BPM

BPM is just the step-by-step plan for achieving your business goals.

Business process management = creating and optimizing the perfect plans to achieve your business goals.

It’s not a technology, or a one-time thing. You don’t ever consider your processes ‘fully managed’ or optimized. Whether or not someone in the company has it in their job title or description, business processes are in a constant state of flux. BPM is always questioning the current state of operations.

BPM asks: “is this really the best way to do it?”

Processes are managed when they’re kept up to date, tested and optimized. Since the nature of business is always changing because companies change size quickly and the tools they use change, processes have a terrible tendency to become outdated.

Have you ever looked through a process document and thought ‘yeah, we don’t do that at all’? It’s lack of BPM that’s lead up to that moment.

Well optimized business procedures save time and company money because time wasted following poor processes compounds every time the process is run. If hundreds of people run a bad process hundreds of times, you could lose out on weeks of your year without noticing, leading to a massive dip in revenue and no proper explanation.

Owning your processes

An important feature of BPM is ownership. Processes should be owned by people, and those people are responsible for updating and optimizing them. This makes sure the processes actually get used, too.

The best people to be in charge of creating and maintaining their own processes are those responsible for doing the tasks. Naturally, I’m responsible for keeping the writing and editing processes up to date. Our support team takes care of the support processes, and anyone else who uses these processes can make edits and suggestions to optimize them, too.

Optimizing your processes

For simple processes, it might be something like switching over to a more efficient tool. For long processes with many people involved, you’ll have to think deeper on more questions:

• What is the goal or desired outcome of this process?

• When does the process begin and end?

• What activities move the process forward?

• What departments and/or employees are involved?

• What information is being transferred between steps?

The difference between optimizing your processes and not bothering is the difference between having an office full of people shrugging and making faces or having an office full of tightly bound teams who know how the best way to create, improve, market, distribute, manage, sell, design, write and do.