In our last post, we considered the concept of the business requirement, an elusive term at the heart of process design. Defining it as an action necessary to achieve an objective or optimize a business metric positions language itself to help us drive value. But who or what actually drives value in a business? This question brings us to the concept of the business role.
People are at the heart of any business; defining how they work together as a team is as much an art as it is a science. In designing processes and systems to drive value in a business, it’s easy to get our focus on the technology, or the data, or the metrics, and forget the cornerstone of any business process: the person executing it.
Associating the concept of a position with prescribed behaviors required to satisfy a business requirement, and filling this position with a person who understands how to effectively execute a business process, this is how we link people and process and technology together. The cornerstone of this design is the business role.
Business role: A position associated with prescribed behaviors required to satisfy a business requirement and filled by a person.
Ultimately, since it is people who drive value in a business and impact business metrics, properly defining how to operate a business efficiently requires knowing which people should perform which activities, how each activity is to be performed, what skills, training, responsibilities, authorizations and tools each person needs to get their work done effectively, and understanding task interdependencies: how each of these activities impact each other in the course of daily workflows. And as we bring people and technology together in an effective synergy to drive value for a business, we also need to carefully identify the appropriate temperaments required to most effectively fill each business role, and identify the people within the organization who are best suited for each one.
Every business requirement is associated with multiple business roles: those Responsible to execute the related business process and satisfy the business requirement, those Accountable for ensuring the business process is executed optimally and consistently, those Consulted and Informed during the execution of the process, those acting as suppliers providing deliverables as input to the process, and those acting as customers requiring process deliverables, all fill business roles which need to be carefully and thoughtfully defined.
As Sanjiv Sidhu, founder of i2 Technologies, used to say, “You don’t win wars with F-16 fighter jets, you win wars with F-16 fighter pilots.” We can install the finest agile technologies and collect data until the cows come home, but if we don’t have dedicated, skilled, driven people to execute our processes with passion and precision, then we will fail to realize the value we should.
Once we define what people need to do to optimize business metrics — in other words, we define the business roles and requirements — then it makes sense to define what we mean by a business process to get the right things done in the right way, and see how the terms are all related.
In our next post, we’ll take this a step further and tie it all together in the very foundation of business process design itself: the business process.