I was wrong, the last one wasn’t my last session, I had time for one more: Pat Dowdle on a Roadmap to Implementing Process-Based Management, based on CAM-I’s emerging Process-Based Management (PBM) assessment and framework. There’s a number of pieces to this:
- Mindset/culture (how things are done; values, rules, practices)
- End-to-end processes (classification; portfolio; structure)
- Process-based measures (process performance; incentives/compensation)
- Initiative integration: (ABC/M; ISO/quality standards; Six Sigma)
- All centred around customer expectations
He went through a management model for process ownership, from a process council to process owners to team leaders and the team, and talked about a roadmap to PBM through the seven key milestones: awareness, commitment, engagement, managing processes, integration, embed and optimization. In this, he talks about moving from process metrics to transformation metrics once processes start to integrate across the organization: critical for moving from local optimized processes to global optimization, which seems to be my personal theme for the day. He also names the transitions between the seven milestones: discovery, foundation, transition, transformation (moving from managing processes to integration), institutionalization and realization.
There’s a presentation on the CAM-I website that goes into more detail about PBM including much of this, and quite a bit of material of theirs on BPMInstitute.org (just search for CAM-I). Check out slide 13 on the CAM-I presentation for a great chart that maps different quality programs (such as Six Sigma) against their seven milestones.
My flight home just cancelled, so I may hang around a bit longer…
Sandy – Great commentary on both Jeremy Alexis and Pat Dowdle. I am writing more about these two presentations on my blog.
The most interesting piece to Jeremy’s presentation was the correlation one could make with the lack of emphasis on the “discovery and scoping” phase of decision making and the lack of robustness in the business-based discovery, analysis and design at the natural beginning of any BPM project. Perhaps this is true even of most projects. It takes a great deal of discipline, work and commitment to making good discovery, analysis and design happen. Unfortunately, I have seen too many times that teams would rather focus on development phases – perhaps because the work is more tangible.
But, when one couples Jeremy’s presentation with that of Pat Dowdle’s, one comes to hypothesize that, perhaps, the reason companies don’t spend as much time on the front end of these projects is because they measure and reward their management and stakeholder teams to focus on the back end of them.
In the end, I think we like to focus on the left brain stuff because it IS tangible, more easily measureable. But, are we measuring the right things? If we would spend more effort on the right brained, creative, thinking pieces of our projects, we might find greater success in aligning our process to how customers really interact with us. Now, that would be real progress!!!
David, great comments. In spite of being incorrigibly left-brained, I agree that we need to spend more time up front in the discovery, analysis and design. I’m doing two webinars this week for two different vendors who are interested in exactly that part of it, so even the BPM vendors are starting to realize that it’s not all about the technology any more.