Introducing: The Process Experience

‘The Process Experience’ gravitates around the issues of

• who experiences business processes,
• how those processes are experienced and
• what implications this has for the way processes are designed and managed.

What started us off on these questions was a lengthy review of past projects during which we found that in most cases processes were designed and changed according to requirements from inside the enterprise, by the people working the processes. As process workers have a natural tendency to seek stability in their daily work, this reflects directly in a rather more rigid process design than one would assume to be appropriate when including management or the customers. Each of these groups also has differing points of contact with the process, has differing levels of expectation and requirements and also has different lifecycle-rhythms. So, processes in this sense are far from being a stable entity, which is why we regard process management as the prime task of constantly evaluating and adapting processes to ensure maximum delivery to the dynamic and weighted (=strategy) mix of objectives from process workers, management and customers.

We also found that very few processes actually address the customer. They are mostly designed to tie into existing process landscape charts or process architectures. The focus here is on building and running ’functioning’ processes vs. processes that deliver to clients objectives.

A third issue that struck us was the way the argument of standardisation of processes was used during design, re-engineering and operations. Standardisation in the context of process design is more often than not perceived to lead to one-size-fits-all processes instead of leading to clearly defined (vs. ad-hoc) processes. The underlying understanding is that each and every customer can be fitted to the standard process. The hopefully few that constitute exceptions are usually dealt with ‘in character’: (Wrongly) regarded as one-off-never-to-be-repeated-exceptions, they do not become part of any learning curve and are only seen as individual cases. In reality there are quite a few examples of where the exceptions outnumber the standard. Combine this thought with the knowledge that exception-handling usually costs more per instance, draws on resources which are have to be taken off other tasks and you are quickly faced with questioning the wisdom of the economies-of-scale of ‘standardised’ processes.

If we understand that the sole raison d’etre of an enterprise is to create value for customers and that value is created through processes, then

• surely must not only the customer feature heavily in processes – he is the one who determines if and what value is created,
• must we actively manage processes – not to do so would imply leaving value creation unattended and
• we must also change and turn around our thinking on rigid processes and flexible customers.  

Not that this is all new stuff. If you look at Steve Towers concept on ‘Successful Outcomes ’ and the ‘Outside-In’ approach, they do much to address the customer orientation in processes. Equally has business process management been around for some years now – if in many cases only as wrongly labeled process automation toolset.

We think that through ’The Process Experience’ we can tie some of these concepts together and create some additional value. Of course, there is a downside to this: it requires you to think differently about processes. This is not re-engineering with a new label that leads to doing the same thing but differently – this is about a different way to think about and employ processes for what they are: the means to achieving and controlling value.

Stay tuned for more as we dive deeper into individual aspects of ‘The Process Experience’ in the times ahead.