Unleash BPM to Boost Team Accountability
NexPhase
November 14, 2024
A few years back, I was working with a client to automate one of their core processes. We expected a straightforward process mapping exercise – a few days of interviewing employees to document the workflow. Little did we know, we were venturing into the wild west of business processes.
What was supposed to be a quick discovery phase turned into a month-long odyssey of conflicting accounts. Every person we spoke to had a different interpretation of how things were done and what rules applied. It was mass confusion.
When we finally turned to the management team for clarity, they just stared back at us, dumbfounded. They realised their process analysis made no sense in these conditions, and they had no reliable way to measure operational performance. It was a rude awakening.
When your business processes live as unwritten tribal knowledge in employees’ minds, making any progress is an uphill battle. Critical process data doesn’t get properly recorded, leaving you stumbling in the dark, unable to analyse cause-and-effect relationships.
This is where Business Process Management (BPM) comes to the rescue. With BPM, you can wrangle all those rogue processes, clearly defining the rules, steps, roles, and handoffs – no more confusion. Every action gets digitally logged for full transparency.
Having a visual depiction alone provides immense value. You can instantly spot redundancies, bottlenecks, and opportunities to streamline. Managers and employees can quickly get on the same page about how work should flow.
What was once an untamed wilderness of rogue processes becomes an efficient, well-oiled machine. No more chasing your tail or second-guessing – just a smooth, measurable operation from start to finish.
What often gets overlooked is applying this same disciplined process management to back-office operations. Companies tend to invest in BPM for core processes that directly drive revenue. But neglecting back-office workflows like procurement, HR, finance, and administration can create their own tangled web of inefficiencies.
These ungoverned back-office processes may seem small and isolated, but their cumulative impact can hamstring operations in unseen ways. Broken procurement processes result in costly delays. Convoluted IT ticketing workflows translate to slower fixes and more downtime. Inconsistent HR processes lead to compliance risks.
The costs of leaving back-office processes untamed can really start adding up – both in hard pounds and opportunity costs. When these back-office problems fester, they inevitably start infecting the performance of customer-facing processes too. Orders get hung up in billing bottlenecks. Service requests get lost in bureaucratic shuffles. The dominoes start falling across the entire operation.
So, if your processes have gone a little cowboy on you, don’t keep riding in circles. Let BPM restore law and order to your workflow before inefficiency takes your business permanently off the rails. By applying BPM principles across all aspects of your operations, you can ensure a smooth, efficient, and measurable business environment.
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