Business Process Management

“To improve is to change; to be perfect is to change often.” - -- Winston Churchill

Business Process Management (BPM) is about managing change to improve business processes, in which it works hand-in-hand with Organizational Change Management (OCM). BPM offers a single standard in taking care of: Process Modeling, Simulation, Workflow, Enterprise Application Integration (EAI), and Business-to-Business (B2B) integration.

Even though the terminology might sound new, all the above-mentioned processes have been around for decades. Business Process Management however, offers a standard for a complete process lifecycle in controlling and guiding the design and execution of business processes. One cannot manage a change process in an ad-hoc manner. Business modelling and execution language standards are much in need, during an organizational change.

In modelling a business process flow, we simply model the events that transpire to start a process, the processes that get executed, and the end results of the process flow. The process flow of course can contain sub-processes.

As you continue down the path of business analysis, you can identify accountabilities and responsibilities, as well as KPIs. For BPM to achieve the set KPIs, the value provided for the client/customer as to be critical and primary. Successfully using BPM usually involves a few steps to be taken:

• Focusing and organizing the process around outcomes not tasks, so not to be derailed from the main objective.
• Being proactive in correcting and improving processes, through deployment of Continual Service/Process Improvement, before theoretically automating them.
• Establishing processes, as well as communication of the processes and assigning ownership to ascertain the quality and integrity of the work.
• Standardization of all processes across the enterprise so they can be more readily understood and managed, errors reduced, and risks alleviated.
• Enabling and encouraging continuous change so the improvements can applied over time.
• Improving existing processes.
• BPM and OCM are not a one-time exercise. Both should be the core of Continual Service Improvement (CSI) initiative, involved in a continuous evaluation of the processes and included in taking actions to improve the total flow and efficiency of processes.