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The
Central Belief
"Business process thinking is predicated upon the central
belief that it is fundamentally the complex, cross-departmental,
technology-enabled business process that
create value for
customers and shareholders."
This predication assumes that every significant management
activity should begin with an analysis of customers' needs and have, as an
intrinsic objective, the shared understanding of the key
business processes or
organizational
capabilities that are critical to satisfying those needs."2
Transforming the Traditional
Functional
Mindset
Excerpts from "BPM – Approaches & Best Practices"
by Andrew Spanyi
In far too many organizations, senior management's
traditional functional mindset represents one of the most significant
barriers to change. Indeed, there is reason to believe that the traditional
functional paradigm has done more to impede customer focused, business
performance improvement over the past two decades than almost any other
factor.
This way of thinking stands in the way of executives
understanding and improving the flow of cross-functional activities which
create enduring value for customers and shareholders. It promotes the
type of thinking that impedes the effective deployment of enabling
information technology. It promotes also 'silo behavior' and turf
protection, and an undue pre-occupation with organization structure. This
mindset contributes to the mistaken belief that if it was somehow possible
to properly define the boxes on the organizational chart, and fill in the
names of the "right" people in the key boxes – then the organization's
performance will automatically improve. Yet, little is further from the
truth.
Further, it encourages a distorted view of
performance measurement and
executive
rewards, shifting focus away from meaningful measures such as the
timeliness and quality of services provided to customers, and towards less
significant measures around functional departmental performance.
It reinforces a task focus and traditional command and
control behavior, where questions such as 'What is the scope of my
responsibility?' 'What tasks I execute?' and 'Who are the key subordinates
who can help me look good?' are foremost and top of mind.
Moreover, traditional functional thinking has also led to
outdated management practices in the areas of
goal setting and problem solving
and it stifles innovation.
So what to do? How can you transform the traditional
functional mindset such that your organization is designed to make it
easy for
customers to do business with the company and easier for employees to
better serve the company's customers?
There is increasing evidence that an effective way of
transforming the traditional functional mindset is to embrace
enterprise business process thinking and
install enterprise business process management
(EBPM) practices.
What does this involve? Frankly, it requires a lot of very
hard work, and concepts which will make some of your
executives very, very uncomfortable.
Why do it? Simply because the benefits of making this mental
model transition are significant.
Kaizen – the Japanese Management Philosophy
 Kaizen means "improvement". Kaizen strategy
calls for never-ending efforts for improvement involving everyone in the
organization – managers and workers alike. It concentrates at improving the
process
rather than at achieving certain results. Such managerial attitudes and process thinking make a
major difference in how an organization
masters change and achieves
improvements... More
Kaizen
Mindset
More
Making Commitment
to Process Thinking
The wholehearted commitment to process and an abandonment of
the thinking and practices inherent in functional organizations begins with
focusing on twin principles – being organized
and being together.
Being organized ('disciplined design') means
having concrete, specific designs for processes so that their performance
isn't determined by improvisation or luck.
Being together ('common alignment') means
"creating an environment in which all process workers are aligned around
common goals and see themselves as collaborators rather than adversaries."1
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