Process Success Requires Sound Process Management
Monday, November 21, 2011 at 2:36PM
Steve Romero

Process management is the monitoring and continuous improvement of end-to-end process performance. It entails ensuring the process meets enterprise goals and includes ownership and accountability for the process design, supporting systems, resource requirements, budget, and tending to process interfaces. No matter how well a process is designed and implemented, it will wither and die on the vine if it is not carefully and passionately managed.

Many people roll their eyes when I tell them managing a process requires love and devotion. They need to take me literally and see processes as living, breathing, temperamental, and fragile artifacts of the enterprise. For all intents and purposes, processes never grow up. Though they may mature, they stay infants forever—in constant need of care and feeding. Their survival is completely dependent on the diligent, flexible, adaptive and responsive act of process management at the hands of a capable Process Owner.

The act of process management is illustrated in the process management lifecycle diagram, shown below.

 The process management lifecycle is comprised of four major activities:

Each of these activites must be performed in perpetuity if an organinzation is to have any chance of institutionalizing a process and making it second nature to the enterprise it serves. If any of these activities is neglected or ill-performed then all of the hard work and achievements of the process design and implementation will go for naught. The people once liberated to perform in the governance-driven customer-focused end-to-end process work will eventually revert back to their functional silos. 

Assigning a Process Owner who is devoted to the success of the process management lifecycle is essential to the success of every process. I regret to say that I seldom encounter Process Owners assigned to processes, which means I seldom see this process management lifecycle in practice. The lack of devoted and passionate Process Owners and the associated neglect of the process management lifecycle makes it no surprise that many enterprise processes fail to empower workers and fail to meet enterprise goals.

~ Steve ~

Article originally appeared on Romero Consulting (http://www.itgevangelist.com/).
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