What is The BPM Life Cycle for DIY Business Process Use
Though all organizations, irrespective of size, have their processes to be tweaked upon, many of them lack the expertise to do so. This is where BPM tools get the command. But one cannot make anything even of the most intuitive software without a basic understanding.
Consider how you would follow a recipe as a baker, you don’t stick to the recipe till the T but wiggle a little to improvise according to the situation (like when you run out of eggs!). Following BPM practices in your organization is a similar kind of situation. There is a basic recipe but you learn to tune it to your requirement upon administration.
Now, knowing what accounts for a robust BPM practice can help you make more informed decisions for your organization’s growth and improved process efficiency. Let’s start by understanding BPM and how a typical BPM life cycle works.
Understanding Business Process Management, a Little More
Business Process Management (BPM) is a top-down management outlook that focuses on improvising business operations to spiral up efficiency and accomplish business goals. Being an organization that lays strong emphasis on continuous process improvement, you get the flexibility to quickly respond to the changes in highly competitive business industry. This broadly involves organizing the business around distinctly defined and documented processes and managing the BPM life cycle.
Stages of BPM Life Cycle
A typical BPM life cycle would look something like described in the below image:
Now, to explain the stages of the Business Process management life cycle in an even simplified manner, we have broken it down arbitrarily in the following stages:
1. Planning and Strategic Alignment: The foremost stage of the BPM life cycle entails gaining an in-depth understanding of how well the processes are lined up with the value chain. This stage requires us to examine the available documentation to comprehend how the processes are in line with services provided, support, sales management, and customer service.
Activities undertaken in this stage are:
- Profiling of the Organization
- Identifying and sorting primary, management, and support processes
- Pinning down key performance indicators (KPIs)
- Preparing for Process Analysis
Understanding what primary, management, and support processes are will aid you to identify them for your organization:
Primary Processes: They can be understood as the firm’s core operations. These processes exist to deliver direct value to the customers. Processes that involve designing, product selling, or any service to customers are considered primary.
Support (Secondary) Processes: As the name suggests, these processes form solid support for the primary processes. A typical example would be human resources, IT management, procurement, office administration, etc.
Management Processes: Management processes exist to monitor primary and secondary processes ensuring that the firm is moving right to achieve all the financial and operational goals, other than ensuring compliance with regulatory guidelines.
2. Process Analysis: The analysis stage of the BPM life cycle requires you to observe the process as it is recently practiced to get a clear complete picture. This process has to mandatorily precede the modeling stage to ensure easy introduction of changes when required.
The method of the analysis would be qualitative or quantitative depends majorly on the nature of the processes. However, if considered in general terms, the analysis included interviewing process performers and analyzing available process documentation to create a clear picture of processes that are being executed.
3. Process Design: Derivations from the analysis stage are put to use in the design stage. You should have the awareness of bottlenecks, lags, and delays in detail by now. Because these very observations will help you find the answer to whether the process should be retained as is or redesigned to fix the issues that popped up. You can go on, in one of the two ways:
Continuous Process Improvement: This approach involves monitoring process performance to identify and eliminate efficiencies one after another.
Redesign: This involves remodeling the entire process in its entirety.
Once you’re done with process modeling, hop on to approving new procedures. Create a deployment plan to ensure that concerned process performers are well trained for the changes and transitions are smooth.
4. Process Implementation: You can put process design to execution in two ways: systematic and non-systematic implementation. The difference between both is that the former uses software and tools for implementation whereas the latter doesn’t. Though the goal remains the same- to practice the workflow design in the previous stage, the choice between the two ways depends on the resources available and the nature of the business process.
5. Process Monitoring: This stage is all about monitoring previously identified KPIs to ensure that the process is in line with the organization’s goals. You would typically be tracking, measuring, and controlling in continually in this stage. While KPIs may differ from company to company, some common KPIs are cost and duration of the process, the production capacity of the process, errors that may affect customer experience, etc.
This information will aid you to underline if the process needs changes and the redesigned process is meeting the firm’s objectives.
6. Process Refinement: The refinement stage is all about making an effort to close the gap between current performance and the modeled process with cautiously measured changes. This can also be understood as the process transformation through planned development and continuously monitoring measured results. The kingpin should be performance improvement, cost reduction, and meeting customer needs that ultimately nurture your relationship with them.
This explains why the whole chain is called the BPM life cycle: because it all returns to the beginning.
The process is repeated in several attempts to enhance the organization’s performance and boost growth. With everything being in place and progressing, analyze the processes again to ensure if they’re aligned with the organization’s strategic goals while continued refining helps in serving increased value on the customer’s plate that ultimately draws more profit for the company.
Ensuring escalating process efficiency can be overwhelming if you don’t have the expertise of the subject. We hope this post has helped you with the basic knowledge of the processes so you can make use of powerful BPM software.