Almost everyone in business talks about processes as one of the key factors of success. But understanding what needs to be done to actively manage and optimize your processes is not easy. And there is no silver bullet. As always, it depends on your business and what you like to achieve.
Some people think that optimizing processes means drawing some squares and arrows on a whiteboard. If you are lucky, you find someone who draws these pictures in Visio. And – surprise, surprise – for some very agile kinds of business, this might be the best thing to do. IT driven folks might confront you with things like workflow, web services, SOA, BPM, BPEL, BPMN and the all rest. And – surprise, surprise – for some businesses requiring lots of fully automated (and automatable) IT tasks, this might be the best thing to do.
But these are the two extremes, there must be something in between. From our experience, the optimal process management solution for an organisation depends on three factors:
- business model,
- business goals and
- process maturity
If an organisation neither has a business model nor business goals, its chances to survive are not very high. So, we will concentrate on the third one: process maturity. Models like CMMI or SPICE allow organisations to determine their process maturity. The CMMI model focusses on the organisation’s business goals (contained in so-called “policies”) to find the optimized level of process management. As organisations become more mature, they can adopt more and more aspects of process management. Therefore, a process management solution needs to be scalable to cover and organisation’s requirements from the basic level (process definition) via advanced levels (process control) to experienced levels (process optimisation and predictability).
So, a scalable process management solution should provide features for these different stages, namely
- defining processes
- modeling processes (simple processes and complex end-to-end processes)
- managing consistency of processes
- publishing process descriptions
- providing role-based access to processes
- managing processes
- collecting feedback about processes and managing process changes
- baselining and releasing process descriptions
- defining best practice processes as organisational standards
- modifying and enhancing the process metamodel (defining what are the important pieces of a process)
- assuring compliance to standards like CMMI, SPICE or ISO
- controlling processes
- performing process tailoring to optimize standard processes for specific projects or tasks
- enacting processes in real-life projects
- managing process and project documents with access to document and configuration management tools
- exporting relevant process parts to BPEL workflow engines, development tools like VSTS or JAZZ/TeamConcert, SOA-capable tools, etc.
- measuring the process performance
- measuring the impacts of process improvements
- optimizing processes
- finding process performance trends over multiple process instantiations
- optimizing process design (which steps are really neccessary and which steps can be left away)
- analyzing trends in process performance and managing mitigations when processes are out of control
- predicting processes
- finding weaknesses or bottlenecks before they impact business
- simulating the impact of process changes
- feeding back process performance predictions into planning
Organisations that head off to this “process improvement journey” with sustainable results might take years to get to the final stage. Always start with the end in mind, but really take your time. Go one step after another. It is nonsense to think about any kind of trend analysis when your processes produce chaotic results because no one really knows the processes and just does what he or she thinks is best.
Needless to say, that a process management tool should support you at every stage, helping you to reach the next one when your organisation is prepared for it.
…and this is one reason, why our process management solution is named “Stages”