As described in our last article, Business Process Management and continuous improvement is a mandatory discipline for every company. We described in our last article "Away from departmental thinking to process management" how to implement Business Process Management in your company. In this article, we want to suggest how you can monitor and orchestrate continuous change in your organization.
Controlled continuous improvement
When you start to identify optimization potential in your company, you will quickly find it and can start to initiate an optimization project. The challenge is to keep track of the optimization initiatives and to coordinate them. The goal is to save resources and avoid having two parties working on the same process in an uncoordinated manner. To achieve this, you need to be in constant exchange with your process owners. The exchange gives you an overview of the optimization initiatives so that you can intervene when necessary. Your task is to check together with the process owners whether the optimization projects contribute to the business strategy, whether there is another project that wants to optimize the same process, whether all stakeholders are involved or whether the project needs to be set up larger to optimize the entire organization. An example of this is the Access Management process. Access management sets the goal of giving authorized users access to systems and excluding non-authorized users. One technology that is often used to optimize this process is single sign-on. If your sales process owner wants to implement single sign-on to optimize the CRM access management process, then it's your job to see if others also have the need for a single sign-on solution. The questions remain, how do you coordinate the projects and how do you hear about them?
It is a good idea to set up a coordination meeting with your process owners once a week. This should be used to exchange information about the ongoing projects and to bring the stakeholders together. Many organizations have little cross-functional exchange, so the impact of process changes is often not seen until after implementation. By sharing regularly, your process owners gain insight into all departments, which encourages cross-functional thinking. Additionally, don't underestimate how productive such an environment can be, as unresolved issues in one area may be solved by a process change in another. Use the meeting for this open exchange and allow it to lead to discussion if it is purposeful. The most important thing is that the appointment is well moderated so that the appointment remains constructive.
Have the meeting chaired by a neutral person who has the necessary standing in your company to force decisions and initiate projects. The person responsible for the system landscape or process management is a good choice, as they are neutral on process changes and create the bridge to the IT department.
Continuous improvement is important, but where do you start?
When you start with Business Process Management, you should ask yourself where you begin. A good approach is to check which optimization projects will move you forward as a company. To do this, you should have your process owners survey optimization potentials, which you can then prioritize. Discuss your prioritized project list with your process owners to develop a joint proposal. Once you agree, it is a good idea to have this proposal approved by your management so that all organizational levels have the same goal in mind. Additionally, your management may have additional projects on your roadmap due to company acquisitions, for example, that you have not yet considered.
Convey a common goal image
At the beginning, you should show your management, your process owners and process managers a target process and system landscape so that everyone has the same expectations. Then define project owners who will present the project progress in your weekly meeting and drive the optimization operationally. The process and system landscape, as well as the project owners, should be publicly available so that employees in your organization have the opportunity to learn about the ongoing projects. Once you have clarified a common goal and the responsibilities, you can start optimizing the processes.
Take your time
Keeping up is everything. Communicating with your process owners and project managers is essential to the success of your business process management initiative, for the reasons mentioned above. That's why you and your process owners should take the time to coordinate together, even when day-to-day business makes it difficult. In conclusion, optimizing your processes will reduce your workload in the medium term, which is why taking the time for such an exchange pays off.