In our last post, we re-discovered the hidden talents of people in execution, how business roles optimize team synergy to maximize value creation. Getting the right people to work together to do the right things in the right ways is what business process design (BPD) is all about. And the centerpiece of this design is the business process itself.
To keep everything in context, let’s review related concepts from the last couple of posts. Business metrics are how we measure success, business requirements define what people need to do to optimize these metrics, and business roles define which people are involved in execution and how they relate to each other as a team. But we’ve yet to precisely define how people actually achieve results: this is the business process.
Business Process: a set of logically related steps or activities performed by a business role to satisfy a business requirement.
This is where we get specific about how best to perform business functions. A business process is the set of steps involved when a person in a business role is fulfilling a business requirement; it is simply a more detailed explanation of how a business requirement is met, or accomplished. The business process documents how a person is to perform their role in the most optimal manner, describing what inputs they need from which suppliers to do their work, the steps they need to follow to produce optimal value, and the customers who depend on the timeliness and quality of their deliverables. Without a clear definition of what do do, we can’t expect people to consistently succeed in their roles.
The above definitions relate the terms business processes and business requirement in an interrelated fashion: each of the steps in a business process can be the business requirement for a related child (lower) level business process within the BPD hierarchy, and each business requirement can itself be a step within a parent (upper) level business process. Each activity performed within a business can be viewed as both a business requirement and also a step in a business process, depending on the focus level within the BPD. In this context, it is natural to name the business process after the business requirement that it satisfies, providing clarity and continuity throughout the BPD dependency structure. In addition, these definitions relate the terms directly with the ultimate goals of the BPD, to enable process design which drives optimal value (via business metrics) for the business.
In our next post, we’ll look in more detail at the structure and components of a business process, and provide a template for organizing this detail.