The Leonardo Blog

Chances are, if you're watching this video, either you or somebody you know, is in the profession of business process management, or BPM. Business process management professionals have a very unique role to play in any organization. They get to see across processes, across the organization - not just siloed departments. This view can bring so much value across the organization. Not to mention that a lot of BPM professionals are fairly smart. Having said all that, why aren't people in the whole entire organization just absolutely raging at their door, wanting them to work at every single project, every single piece of work?

I believe that the primary focus of every organization should be the understanding, management, and continual improvement of the business processes by which customer value is created, accumulated, and delivered. Not the only focus, of course, but by far the most important. This is the essential message of process-based management and once that message is heard, the need for both process management and process improvement is obvious, urgent, and compelling. Let me explain what I mean by, and why I believe in, the ‘primacy of process`. This blog is deliberately short (if I had been in a hurry I would have written a longer one!) because I would like to find a way to succinctly define the key message of process-based management. Have I achieved that? Please let me know. Process? Why “process”? The simple view of a process is that it is a collection of cross-functional activities that transforms one or more inputs into one or more outputs. I also include all of the resources, people, systems, infrastructure, policies, regulations—everything that is required to execute and manage the process. Processes are important because this is how organizations get work done. Primacy? Why “prime”? Cross-functional business processes are the only way organizations can deliver value to customers and other stakeholders. By themselves, the separate functional areas of an organization cannot deliver value to external parties. An organization`s resources are managed ‘vertically` via the organization chart. Value is created, accumulated, and delivered ‘horizontally` across the organization chart. It follows that an organization executes its strategic intent via its business processes. The sequence from strategy to execution is shown in the breakout box, From Strategy to Execution. The only way an organization is able to exchange value with its customers and the way in which it executes its strategy—sounds prime to me!

In this week’s Process Session, we talk about the importance of selling your process model benefits using best practice marketing tactics and approaches. The transcript below has been lightly edited. -- Sandeep: Selling the benefits of process modeling is difficult. In fact it’s one of the hardest things that any process modeling project undergoes. A lot of traditional ways of selling process models have been questioned before and some of them have not worked. Others may have but what we’re offering today is a fresh new way to look at how process models have been sold. More importantly the benefits of these process models. I’d like to introduce you to Daniel Weatherhead who’s our marketing manager in Leonardo Consulting. He is here today to answer some of our questions and provide some guidelines on how process modeling or models can benefit from a marketing perspective. Welcome to the show Daniel. Daniel: Thanks Sandeep. It’s great to be here today. Sandeep: So before we get into actually answering the question of how process modeling can leverage marketing, let’s get some of the basics correct first. So Dan in your point of view, what are some of the basic techniques the world of marketing can inform and can educate the people in the modeling world? Daniel: What we’re talking about is a shift - a shift away from what we would call the old outbound marketing tactics. These are the tactics of the previous generation - the generation before. Interruptive tactics that don’t necessarily look to inform and educate but were very much placed there interruptively into people’s lives. Now think about your television ads, your radio ads, your newspaper, advertisements. These are the sort of things that shout at you. They are one-way traffic. People didn’t necessarily go seeking those messages.

How do you know when you've come across a good process model? Do you use your gut feel or do you actually quantitatively assess how good a process model is. Interestingly enough, there's very little out there that describes how to assess whether a model is good or not.

Have you been asked to do a process model and you just don't know the amount of detail that you need to do a successful process model? The level of granularity that you have in your process model will determine how useful it will be.