What Drives Process Design?

For me, business process design is driven by a portfolio of business artefacts including a business plan with KPIs relating to the horizontal bands of strategy, tactics, and operations and the vertical divisions of core business, and support functions normally finance, HR and, ICT. The artefacts would also include an issues register of Pain Points encompassing outside-in issues to ensure that customers' needs are being met. What are customers? Not merely consumers of products and services! What are customers' needs? Customers' needs are best supported by understanding customers' values. If you understand customers' values you can identify the outputs that will support those values. If you can identify the outputs that will support customers' values, you can design the process(es) that will deliver the outputs to support customers' values. Once you have designed the process(es) it becomes comparatively simple to identify the inputs to the process(es) that will generate the outputs that will support customer values.

If the enterprise is governed by one or more legislative, regulatory, and compliance constraints these must be distilled into business rules that integrated with process(es) enable the process(es) to be executed completely, consistently and sustainably as:

Consistency allows all processes to convey the same themes (e.g. use of information in decision-making, performance monitoring, & emerging best practices);

Completeness ensures each process captures implicit and tacit as well as explicit knowledge and information; and

Continuous improvement ensures the establishment of a culture always looking to improve and innovate.

Business Process Management - A Framework‏

Frequently enterprises who realise that something is wrong in their enterprise resort to attempting to solve the issue through one of a number of practices of which one is implementing Business Process Management. The following presents a Business Process Management framework that offers an overarching structure to provide ongoing, consistent, & sustainable process execution:

Business Process Governance in Government‏

ICT governance is the responsibility of the board of directors and executive management. It is an integral part of enterprise governance and consists of the leadership and organisational structures and processes that ensure that the organisation’s ICT sustains and extends the organisation’s strategies and objectives.

Governance Definition:

The act of affecting government and monitoring (through policy) the long-term strategy and direction of an organization. In general, governance comprises the traditions, institutions and processes that determine how power is exercised.

Governance Assumptions:

The Project will be led by the lead agency if a multi-agency project/program;

The lead agency will own the project’s system assets and would manage their depreciation, ongoing maintenance, and replacement;

Cost attribution and service level reporting will be agreed by the management board comprised of agency senior managers;

Management overheads will be minimised wherever possible and meeting management objectives and statutory reporting requirements of all participating agencies;

Governance Principles:

The governing entity of the project operating entity will be a management board;

The membership of the management board will be a representative of each of the participating agencies and others as appropriate to ensure that no single agency gains ascendency over another;

The management board will have strategic linkages with the Government;

Overall responsibility for the Project will rest with the CEO of the lead agency;

The CEO of the lead agency will act only on the advice of the Program Management Board;

Participating agencies will each execute separate IAs to establish agreed terms, conditions and levels of service;

The core measures of service performance would include at a minimum network accessibility, reliability, security, and resilience (availability & backup);

The management board will meet monthly and other times as appropriate to discuss service performance and proposals from agencies that significantly change the scope, reach, and levels of service they required or elected to leave the program;

Variable costs would be attributed to each agency based on their consumption;

Cross subsidisation by one agency to another will not occur;

Network management will use a combination of business rules and workflow automation to achieve minimum levels of intervention to keep costs as low as possible;

Have any of you been involved with similar multi-government agency projects that you can share with me and other readers?

The Evolving Trust Continuum‏

This post may appear a little off the track of Performance Improvement through process improvement.

When embarking on process improvement to improve performance there is an implied judgement that the current process is broken – and as such is the fault of somebody or a business unit!

Hence, it is important when working in such sensitive situations to follow the trust continuum evolving from Trust – Confidence – Reliance – Dependence. Not dependence in the sense of the client cannot move without the support of its process improvement advisers but more that a level of trust has been reached with full confidence.

To gain the TRUST of a potential client, there’s a lot more to communicating than just words. Your body language and your tone speak as loudly as the words you vocalise, therefore each discussion, workshop, and/or presentation must be offered with cheerfulness and confidence.

Upgrading the client’s TRUST in you to CONFIDENCE is generated from you delivering on your previous promises.

There may be times when you meet with a client and you don’t feel an immediate connection. Consider it a challenge! Trying to find ways to connect with the person and then achieving it can be very rewarding. After all, your mission is to be the most important resource to your client therefore your goal is to impress the potential client with your ability to solve their problems.

Pay careful attention to what the client really needs by actively listening. In achieving this you raise the relationship from CONFIDENCE to RELIANCE!

Finally you move from RELIANCE to DEPENDENCE. Here you demonstrate that you are a Mainstay and a capable person that sustainably delivers on promises.

If you have had problems with establishing trust levels, please share the story with me and other readers. Thank you.

Framing the Benefits of Using a BPMS

(Below is an extract of recommendations I made for IP Australia)

This work should be undertaken using a Business Process Management Suite (BPMS). This suite needs to have as basic features: process modelling, simulation, document management, business activity monitoring, IT systems integration, a business rules engine, a business process repository[1], and a workflow engine to generate the following business benefits:

All of the above benefits relate back to the D-G’s vision and the core principles in the TM Vision documents:

Organisational Effectiveness

Streamline and refine the IP system to improve the alignment of public and applicant interests in a global economy

Strategies

Implement search, examination & IP administration processes to reduce rework & optimise quality & timeframe performance of our products/services

Improve ease of access, cost-efficiency & consistency of customer service delivery across multiple channels

Objective

Pursue continuous improvement in our current products and processes (Moderate)
Improve the efficiency & effectiveness of our operations (Moderate)
Maintain excellence in customer service (Minor)

Description

The objective of the Trade Marks Systems Future Project is to develop a concept for a trade mark business model and supporting IT systems over the next decade. The initial stage of this project will involve a scoping study to determine our needs.

Benefits

Provides a modern IT system that improves accessibility and increases the effectiveness and efficiency of our operations

Increased customer satisfaction and confidence with IP Australia

Stakeholder Confidence & Market Relevance

Strengthen stakeholder relationships and better inform decision-making to remain a competitive provider of high quality products and services

Strategies

Deliver Public Education & Awareness programs to increase understanding & appreciation of the value & importance of IP in targeted community segments

Build our reputation as a competitive provider of high quality products & services & develop opportunities to expand our business

Advocate lower cost & simpler mechanisms that assist the process of IP Rights enforcement

Objective

Increase understanding and awareness of IP within the Australian community (Major)

People & Workplace

Be a great place to work where people can realise their full potential and be recognised for their achievements

Strategies

Create a collaborative & achievement oriented work-place through our leadership & performance management approach, contemporary business practices & tools

An overarching vision of IP Australia’s BPM objectives is not an absolute requirement, but it can be a powerful force in galvanizing people around a BPMS deployment. Value creation is an absolute must. The deployment of a BPMS must be directly linked to improvements in operational performance.

Only when you can demonstrate that the first BPM project has delivered measurable results will other projects follow. Velocity of execution — the ability to rapidly adapt to changing business conditions — is the ultimate promise of BPM and it's something the BPMS must deliver.

Benefit Example

These are real world benefits identified in a 2007 paper by Jim Rudden which different enterprises have derived from implementing a BPMS confirming that automating business processes as advocated by the Director-General does actually realise real benefits:

Efficiency:

Eliminate Manual Data Entry Reduction;
Reduce Process Cycle Time Reduction; and
Reduce Manual Analysis/Routing Elimination.

Effectiveness:

Handle Exceptions Faster and Better;
Evolve process improvement;
Make Better Decisions from improved review process results; and
Consistent Execution Customer satisfaction.

Agility:

Faster Regulatory Compliance Change.
Support New Business Models.

Please share your experiences!

Map the business processes and identify opportunities for IP Australia’s performance improvement

In the final quarter of 2008, I enjoyed the great pleasure of performing a piece of work at IP Australia with the goal of improving their Business Performance. Here is the approach I employed which generally I would employ with most clients:

These are the high level phases of the suggested approach:

¨ Complete scoping exercise and design program of work;

¨ Review/Determine “Points of Pain”, PEST, & SWOT analyses with IP Australia subject matter experts (SMEs);

¨ Create a Current State Process model of the whole IP Australia enterprise operating under the auspices of the Department of Innovation, Industry, Science and Research;

¨ Perform a gap analysis against their business plan, strategy, federal charter, etc.;

¨ Distil various acts and regulations, i.e. Patents Act 1990, Patents Regulations 1991; Trade Marks Act 1995 except Part 13 which the Australian Customs Service administers; Trade Marks Regulations 1995; Plant Breeder's Rights Act 1994; Plant Breeder's Rights Regulations 1994; Designs Act 2003; Designs Regulations 2004 to create plain English business rules enabling consistent and sustainable process execution for improving the quality of unrepresented applications is to develop a set of business rules around the trademark application process that transfers the onus and workload from IP Australia to the applicants;

¨ Perform an analysis of key international treaties as advised making linkages with domestic federal legislation;

¨ Create a Future State Process model recognising customer/stakeholder values that may well result in a new organisation design.

¨ The Future State Process model would be embedded in a workflow where compliance with business rules would be the driver of the automatic process;

¨ In the event of non-compliance, emails would be generated to the applicants offering guidance to achieve compliance and if not accepted within a time frame to be determined, an alert would be generated to a digital dash board and the application referred to an examiner.

This will address the concerns of the linear relationship between staff numbers & output. There are significant savings in operating costs and improvements in quality deliverables moving from the current model to a model that focuses on exceptions. The precedent for this is Queensland local government building & development applications.


Ensure optimisation of operations in alignment with the strategic plan using business process reengineering:


¨ This is critical for the outcome sought;


¨ The business artefacts of IP Australia must align must align with the Future State BP model;


¨ In turn, information technology infrastructure must align with, and support the Future State BP model as per the following model:

Business Process Modelling No.1 Talent being Sought by IT Departments‏

Is Business Process Modelling of any value? It seems that it is valuable. Foote Partners’ CEO David Foote says “what’s unique about this downturn is that IT departments are hiring talent in certain areas – such as business process modeling and project management – while laying off in others connected to weak product lines.”

And, indeed, coming in at the top of the list was Business Process Modeling:

Business process management, methodology and modeling is one of the few IT niches that saw pay gains in the fourth quarter of 2008, according to the quarterly IT salary survey compiled by Foote Partners. In particular, companies were willing to pay for workers with ITIL IT best practices and CobiT IT governance experience. Pay for these skills was up 10.3% from a year ago and 5.6% from the previous quarter, the Foote report says.

Kevin Faughnan, director of IBM’s Academic Initiative, says business process modeling is one of the key skills that business majors should be studying. “It’s about how does our business work, what are the business processes and how do we analyze them,” Faughnan says, adding that this is a key issue for companies to consider before applying IT to solve business problems.

This seems to make sense to me. It is always important to know your business processes in order to be able to modify and refine them to keep pace with change… and today there is an extra helping of change that we all must not only keep pace with but get ahead of. Business Process Modeling is a key first step.

I believe this is excellent news and hopefully it will be understood by the wider global market place. Why? Business Process Modeling done well delivers a raft of efficiency and performance improvement.

As Napoleon Bonaparte said, "a picture is worth a thousand words". Process "models" are certainly useful tools for managers to visualize process and intended results.

But models alone are often not enough. During a process improvement exercise, interviews with process participants yield a theoretical, future, and intended-to-be improved "picture" of the process itself. This visual model attempts to communicate how the process will be improved.
For many, visualization best illustrates the overall flow (actions and decisions) and—depending on the type of process diagram—resources that act in a process. The goal, of course, is to intuitively reveal the expected process enhancements. These "models" also provide emotional buy-in for the proposed progression.

By themselves, however, models can be misleading. A process has many factors that lead to improvements beyond the re-arranging, consolidation, and overall optimization of activities and resources. The area of Information or data management is one of the underestimated areas in Business Process Management (BPM).

Reducing duplication is only part of information change. What about information omissions? Information management in BPM is also about the informal exchange of corporate assets in the form of e-mails, phone calls, and other casual communication. The cost of not measuring and managing such information sharing can be enormous. To understand these costs, imagine a crucial employee who suddenly is unable to work. In his or her absence, many organizational processes would not only suffer, but would also stop since critical corporate information often resides in the minds of individual contributors.

Just as BPM's tools often excel at consolidating duplication information, it can also expose information that is not visible today as a corporate asset. With proper planning, when a resource or activity goes amiss, the business can recover quickly because they know what was being done, when it was done, what progress has been made, and where the information is available for a supplementary resource. Such capability is important in our every global economy where a back-up of a process may be a corporate resource half way around the world.

Following a BPM methodology that addresses the reality of such information management needs is important. It is critical to identify duplicate corporate information as well as spot critical orphaned information hiding in business activates. A large financial services company recently identified several critical areas of data duplication and a need for improved data management.

The institution had the ability to leverage a full BPM Suite not only to manage orphaned process data, but also to re-use existing corporate assets in order to reduce errors, shrink process complexity, increase process throughput, and provide overall improved customer satisfaction.

Please tell me of your experiences in benefitting from Business Process Modelling.