More than eight in ten organisations believe business process management (BPM) has a positive impact and seven in ten plan to either maintain or increase their BPM spending in the next three years. Be that as it may, the focus on process is hampered by historical failure, while a poor track record of process improvement dogs a significant proportion of Australasian companies.

These were the findings of a mid-2015 study by TNS Global which assessed the current state of BPM in Australia, New Zealand and the United States, drawing responses from 627 functional managers and senior executives representing a range of industries. Participants spoke of BPM projects delivering benefits ranging from improved customer satisfaction and reductions in training time and costs, to more consistent service delivery. A surprising finding for public sector organisations is that they are more likely to report staff efficiency gains than their private sector peers.

The reality of current practices
However, not all Australasian organisations are realising the full potential of their BPM activities. In fact, the majority of local respondents acknowledge there is still much work to be done.

Across all countries and industries, almost one in four research participants (and 58 percent of Australia’s public sector) still have few or no processes documented. Even where documentation does exist, confidence in the processes is low, with only four in ten organisations believing their processes are better than those of their competitors.

The reasons for this poor track record are varied. Some say they are hampered by insufficient resourcing committed to improvement, with almost seven in ten Australian respondents pointing to low improvement staff numbers. Time is another issue. Despite the potential ROI, adding BPM workshops into the mix still appears to be a stretch.

Lack of consistency in establishing, documenting, managing and monitoring processes is also a common problem. It’s hard to establish a process framework if each department manages its processes differently. This ties in with another often cited concern – ownership. The majority of organisations said that they do not have fundamental process governance roles and four in ten do not have process owners identified.

The lessons of the past
There is one other reason why some organisations haven’t boosted their process management efforts, or why their attempts tend towards the superficial. These are the organisations that remember the early BPM approaches of the 1980s and 90s when many projects sucked up resources and good intentions with little return. It was a time when documentation itself was often the end game. Over time, many of these processes were largely forgotten, and had minimal impact on real business activity and outcomes in any event. There was no attempt to sustain this information or improve processes and for many organisations the significant investment in ‘documentation’ was considered unsuccessful.

Today it’s a different story. Heightened competition and the modern business imperatives for consistency and continuous improvement have brought renewed focus on BPM. But this time, the processes aren’t static. They are online, owned, living embodiments of an organisation’s knowledge, providing a foundation for action and a starting point for improvement.

Reconciling the contradictions
Most businesses investing in processes achieved improvements in consistency, standardisation and in alignment between teams. Perhaps most convincingly, the research also found a correlation between a focus on BPM and higher profit growth over the last three years.

Yet at the same time, Australian organisations lag in documenting processes. Few believe they are providing sufficient resources to maximise the benefits of their BPM projects.

What is clear is that BPM is achieving noteworthy benefits in both the public and private sectors, in Australia, New Zealand and the US. Because of this, it is attracting interest right across the board and according to the survey, seven in ten organisations will be maintaining or increasing their investments in BPM in the coming years, with 37 percent of Australasian organisations planning an increase in BPM investment, starting in 2016.

Start with the fundamentals
While organisations reported good outcomes, there is still a great deal of room for improvement in the way BPM projects are managed and realised. Before boosting investment in process, organisations need to understand that fundamentals like governance structures and resourcing can extend the benefits even further. Rather than focusing on BPM as a technology shift – if we take the learnings from history – we need to consider other elements critical to success. This includes factors like process owners, establishment of a governance structure, the role of ‘visible’ leadership, the introduction of a central, accessible process repository, and the application of process methodologies that communicate knowledge in formats appropriate for the intended audience.

As we look forward to the next five years – the organisations reaping the real and sustainable benefits from improvement efforts will do so through the right ownership, leadership and accessibility of this invaluable IP. Far from existing in static files and folders, process knowledge has transitioned to become an integral part of everyday business. It can provide a framework for consistency, efficiency and improvement to support an organisation’s ability to learn faster than the competition. When managed effectively, process is a critical enabler of competitive differentiation.

ABOUT IVAN SESELJ//

Ivan Seselj is the founder and CEO of Promapp Solutions, a Deloitte Asia Pacific Tech Fast 500 company. With a finance and internal audit background, and experience in business process improvement roles across a range of organisations and industries, Ivan has helped hundreds of companies around the world develop and foster a positive improvement culture.

Processes and Execution
The critical role that business processes play as a component of change has evolved through the years, and today most organisations recognise process management as a key component of the discipline of change management.

More recently however, the traditional methods used to communicate processes have come under the spotlight and a growing number of organisations are starting to examine the impact these approaches have on team execution and innovation.

The disappearing processes
Because of the importance of getting processes right, many companies decide to turn to specialists to document their processes. Generally, these specialists are given a free hand when it comes to choosing software tools for this documentation. For the past two decades, the tools-of-choice for describing a flow of activities have often been Microsoft Office Word and Visio.

Process, quality & improvement specialists study an organisation’s ways of working, look for waste and the potential for improvement, then work with teams to develop and document agreed flows. After this, they communicate these new and improved processes back to teams.

Unfortunately, it is at this point the ‘process of process improvement’ often falls down. The status quo in recent years has been to file this documentation on the shared drive or print it out as a hard copy and never look at it again. At least, not until an auditor visits, or the next specialist is brought in to update the process documentation.

Where’s the problem?
Even without up-to-date or easily accessible documentation about procedures, companies still manage to roll widgets out their doors all over the world, every day. So it’s fair to ask: Is a lack of documentation, or outdated documentation really a problem?

The issues arise when we look at control over execution and impact on collaboration.

Without critical measures in place, only mediocre CEOs would content themselves with subjective assessment of execution rates. If there is no agreed platform to deploy and track strategic ability, the outcomes are being left to chance.

It’s the same story when it comes to a process owner’s ability to drive collaboration and innovation, to truly own a process. When there is no agreed process recorded, how do you deal with repeat problem resolution? How do you ensure incremental improvement? A lack of agreed process makes it that much harder to elicit ideas from all stakeholders across the business. And when you want to make changes or improvements, action relies on building a temporary consensus through often-inefficient forums such as emails and meetings.

For many organisations, process management is now being pulled into the 21st century.

Rather than investing time and money building processes that are destined to become irrelevant, these organisations are shifting this platform for strategic execution into everyday conversation. They are encouraging individuals and teams to make continual improvements by placing process execution tips, videos and guidance online. They make the information simple to find and readily accessible to all within the organisation.

Process conversation breaks into everyday activity
By establishing a platform for process management, process owners now have a database of structured, searchable knowledge. When it’s easy to improve on this knowledge, teams feel free to develop new and better ways of doing things and at the same time, capture and share the new process.

As a result, more business teams are joining the process conversation – whereas in the past these conversations were held behind the closed doors of technical specialists and auditors.

Even better, simple communication tools are helping to embed these conversations into everyday business activity.

Terms such as “process owners” and “process champions” are shifting traditional thinking of who needs to be involved and how.

What does this mean for strategic execution?

The number one challenge for CEOs – execution – is becoming a whole lot more tangible and more traceable.

As for all those beautiful ideas, they stop being ‘ideas’ as soon as teams across the organisation sit down and agree exactly how to execute them in a systematic way. If processes aren’t meeting customer expectations, problems can be readily identified and critiqued, just as opportunities can be lauded. In other words the processes gain currency. Rather than becoming the subject of a boardroom assessment following yet another failed strategy 12 months down the track, an organisation’s processes become part of everyday discussion, capable of being examined, altered and improved in ways that deliver maximum benefit to the business and to their customers.

ABOUT IVAN SESELJ//

Ivan Seselj is the founder and CEO of Promapp Solutions, a Deloitte Asia Pacific Tech Fast 500 company. With a finance and internal audit background, and experience in business process improvement roles across a range of organisations and industries, Ivan has helped hundreds of companies around the world develop and foster a positive improvement culture.