What is Process Management?

 Process Excellence.

Process management is often viewed solely through the lens of improvement initiatives and specific methodologies. However, it encompasses a much broader scope and extends to various other organizational aspects. To gain a comprehensive understanding, let's explore the "big picture" of process management, including its key elements:

Process identification

A fundamental aspect of process identification is clarifying what the organization truly does, by defining processes, sub-processes, and activities in a transparent manner. This transparency should extend not only to top management but also to all employees within the organization. The question arises: why is it essential for the scope of activities in each unit to be clear to everyone?

Transparent activities throughout the organization minimize siloed thinking and foster a shared understanding of the organization's goals. This understanding is far more effective than working without deeper comprehension. Apart from categorizing processes into operational, auxiliary, and management processes, effective process identification involves employing tools and solutions to define the processes managed by the organization. One such solution is process architecture, which considers process decomposition, including dependencies, hierarchies, and relationships between individual processes.

From the perspective of a single process, process maps can provide graphical interpretations. Process awareness should not be confined as secretive knowledge available only to process owners or participants. Instead, it should be accessible to everyone independently. In order to streamline processes effectively and enhance their efficiency, it is crucial to first understand how these processes operate. By considering formal coordination and answering the question of "what," we can subsequently address the questions of "how," "who," and "when."

Skipping the process identification stage during process transformation, or carrying it out without certainty, hinders the achievement of process excellence. To move closer to process perfection, it is necessary to ensure accurate and comprehensive process identification, enabling effective process streamlining and improvement.

System of measures - indicators and taking them into account in the process of making management decisions

We often encounter ambitious targets driven by the desire for speed, quantity, and quality improvements. In this pursuit, managers tend to determine expected values for processes based on the outcomes within their respective areas, without considering the broader perspective of the entire organization. However, it is crucial to establish a system that connects the strategic goals of the organization as a whole with the performance indicators of individual processes.

By starting from the top and cascading strategic assumptions down to individual processes, organizations can achieve more sustainable and satisfactory results. While developing indicator systems within individual processes is important, without linking them to strategic goals, we merely perpetuate a siloed perception of the organization. We may succeed in achieving isolated goals, but this success is often accidental rather than intentional and well-thought-out.

To ensure meaningful progress, it is essential to align process indicators with strategic objectives. This integration creates a cohesive and unified approach that fosters organizational synergy. By establishing a clear connection between process-level indicators and the overall strategic goals, organizations can drive purposeful and deliberate progress, enabling long-term success.

Process improvements

Even if an organization engages in various activities related to process identification and optimization, the absence of a specific plan aligned with strategic goals renders these efforts accidental, despite their potential for success. To truly achieve process excellence, it is crucial to develop a comprehensive strategy that encompasses the entire organization's processes.

Developing a strategy for process excellence allows the organization to have a more significant impact by aligning activities with overarching goals. It not only defines the tools and resources to be utilized throughout the process but also establishes guidelines for cooperation among team members. Furthermore, the strategy outlines a long-term vision and sets a clear path for continuous improvement.

Having a well-defined plan for achieving excellence significantly increases the chances of success compared to scattered and disjointed activities. The focus shifts from merely improving isolated processes to creating a cohesive strategy that encompasses processes across the entire organization. By taking this holistic approach, the organization can optimize its operations and drive overall performance towards excellence.

Process formalization

The formalization of processes involves the implementation of procedures, instructions, and other documentation within the processes. It is an integral part of process identification as it defines the attributes of the processes in written form. However, there is often a tendency to place process-related documents outside the processes and separate them from their owners.

While this approach can alleviate the administrative burden on process participants, it has its drawbacks. Separating the process description from its owner reduces flexibility and timeliness while creating administrative silos. It hampers the ability to adapt and make timely changes to processes, which can hinder organizational agility.

To address this, the focus should be on simplifying and streamlining process-related documentation, rather than centralizing and disconnecting them from the process owners and participants. The aim should be to strike a balance between documentation requirements and operational efficiency. This approach ensures that processes remain agile, owned by the appropriate stakeholders, and adaptable to meet changing needs.

By emphasizing a lighter and more agile approach to process documentation, organizations can enhance flexibility, responsiveness, and collaboration, enabling effective process management without creating unnecessary administrative burdens.

Summary

Various sources define the concept of process maturity similarly, by distinguishing its components such as: identification, indicator measures taken into account in management processes and process improvements. The concept of process excellence used here, however, is more accessible, broader in meaning and more often used in the field of process management.Effective process management requires a holistic view of the entire organization and linking all components together. Setting goals, which, cascaded below, set the direction for processes in terms of indicators, expected values for them and the improvement process. Many times, I have encountered well-functioning units in organizations that set goals and measurement systems in books, streamlined their processes, which in the short term brought excellent results, in the long term, unrelated activities as a whole, caused growth, not organizational development, and let us remember that cemeteries also they grow.

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