BPM holds promise for governments.

• Author: Kavanagh, Shayne C.
• Position: The Bookshelf - The Insiders' Guide to BPM: 7 Steps to Process Mastery - Book review

The Insiders' Guide to BPM: 7 Steps to Process Mastery

By Terry Schurter with Peter Fingar

Meghan-Kiffer Press

2009, 218 pages

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Business process management (BPM) is the latest step in the evolution of business process improvement techniques that began with the work of W. Edwards Deming and total quality management (TQM) and continued through business process re-engineering (BPR) in the 1980s and 1990s. There are three distinguishing features of BPM:

1. It focuses on sustained, incremental improvements (in contrast to BPR's rip-and-replace approach)

2. It emphasizes the perspectives of the people who participate in a business process

3. It takes advantage of modern technologies such as automated workflow and key performance indicator dashboards and scorecards, but is not dependent on them.

   As such, BPM may hold particular promise for government because it accommodates many of the characteristics that complicate change in government, such as strong aversion to radical change, the need to take into account the interests of a variety of stakeholders when making change, and lack of funds for investing heavily in technology.

   GETTING STARTED

   The Insiders Guide to BPM presents seven steps that cover the essential tenets of BPM. However, before describing the seven steps, Schurter makes the keen observation that process management is like the story of the blind monks examining the elephant: One monk feels the trunk and believes it is a snake, one feels the leg and thinks it is a tree, one feels a tusk and thinks it is a spear, and so on. Applied to process management, this means that everyone has a different perspective on what a process is, based on their limited viewpoint. BPM helps bring the "elephant" into view. Therefore, before embarking on the seven steps, it is important to identify the process stakeholders who, together, can correctly describe the elephant.

   The book refers to three types of "affinity groups" (groups of stakeholders with similar characteristics). First are the managers, who provide oversight, leadership, and direction to the BPM initiative, decide how BPM meshes with larger strategic considerations, and make sure that BPM takes account of the customer experience. Second are the builders, who are concerned with the technicalities of creating a process. It is the job of the mangers to make sure the builders are able to address the organization's critical processes, not just those that may be convenient to...