The Leonardo Blog

If process improvement were a crime, would there be enough evidence to have you convicted beyond reasonable doubt?

For many organizations, and their teams and people, there is a significant disconnect between strategy and process, between the mission-vision-values statements or their equivalents and the business process pathways that operationalize the strategy. Strategy development is inherently a top-down activity. Business process management and improvement is often conducted in a bottom-up or middle-out fashion. With the strategic view ‘coming down’ and the process view ‘going up’ there is a real chance that both fade to gray before they meet. In the resulting ‘gray zone’ the strategy loses its clarity and purpose and process activity fails to coalesce into holistic management practice. Too many organizations end up with two seemingly unrelated conceptual views of the enterprise: the strategy, perhaps with strategy themes and a strategy map, and the process view shaped as value chains, process hierarchies and detailed models. Nice PowerPoint, love the artwork — but no practical support for improvement aspirations. Developing a more coherent view of the inter-relationships between strategy and process makes it much more likely that the strategy will be executed and the processes will be effectively managed. Win-win. Let’s see how that might work.

So you’ve created your As Is models. You’ve spoken to the stakeholders, drawn the diagrams, collected the data, documented the problems, and discovered some opportunities. You know how things are done now, and have a good understanding of all the problems with the current processes. You know everything you need to get on with improving the processes, to create the To Be, and establish a new and better As Is. Or do you …?

The BPM support model in which a small number of people in a central unit do all of the process improvement work must ultimately fail; there is no way for it to survive its own success. Although it is very useful to have a central support group (an Office of BPM), it won’t, by itself, ensure widespread and continuous improving of processes. Success for a central group that starts out doing all of the improvement work will mean many requests for support from across the organization. Whatever the size of the central group, there will come a time when process improvement projects are on hold waiting for available resources. At this point the central process group is now the bottleneck preventing the improving of your processes! Dependence on a central group just doesn’t scale.

Why measure process performance? Because, if you don’t, all your process analysis and management efforts are a waste of time; you don’t have control over the things that really matter, and organizational decision-making can only be suboptimal. The only reason for doing process analysis, improvement and management is to improve organization performance in meaningful ways. Without measurement, we don’t know if there is improvement; we don’t know what is meaningful.