Thank you for joining me again. Last time
we spoke about the overview of the 7 Enablers
of Business Process Management.
The first enabler is process architecture.
Why is process architecture important?
Well it is going to give us an understanding
of how we deliver value to our customers and
other stakeholders? How is that delivered
through our business processes? It's very
important to know:
Where are your business processes?
What do they look like?
How are they performing?
So where are you processes?
They live in a process architecture. The key
artifact in any organization should be their
process architecture where anybody can go
and point at and find the business processes
that are performing in delivering value to
their clients. The other reason for it is
that it allows you to prioritize what limited
resources you have to do projects and process
improvement. This is very important. Where
do we assign our resources? The other thing
it can do for you is coordinate projects because
you may be working on the same process at
the same time. So you need to have some place
where you know where the different projects
are working within the same house or within
the same architecture.
Finally, and most importantly it is a visual
communication of where do your processes is
live so we're looking at and need to see and
tangibly understand and discuss with other
people where our processes are. In delivering
this and creating a process architecture you
must include as many people as you can within
your organization. We do this so that they
can adopt it; they can own it the can come
up with it. The way it looks really doesn't
matter as long as you have three key aspects
to it. That is your management processes.
So as long as you've got your management process
is captured in some way, shape or form then
you're on the right track because these management
processes are what ensure you delivering your
core processes - so your core processors need
to be key. These are your value chains from
end to end and that you're delivering to your
clients. Then, of course, you've got your
support processes which need to support that
to happen in an efficient and effective way
through other people or IT or both.
So once you've got those three key parts,
you've got your process architecture. Put
it in more ever form you want. Be creative
depending on your industry. Make sure that
it aligns to your organization. In this one
you can see it's clearly for a hospital. It's
simple and I can go down and drill into each
one of these and decompose them to see what
the detailed process is down at the deeper
levels in the organization –but at this
level I understand my end to end value chain
the example here. Roger Tregear put this together
for a hospital, and the hospital says its
primary value chain is to care for patients
so they understand what are all the processes
involved in caring for patients and how do
they perform.
So that's in essence what a process architecture
does. We could go on for a long time discussing
the details about how to build them out. Just
remember your process architecture is never
finished. You can get it to eighty percent
done, but it's an iterative, dynamic document
or artifect that you use all the time to make
strategic decisions in your organization and
ensure that you are aligning to the strategic
objectives of the organization.
Remember that each week we will be releasing
a different enabler so join us next time to
talk about process measurement. Thank you.
