The Ins and Outs of Process Management

Process management, or business process management (BPM), is a unifying tool that you can use as an organization leader to maximize business efficiency. As a process theory, this form of management can create new ways of motivating your employees and guiding them to achieve your organization’s goals and vision better. Becoming comfortable with altering your business processes can help you meet and address new challenges. An initiative like BPM can also improve your workplace environment if you face regulation shifts, market trends, or new competitors.

What is process management? 

Process management is a long-term business strategy that analyzes everyday practices within the organization and seeks to improve them for maximum efficiency and productivity. It is a continuous process that involves the design, implementation, and management of business processes. BPM creates a sequence of steps for employees to follow to modify business practices. 

The significance of process management 

Process management is a significant improvement you can make to your business. It allows you to take a step back and study how well your organization runs. Improvement efforts identify the practices that are working and change the ones that are not. 

Changing your organization’s practices can improve customer satisfaction, meet stakeholder needs, and transform your work culture into a more productive and successful environment. Improving customer satisfaction and meeting stakeholder needs will typically result in revenue growth as you will eliminate issues within the organization and make room for more successful work practices. 

Who uses business process management?

The main users of business process management include workers in various industries. Professionals in human resources, customer service, content distribution, banking, and finance will likely encounter BPM. As an organization leader in any of these industries and beyond, you can use BPM to customize workflows, personalize customer answers, streamline document management, and manage the flow of information more effectively. If you are responsible for any company business process, you will be a business process owner, which means you manage the process from beginning to end.

Types of process management 

You can choose between three main types of process management to implement in your work environment. First, assess what your organization lacks or has trouble with, then select and optimize a process management strategy to implement among your employees. Deciding what you want to change can help you select the type of process management to use. 

Integration-focused

Integration-focused process management uses repetitive transitions and automated workflows to improve cross-platform processes without human involvement. This BPM approach is best for building and promoting digital tools like software. 

An integration-focused system is best for handling processes that depend on business systems currently in use within the organization. Combining business process management and service-oriented architecture allows you to create faster and more efficient business processes, ensuring you and your team can stay current on market and business trends. 

Document-focused

Document-focused process management keeps track of many forms and papers needed for your organization’s business processes. If your organization depends on physical copies of documents and forms, document-focused process management may be the best choice. 

This process will create a more organized flow of documents from one team to another within your organization. Document-focused BPM will also work to eliminate any obstacles that prevent or slow down the flow of documents, improving your team’s productivity.  

Human-focused 

Human-focused process management (BPM) focuses on improving employee collaboration and building better relationships between employees and their tasks. Rather than focusing on the physical parts of business systems, BPM acknowledges the role of humans in the workplace and seeks to improve their task handling.

Once your employees feel appreciated and valued, you can use this BPM approach to integrate automation systems into the workplace and ensure human-centered tasks still have a process in place. Human-focused BPM ensures you can easily reassign tasks like customer service or employee onboarding if needed, and all employees know whether the task has been done. 

BPM process and life cycle 

The BPM process is a continuous cycle involving steps that allow you and your organization to improve your processes systematically. The goal of BPM is for you and your employees to achieve your strategic organizational objectives efficiently and ultimately improve your workplace to be more productive and fulfilling. The order of the phases may vary depending on the circumstance. However, in most cases, the BPM life cycle consists of the modeling or designing, execution, monitoring, optimizing, and analyzing stages.

Modeling 

Modeling is the stage in which you select and adapt which processes to implement for your organization. By identifying the practices in your organization that you wish to change, you can establish a vision for how these changes will affect the organization in the future. As a leader in your company, you can use this stage to establish changes and adjust the procedure before it is fully adopted.

Execution

Now that you have identified the changes you wish to make in your organization, you can begin to execute them. The execution stage allows you to test your changes and automate your business processes to make them more efficient and less reliant on human intervention. You should explain and demonstrate your organizational changes to a test group before fully implementing them into the organization. This will allow stakeholders or employees to voice their concerns before the processes occur.

Monitoring 

Once the business processes have been implemented, it is time to monitor the changes and assess how well they serve the organization. By gathering data, you can analyze how your organization's critical activities are improving. This stage allows you to control the processes you put in place and improve any processes that do not work.

Optimizing 

The optimizing stage continues the process of improving the new practices you have implemented within your organization. You can remove any practices that are not working based on the knowledge you gained from the monitoring stage of the BPM process. If your organization’s subtasks have not yet been automated or some of your implemented practices are unnecessary, you can use this stage to eliminate them and optimize your workplace.

Make a start with BPM

To start implementing BPM, assess which of your business processes would benefit from BPM. Your company’s business processes act as the blueprints for how your business functions, and you should decide if they need optimization. To implement BPM in your workplace, set goals to gain clarity on your strategic direction, align your company's resources, and increase discipline in your daily operations. 

By striving for these outcomes, you can focus on bringing together members of different areas within your workforce to interact more effectively with your suppliers and consumers. Once you have grasped the BPM process, your organization can streamline your business processes and make BPM an everyday tool.  

Getting started with Coursera   

Business process management is an important aspect of businesses and organizations looking to optimize systems and processes to improve efficiency. It helps support change and create a positive work environment.  

Discover more about process management by exploring courses and certifications like the Google IT Automation with Python Professional Certificate on Coursera. This course allows you to practice your ability to analyze real-world problems and use process management to ensure the effectiveness of your business from an IT perspective. You will also explore how to manage IT resources and conduct Python programming.