part of its strategy; and there will be an executive sponsorship on C-level. Top leaders can leverage process management as a thinking tool, to analyze, formalize, coordinate and audit the way how the works get done.

Digital organizations become hyper connected with extended enterprise boundary, processes also turn out to be more dynamic and hybrid of structural and unstructured, for enabling cross-functional communication & collaboration, cross culture of learning and sharing, cross disciplinary problem-solving, in order to engage cross-generational, multi divicing workforce and new generation of customers.

Unstructured process: New generations of digital technologies such as a social platform or other collaboration tools are enabling not only the structured processes of the past but also the unstructured processes of digital normality. In fact, business process management is moving into an unstructured, more collaborative age for enforcing cross-functional communication and collaboration, harnessing innovation, to ensure the performance of the entire organization.

Business process management delivers many business promises. All social interactions containing plain text messages as significant process entities, not just comments, but activities, human tasks, events, assignments etc, are unstructured Knowledge-based work with an unstructured and collaborative process that requires secure coordination of content, correspondence, and discussions with different groups to overcome common challenges. Process management and rules management go together to make sure that the organization stays properly governed, visible, and compliant, while dynamically keeping business processes on track to reach desired goals and KPIs.

On a continuum, you'd have well-defined processes on one end and loosely defined practices on the other end: All the knowledge necessary to carry out the work is embedded in the process. There are process intelligence and intelligent processes. Processes are a series of well-defined steps leading to repeatable, predictable results. The trick is to have "just enough" process precision to ensure business alignment and effectiveness for improving business fluidity and variability.

It’s important to strike the right balance of process standardization and flexibility. “Just enough” is great for those who have organizational and individual knowledge to implement it, because “just enough” is context-dependent and it has to be created and discovered. The main challenge is that implementing “just enough” processes requires serious thinking, knowledge and skills.

There are different reasons for businesses to invest in business process management. A progressive organization should always take process improvement and optimization as a journey, not a one-time business initiative, to improve process effectiveness, efficiencies, productivity enhancements, operational excellence, for achieving business agility and building competitive business advantage.

Posted in: Business Process Management