What's In Your BPI Method?

Michael R. Wood is a Business Process Improvement & IT Strategist Independent Consultant. He is creator of the business process-improvement methodology called HELIX and founder of The Natural Intelligence Group, a strategy, process improvement and technology consulting company. He is also a CPA, has served as an Adjunct Professor in Pepperdine's Management MBA program, an Associate Professor at California Lutheran University, and on the boards of numerous professional organizations. Mr. Wood is a sought after presenter of HELIX workshops and seminars in both the U.S. and Europe.

 

The rub in selecting the best tools and techniques for your BPI approach is in the lack of the proper evaluation and selection criteria upon which to base your decisions. To assist you in that process I have assembled a brief set of attributes that should be present in a comprehensive BPI methodology. Use these as guidelines for evaluating and implementing BPI tools and methods into your projects and organization.

Stakeholder Value Focused

The entire goal of business process improvement is to improve on processes and the quality of value delivered to customers, owners, employees, strategic alliances and communities (the Stakeholder Value Proposition, or SVP). The methods and tools you deploy should include processes and procedures that identify, measure, and define the expectations of the organization's stakeholders.

Value Gap Closure Driven

The best way to insure that BPI initiatives are properly focused on improving the SVP is to identify and quantify the gap between the value that is being delivered and the value that could/should be delivered to stakeholders. This value gap should be incorporated into the strategic direction and objectives of the organization and then be used to drive all BPI initiatives. A fundamental requisite of a BPI methodology is to have pragmatic and predictable ways to develop a Value Gap Analysis.

Stakeholder to Strategy to Operations Aligned

Alignment is as critical to BPI as it is to success in business. The key to breakthrough BPI outcomes is to explicitly link stakeholder expectations to business strategies to day-to-day operations. Improvements to the SVP are always manifested in operations. Therefore your BPI should incorporate workflow mapping and modeling tools that support the correlation of the Value Gap to the existing and proposed business processes in measurable and operational terms.

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Knowledge Worker Reliant

While management is usually the source of information for developing SVPs, knowledge workers (the people who actually perform operational-level work) hold the key to discovering ways to improve cross-functional business processes. However, first they must be briefed on the value gaps that management needs to close. It is only in this context that process mapping has any value in BPI initiatives. Your BPI methods must provide comprehensive techniques for facilitating knowledge workers in context to the value gaps defined in order to identify and define the improvement opportunities. Furthermore, the techniques used should be facilitator independent as to form and outcomes achieved.

Consistent and Repeatable Procedures

Just as the Value Gap Analysis and Knowledge Worker Facilitation Processes must be facilitator independent, so must all the tools and techniques incorporated into your BPI methodology. By definition, a methodology is prescriptive in nature. It is intended to provide a consistent and pragmatic approach to a process that is free from defects and variation. Your BPI methodology should be no different.

Formal, Testable, Provable and Integrated Models and Processes

So far we have identified the following models and processes that need to exist within a BPI methodology:

• Value Gap Analysis
• Workflow Models
• Correlation Analysis (Value Gap to Workflows)

In addition to these your BPI needs to support the following:

• Information Object Transformation Testing. The ability to test a workflow model for to determine if the primary and secondary objects that drive the cross functional process properly transform through each phase of the process.
• Failure Analysis. An analysis that identifies the implications of breakdowns within the workflow and quantifies the impact of the value delivery process for a workflow cycle in question, future cycles of the work process and on other work processes within the organization. Each failure should be specific as to the value reduction anticipated for each stakeholder affected as well as the resolution process to follow in the event a failure occurs.
• Stimulus Trigger Analysis. Within every workflow and business processes exists stimuli that serve to alert people or technologies to take action. These stimuli must be explicitly identified, understood and integrated into proposed improvements to their related processes.

Your BPI should include specific procedures, models and forms for performing the above tests and analysis.

Scalable to a single Project or to the Entire Organization

Like business and technology, your BPI must be scalable so it can be deployed at any level. It should not require an administrative superstructure to implement. Rather it should be a self-contained methodology that can be utilized at any level or initiative. Beware of BPI proponents that focus more on deployment of the administrative structure than the actual methodology to be used to identify, define, model and implement improvements.

A brief search on the term "business process improvement" via Google yielded over 24,700 hits. Here are just a few of the BPI related sites:

There you have it. While not exhaustive, the above seven attributes of a functional BPI methodology should help you in shaping BPI initiatives within your organization.

Let us know how your BPI efforts are coming. We at gantthead are here to help. Good Luck!