The Leonardo Blog

The Process Session is a weekly video series posted on The Leonardo Blog that discusses all things BPM and Enterprise Architecture. Each Friday, one of the Leonardo team will bring you an informal discussion about current news, ideas, tips and trends in the industry. Over the next few months, we will be talking about The 7Enablers of BPM. Please let us know if you have any ideas for future topics for The Process Session.

Creating a BPA is not a trivial exercise, and since it will always be subject to change and the exploration of greater detail, it is a never-ending job. Nevertheless a useful, working BPA can be developed in a few months and the immediate value of doing so can be remarkable. Quite apart from creating a solid basis for effective ongoing process management, discovery of the BPA focuses the organization wonderfully on really understanding how it executes its strategic intent. This article details why Business Process Architecture is crucial as a strategic and operational management tool.

With margins thinner than the crusts of its pizzas, a pizza chain restaurant operates in a fiercely competitive and demanding market. There are many alternatives for the customers’ disposable income. Inevitable and escalating cost pressures impact a wide range of business inputs. Customer tastes are notoriously fickle. Staff enthusiasm is difficult to shape and maintain through rapidly varying demand cycles. This is a tight, demanding, sometimes fragile, always brittle, supply chain that demands deep understanding, superior planning, and faultless execution to deliver consistent success. And you thought it was just a pizza!

Every organisation exists to deliver value (products, services or something less tangible) to ‘customers’ and other stakeholders. However strategic intent is defined, it is about delivering value both ‘outside’ (customers, suppliers, regulators, community etc.) and ‘inside’ (staff, shareholders, partners, franchisees etc.). We traditionally manage via the organisation chart, yet no entity shown on that chart can, by itself, deliver external value. In reality, we create, accumulate and deliver value by collaborating across the organisation. While resources are managed vertically with the organisation chart; value is created and delivered horizontally via the process architecture.

Everybody signs up for continuous improvement. The other side of that coin is that in order to continuously improve, we must be continuously finding things that are not working as well as they might. That may not sit as comfortably; it might be quite challenging to be proactively uncovering problems. If process improvement activity is to deliver its maximum benefit, we must be continuously discovering problems—and their causes, and finding new opportunities—and the constraints on their realization. The fabled directive “Don't tell me about problems, tell me about solutions” may not be so useful after all1. No problem? That could be the biggest problem.