Sustainable Growth:

Business Project Management

Process-managed Enterprise

Focusing on the Whole Business System

Process Enterprise vs. Functional Enterprise

In a functional company, no one has overall responsibility for a process. "Managers are responsible only for a narrow segment of a process. No one is empowered to create or impose a new process design, to knock down barriers, and to make the process work as it should... In innumerable ways, traditional organizations interfere with the ability of their people to perform process work."¹

A process-managed enterprise supports, empowers and energizes employees, encourages their initiative, enables and allows its people to perform process work. "Process work is work that is focused on the customer, work that is directed toward achieving results rather than being an end in itself, work that follows a disciplined and repeatable design. Process work is work that delivers the high-level of performance that customers now demand."¹

Institutionalizing Success

The process approach rejects the idea that the company's success relies on luck, such as inspired individuals or visionary leaders, on the grounds that it is unsustainable. Your cannot control whether "lightning will strike, or depend on it to strike regularly. Process companies seek to institutionalize success by designing high-performance ways of working. They do not denigrate the talents of remarkable individuals, but they recognize that all human talent can and should be leveraged by an overall process. They believe that a company achieves its highest potential by designing processes that mobilize everyone's abilities rather than depending too much on any single individual, however gifted she or he may be."¹

Process Thinking – the First Step in Creating a Process Enterprise

Processes are what create the results that your company delivers to your customers. Shift from functional thinking - i.e. engineering, marketing, finance - to process thinking is a revolution in thought that leads to business transformation. Processes represent a new way of thinking about the work of your enterprise. "The first step in creating a process enterprise is to make the new way of thinking the norm in the enterprise; everything else will then fall into place."¹... More

Systems Thinking – Understanding Interactions between Parts

Systems thinking "focuses on the whole, not the parts, of a complex system. It concentrates on the interfaces and boundaries of components, on their connections and arrangement, on the potential for holistic systems to achieve results that are greater than the sum of the parts. Mastering systems thinking means overcoming the major obstacles to building the process-managed enterprise - for every business process is a whole system."²

Process Ownership and Leadership

Every process in a process-managed enterprise requires a process owner – a results-based leader "responsible for ensuring that the entire process keeps flourishing on an end-to-end basis, from start to finish, over and over."¹ Actually, everyone involved in performing a process "should "own" the process in the sense of sharing the commitment to make it thrive. The process owner, however, is the manager in charge of designing the process, building its supporting tools, installing it in the organization, and ensuring its ongoing high performance."¹

Bibliography:

1. "Agenda," Michael Hammer

2. Adapted from characterization used by GE Capital

3. "Business Process Management: The Third Wave", Howard Smith and Peter Fingar

4. "Synergizing Business Processes," Vadim Kotelnikov

5. "Synergizing Value Chain," Vadim Kotelnikov

6. "SMART Business Architect," Vadim Kotelnikov

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