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.