BPM Roles and Responsibilities
Implementing business process management (BPM) within your organization will require new job roles and possibly even a new organizational structure. That's the guidance offered by Gartner Research Director Michael Melenovsky in a presentation on staffing and structure in the process-driven organization that he gave at a Gartner conference.
As an example, Melenovsky shared a case study that profiled a "large multi billion-dollar manufacturing organization." This company, which he didn't name, had completed several BPM initiatives on a departmental scale, involving new customer acquisition, order entry, contact center, warrantee return, capital approval and employee benefits management. It was also experienced with Six Sigma and Lean methods. Based on the positive results of its BPM efforts, the company committed at a senior level to "embrace a more process-driven organization."
A major dimension of that was to tackle an enterprise-wide process -- "order to cash."
The objectives of the endeavor were threefold, Melenovsky said:
Reduce operating costs by 1.7% per year for the next five years as phases are implemented.
Increase customer satisfaction as measured by the company's customer satisfaction index.
Improve cash flow and return on assets.
A major question that frequently surfaces in BPM discussions is the role played by the IT organization, said Melenovsky. "There's hype in the marketplace [that BPM tools] placed in the hands of the businesspeople [gives them] the ability to evolve their process with no involvement of the IT organization," he said. "The IT organization will still be very involved in helping the organization become more process managed."
What will change, he said, is that as BPM technologies evolve, "more and more of what the IT pros did in business analysis, collecting requirements, will be moved into the business [side]. Business people may be changing their modes, but the testing of that still involves the IT organization."
The manufacturing firm Melenovsky profiled identified several important roles that needed to be developed, moved or modified within its ranks:
Process knowledge manager
Change management coordinator
This person deals with the more tactical aspects of BPM -- "discovering, validating, documenting and communicating business process-related knowledge through modeling, simulating and analyzing current and future states," writes Melenovsky in a Gartner research paper.
The role also maintains knowledge of who has the authority to make a particular kind of change with the process and to make sure that any ramifications downstream and upstream from the process have been checked over.
Typically, the BPA also does the data analysis and feeds key performance indicators to senior management.
In the case of the manufacturing company, the BPA reports to the line-of-business process owner. But during the initial project design and deployment, the analyst may answer to the project manager.
This wasn't always the case. For the first business process taken on, says Melenovsky, the modeling was actually done by the developers -- the same people doing the coding. They collected requirements, wrote functional specs, etc. From there, the company figured out that it needed to move that function out of the development group and have business analysts do the modeling in the business. That's the way the next two business processes were initiated. The last three BPM efforts were moved even closer to the process owner, when the role of business process analyst was introduced.
This person looks at the various processes in the organization and puts together architectures for process as well as a business rules. He or she works to resolve the inevitable differences that crop up between the business process analysts and business units. The job also involves "documenting the inter-relationships between processes and crafting a hierarchy of business processes, functional processes, sub processes and process components...tied to the enterprise's strategic initiatives," writes Melenovsky.
Where does the process architect come from? Melenovsky says it varies by company. "In manufacturing, it's common that they would have a process engineering group. In financial services institutions, it might be part of their IT organization or enterprise architecture group." It varies depending on how big the company is, he says.
Process Knowledge Manager
This individual "becomes a lightning rod for collecting best practices," writes Melenovsky. He or she frequently maintains the business rule repository, crafts process standards and maintains a database of consultants (internal and external) for specific projects.
Sometimes the work done in this role evolves into the creation of an entire team -- or even new venture. The manufacturing company, which sold around the world, had to understand tax laws and other regulations within each country where it operated. Those rules had to be identified and managed within the organization so that when sales people went into a sales opportunity, they had the latest information and could propose their product set appropriately. This wasn't something the company felt could be managed by an external service provider; so it handled the management internally. Eventually, the company set up a third-party entity, which it spun off.
Change Management Coordinator
Frequently, this person is a trainer. Melenovsky writes that the coordinator "has the role of instituting change early in the BPM initiative," by creating the course ware and workshops that will help people learn how to "do" BPM. As a particular process is identified, this person customizes the training around it.
This role, writes Melenovsky, helps to get projects off the ground by hosting "discovery sessions with process participants, and assisting with communication challenges across functional areas of the organization." It may be an internal or external person. The role is to help the process owner understand what value they'll get out of the process.
This role, which has typically resided in the IT organization, still exists and still reports into IT. This is the person who collects process requirements, says Melenovsky, and interprets those for the tech people.
But whereas the BPA has an intense focus on the customer (the line of business process owner), the BA has little focus in that direction. His or her job is to represent the IT perspective in process discussions.
The Role of the Visionary
Another crucial role that Gartner recognizes within the most successful BPM implementations (including the manufacturing company) is that of BPM visionary. "A company needs [somebody who] has the vision of what it means to be a process-managed organization," Melenovsky says.
The essence of BPM is to "capture the intellectual capital of the people who work for the organization and the process model captures the decision points the people make," he explains. The visionary is the person or group that recognizes the value of that effort and can continually rally people around it until it becomes engrained in the way the company works. It's that person's job to ask, "How are we going to continue improving our processes year after year?"
Frequently, it's the visionary who jump starts BPM work -- or recognizes the value of expanding on smaller BPM efforts -- within the company.
A North America survey by Gartner suggests that the visionary can come from anywhere. It may be the CEO or president; it may be the CIO or COO or general manager; it may be somebody in strategic planning; or it may be a person or group that represents a hybrid role, such as the head of a "center of excellence."
The IT organization plays a visionary role too. The same North America survey reports that 30% of companies respond that IT is driving the process management work; the other 70% say business is driving it. The results vary around the world, says Melenovsky. In Europe, the business ratio is higher. In Asia, it's even higher.
The manufacturing firm profiled by Melenovsky set up a BPM center of excellence (COE). Led by a business process director or chief process officer, the COE facilitates process initiatives and helps build consensus for "what it means to be a process-managed enterprise," he writes.
The head of the COE in this case came from a management consulting firm that was doing process improvement engagements at the company and was hired by the COO. Gartner has seen "process champions" come from outside consulting firms more than once, Melenovsky writes. The COE may be created within the IT department (to make more technical services available), or it may be housed on the business side (to help get new projects off the ground and to make sure the direction and decisions stay focused on business goals).
Not only does the COE act as a facility for training and as a repository for best practices in the area of process management, at the manufacturing firm, but it's also the department where the business process architect resides, alongside the BPM knowledge manager, change management coordinator and consultants. Gartner sees a "greater number of Six Sigma-trained people joining BPM COEs to provide process-driven thinking and experience," writes Melenovsky.
In determining where the various roles and responsibilities should reside within an organization, Melenovsky reminds us, "The closer you move the process modeling, process analysis and management of business rules around the process owner, the more effective the business process management issue becomes."
Likewise, one size doesn't fit all. The manufacturing company had a great deal of process expertise -- and Six Sigma and Lean Method competency -- which they leveraged.
Melenovsky also emphasizes that the commitment of senior leadership to the process emphasis can have a major impact on its success. In the manufacturing organization, the sponsor of the BPM initiative is a senior VP who sits on the executive management team and reports to the group president. A group VP who leads the global manufacturing operations has the responsibility for the order-to-cash business process itself. Since the order-to-cash process cuts across several functional areas of the company, four VPs participate as functional representatives -- from sales, customer service, logistics services and corporate finance and accounting. That trickles down further, with directors, managers and supervisors owning various pieces of the process too. (A disadvantage of this approach, he says, is that "you can waste a lot of time if you dive into a process improvement initiative and you don't know who to go to for various aspects of approval.")
Although Gartner doesn't believe this level of management is essential for success, Melenovsky writes, a top-down assignment of responsibility "sends a strong message to the organization of ownership importance and clarity." In other words, it shows how important the company considers the work.
You need to look for ways to inspire process improvement, says Melenovsky. At the manufacturing concern, where responsibility was driven down as low in the organization as it could go, they encouraged people to come up with suggestions for how to improve the process. In six-month cycles, people received monetary bonuses based on the scale and scope of the suggestions implemented.
Finally, BPM isn't just about the tools being used, nor is it a one-time activity. BPM needs to permeate the "culture of the organization," he says. That involves constantly evolving roles and responsibilities, as well as on-going skills training and education.
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