Process Roles and Governance

Key ideas#

Why new roles are needed#

In a functional hierarchy, decisions stop at department boundaries. Functional managers are judged on optimizing their own unit, so the handoffs between units become a management vacuum where delays and errors pile up. End-to-end processes need someone accountable for the whole.

Five process roles#

The CBOK describes five roles. Titles differ between editions and translations; what matters is how responsibilities are split. - Process owner — the central role. Accountable end to end for one or more processes and for performance against targets (for example, a cycle time of 100 days). Forms design teams, reports on performance, escalates issues, and leads the assessment and prioritization of changes. - Process leader — a senior executive, sometimes the same person as the owner. Sets the BPM vision and strategy and the process targets that follow from it, and checks that change priorities match strategic plans. - Process manager — the functional manager whose staff do the work. Keeps local procedures consistent with the end-to-end process and passes staff feedback to the owner. - Process analyst — covers all stages on small efforts and specializes on large ones. Designs the process end to end under the owner, maintains the model repository, diagnoses problems, and runs what-if analysis and simulation. - Process methodologist — defines BPM principles, methods and standards, and coaches and trains others. Focuses on how processes are documented and managed rather than on their content. On small efforts, the owner may play this role.

Where the process owner sits#

• Inside the functional hierarchy, reporting to a functional head: less threatening and more familiar, but weaker. Other functions may not accept one owner, or ownership is split among several, and the handoff problem returns.
• Outside the hierarchy, reporting to the chief executive alongside the functional heads: much better at handling cross-functional handoffs, but it shifts the balance of power and usually needs top-level backing to overcome resistance.

The process-oriented organization#

A process-oriented organization builds its structure, management and measures around its core processes rather than its departments. The CBOK notes that ERP systems pushed many companies in this direction from the mid-1990s, because ERP makes you treat flows such as order-to-cash or procure-to-pay as a whole.

Rummler and Brache’s performance matrix crosses three levels (organization, process, job or performer) with three concerns at each level (goals and measures, design and implementation, management). Its value lies in alignment: a performer’s measures should support the process measures, which should support the organization’s. In practice they often do not.

Signs of a process culture: shared agreement on what a process is and how processes interact; clarity about the value each process creates; known competencies and current performance; decisions based on process performance data; and an owner accountable for each process.

Governance bodies#

There is no standard structure; each organization finds its own based on culture, maturity and industry. Two kinds of body are common: - A process council of senior executives, heads of departments and owners of key cross-functional processes. It resolves conflicts between process and functional management, allocates resources, and aligns goals with strategy. The risk is that it becomes a bureaucracy that slows work down. - A process office or BPM center of excellence (CoE), which standardizes methods and tools, trains people, oversees process design and integration, and reports process performance to owners and executives. The CBOK cites a 2009 Forrester Research finding: 49% of companies with measurable BPM improvements had a CoE, against 4% of unsuccessful ones.

The CBOK also outlines a nine-step approach to setting up a CoE, credited to the BPM vendor Savvion: secure executive support; define goals and success criteria; set up governance structures; develop a BPM architecture; create a process repository; choose change management methods; inventory the processes; prioritize them by strategic goals; start BPM projects.

As maturity grows, organizations may also add functional centers of excellence for specialist skills that several processes share.