The Leonardo Blog

Many companies have recognized the benefits of business process management (BPM) lately. They understand how BPM, by ensuring process efficiency, can support the achievement of defined business goals and contribute to the overall success of an organization.

Creating a process management culture is a difficult and daunting task. We are never looking to make inconsequential change to unimportant processes. We look to change not just some abstract notion of activity sequence, we seek also to change the way that individuals and groups think about those activities and how we measure their success.

For many organizations, a gap persists between their aspirations for process-based management and the reality of what is achieved. They strive to get traction with the ideas of BPM, but progress is slow. Creating an Office of BPM (OBPM) can galvanize interest and action and provide a mechanism for effective control and support of the many process initiatives.

Senior Consultant Indrajit Chaudhuri has created this EPC diagram that explains the magnificent game of Test Cricket to beginners who carry a certain fascination for a process approach.

In my previous articles, I suggested that there is a finite set of compelling reasons for adopting process-based management - a relatively small number of persuasive arguments from which every person and organization draws. My hypothesis is that every organization adopting a process-based management approach does so because one or more of these reasons resonates with its circumstances. I further suggested that the set of causal reasons is quite small and a Compelling Reason Body of Knowledge would be a valuable resource in the quest to develop process thinking and doing. To refresh your memory, here is my suggested list of reasons or expected benefits that persuade organizations to the process view.