S03E08 BPM as a strategic asset

Most mornings I go for a 5K walk (if it’s not raining cats and dogs and I live in NL so this happens from time to time) and I use that time also to listen to a selection of podcasts. Some of them are BPM related (Die Prozess Philosophen What's Your Baseline? and the NewProcessLab.com podcast), some more political (the Rest is politics or the David McWilliams) and other more business related (Inside the Strategy room by McKinsey & Company ). During one the more recent episodes of the latter podcast, I was triggered by the fact that the gap between your strategy and your execution is hard to bridge and apparently that this is something that we still have to explain to executives. 

In this episode of my own process-centric newsletter I would like to explore this statement and provide some pointers on how to solve this. Let’s start with the problem definition:

Organisations are often complex entities with multiple business / product lines, multiple geographies and an incredible amount of things to do. How can they ensure that every activity that is executed by any employee contributes to the strategic goals (be it direct or indirect)?

The first assumption that this problem definition holds is that the strategy of an organisation has been translated into every nook and cranny and found its way into every process and work instruction. I believe that this is hardly ever the case and it’s in my opinion one of the root causes for problems during the strategy execution phase. The strategy remains rather fluffy and theoretical, captured in a lofty document or slide deck. 

One way of mitigating this is to detail out your strategy into an operating model that describes the various components of your organisation that need to be defined and aligned. Think about your organisational structure, the power distribution, the motivation and reward mechanisms for your employees, your enterprise architecture and your process landscape. Regardless if you look at Galbraith’s five star model or McKinsey’s 7s model, each one of them contains a component on processes (of way of working, what’s in a name). 

Now, let’s combine this with the best definition of BPM out there (and the one I use all the time). It’s been developed by (among others) Marlon Dumas and Hajo Reijers and states: “Business Process Management (BPM) is the art and science of overseeing how work is performed in an organisation to ensure consistent outcomes and to take advantage of improvement opportunities.” 

What this definition does is to connect the work that takes place everywhere in the organisation and tie it to the overall goals of the company. If you want to oversee (which can means various things like mine, monitor, map, model or manage processes) work you need to be able to link this to KPI’s, targets, and other agreements. How else can you gauge if the work you are performing is contributing to or harming your progress towards your strategic targets. 

So, how to put the pieces of the puzzle together?

For me, it starts with the realisation that BPM not only deals with the actual processes, but can also map, monitor and manage your business strategy and operation models and by documenting them in the same environment (or database if you want to be technical about it) as your processes, roles, risks, applications and standards you can actually build up an invaluable web of connections between all of these objects. 

This web of connections provides great levels of insights into potential impacts on the various parts of the organisation in case of changes, and let’s be honest here: a strategy implementation or a business transformation is ‘nothing’ more than a collection and sequence of small changes bundled together. 

Based on the above you can argue that BPM is capable of providing support and guidance to the alignment between the strategy, the operating model, the processes and all the way down the work instructions (which represent the execution layer I would say) and this alignment is crucial to enhance your organisational agility. 

In other words, BPM is a true strategic asset. 

Now, imagine what you can do if you combine this with exciting things like process mining, genAI, orchestration and automation. The sky is the limit!

Ciao, Caspar