What is business process management?
The most successful businesses are always looking to find ways to manage their people, systems, and information in a way that supports their strategic goals while minimizing waste. Depending on the size of your business, you may have trouble coordinating all these variables at once. Without a dedicated approach to streamlining these assets, businesses risk spending more time and money on operations than necessary and eventually becoming inefficient. One way to stay ahead of this curve is to implement the principles of business process management.
Business process management invokes the use of systems to automate or simplify complex, repeatable tasks. It takes a holistic, end-to-end approach to operations, in comparison to the discipline of project management, which focuses on individual tasks and assignments. Business process management begins by identifying and quantifying the various tasks and assignments that need to be completed in a given process. Next, the tasks and assignments are modelled, meaning that the process is visualized in a way that identifies deadlines, who does what, and the destination and purpose of anything being produced in the process. Once a sound model is in place, the process is executed, first on a small scale to attain proof of concept before being rolled out to the larger organization. Businesses then simultaneously monitor and measure productivity and any changes brought upon by the implementation of the new process. Once all of this information is gathered, the business will use it to optimize the process in question. Being accurate and thorough in collecting information will better allow you to fine-tune the process, so when it is finally launched and fully implemented, it is done with minimal interruption and maximal uptake throughout the organization.
Think your business could benefit from a process management framework? Here are the steps you’ll need to take, in greater detail with actionable insights.
Step 1: Identify
The first step in business process management involves taking a comprehensive inventory of the workflow problems your business is facing, the people affected, the resources you have available to address the problems, and your desired outcome or the strategic goal you hope to achieve. The more thorough you are with this step, the better, as it’s always easier to embark on a large operational undertaking with more information than you need versus having to backpedal later on, potentially making your work redundant or obsolete. At this stage, you should try to involve as many stakeholders as possible. You may not have complete visibility on every facet of your operations, and that’s completely fine—there are likely people in your organization who can provide valuable input. It can also help at this stage to review your business’ overall strategic goals and try to align whatever process you wish to change accordingly.
Step 2: Model
Once you’ve gathered as much information as possible, it’s time to model it in a process that addresses your business’ strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats at every step. Visualizing the information makes it a lot more coherent and lets you see any bottlenecks that could threaten your implementation of the process. It can also give you a clear reference point to return to throughout the next four steps. Creating a flowchart is the easiest way to proceed here and requires minimal formal design and/or modelling skills. If you are not comfortable with this undertaking or lack the resources in-house to create such a model, don’t hesitate to hire a design professional. Some graphic designers specialize in data modelling and can help you create a coherent visual model. Business process management software can also assist with the creation of a model. It can be expensive and hard to hone, so if you choose to go the software route, be sure to allocate enough time and money to make sure you’re set up for success and using it right. The good news is that after you’ve created the process model, the hard part is over and assuming you did these two steps right, the rest of the process can be quite seamless.
Step 3: Launch
Now that you’ve created a model, it’s time to follow it and put your proposed process into action. You don’t want to roll it out to the entire company at this point because there’s a chance it may be missing key components, so find a way to implement the process on a small scale or perhaps run a simulation or two. Map out all of the theoretical outcomes of your process on a given part of your workflow and try to pre-emptively identify any issues before they arise.
Step 4: Monitor
After launching the process, it’s imperative that you keep a close eye on its implementation. Document, in detail, whether your process has increased or decreased efficiency, in which ways, and for whom. Just like the modelling step, business process management software can help here. It should become very clear fairly quickly whether or not your process is working. You’ll know who is affected the most, what needs to change, and how you’ll go about changing it. This is also the stage where other team members can have the most influence, given their proximity to different facets of your workflow that you may not be so close to. Once you’ve gathered enough information to get a complete sense of whether or not your process is achieving its desired goals, it’s time to move to the next step.
Step 5: Optimize
Given all the information you’ve collected on whether or not your process is working and in which ways, it’s time to turn the screws and optimize it into its final form. This is where a high attention to detail is crucial to make sure your process will succeed. Be wary of sunken costs—you may feel inclined to see things out to their logical conclusion, given all of the time and effort you’ve spent to get to this point, but it’s important to know when to course-correct when things aren’t going well. Be decisive and don’t be afraid to make dramatic changes if they’re needed. Remember, your goal at this stage is to get things as close to finalized as possible. You do not want to proceed to the implementation phase with any loose ends.
Step 6: Implement
With all the variables sorted out and kinks optimized, now’s when you roll the new process out across your company. If you’ve followed the steps closely and thoroughly, your process should immediately improve your workflow. As a general rule, it’s always best to monitor and optimize your process on an ongoing basis to make sure you’re able to handle any unexpected issues or new challenges that require a change in approach. As part of your monitoring and optimization, you should invite feedback from across the organization to see whether or not your new process is making a positive change in the way your people work. Much of your work in designing your business process to this point has been abstract. Now that it’s being put in motion across your company, it’s more important than ever to take a step back and assess things holistically.
In-house vs. consultancy vs. software
Your approach to implementing a new business process will depend on which resources you have at your disposal. If you have a good internal team skilled in data modelling and business process management, it makes the most sense to tap into them to create the new process. Not only is this the most cost-effective way, but it will also let you move quickly because your team understands your business and its workflows more intimately. The downside to using an in-house team is that they may be too close to your business and fail to see things from an outside perspective. They may prioritize “the way things have always been done” in their process creation versus taking a completely fresh approach.
If you don’t have an internal team you can use to implement a new process or you simply don’t have the time to do this at the level you want to, it’s time to hire a consultancy. These are purpose-built teams dedicated to your business, at your beck and call. They bring the advantage of specialization and can give a laser focus to your business and its needs. The downside of using a business process management consultancy is that they can be quite expensive, and you’ll still need to dedicate time and effort to onboarding them to your business.
Finally, you can use business process management software to aid you in creating and implementing a new process. Depending on the size of your company and your available budget, software can be the most efficient and cost-effective means of approaching this. Be mindful that software licences can be expensive for enterprise users such as yourself, and you’ll need to either teach yourself and others how to use it properly or dedicate time to learning. Since software largely automates the process, it can save plenty of time when used right. When it isn’t, it can risk skewing your data and ultimately compromising your process.
