International Process and Performance Institute

How often do process-based initiatives (BPM) fail to achieve their intended goal? Not a popular question with an even less popular answer. Far too often process-based initiatives fail to accomplish what we believe they will.

I’ve been living and breathing process for some time now and I can tell you that the approaches to process initiatives very widely – so widely that the extremes bear virtually no resemblance other than the common use of a few words.

One process perspective sees improvement as a 4 year investment with the first 2 years spend building the foundation from which value can be realized (that means no return on investment for at least 2 years).

Another sees it as workflow automation of existing processes, with automation itself being the “value creator.”

Still another sees it as the re-articulation of the architecture of the business in the form of flexible and reusable components.... services you know.

Yet there are companies that are leveraging process for quick wins that produce tangible results.

Take MidlandHR (http://www.midlandhr.com) for example, a human resource management company in the UK that combines their people talents in process improvement with their software. Ask them how long it takes to show results from a process improvement activity. I’m willing to bet you’ll get an answer in weeks to months, not months to years.

Ask their customers about value creation while you’re at it (I dare you too if you are in one of those “camps” alluded to early in this article). The answers you get will challenge your beliefs to their very foundations.

The problem we are faced in improving process comes from two places: our perspective of the problem and our predisposition to the solution. The simple fact is you can’t solve a problem if you don’t have it in the right perspective and you can’t implement a solution if you don’t understand why the solution actually addresses the root cause of the problem.

That’s what we experience in the IPAPI Certified Process Professional program. We find people with the wrong perspective and an engrained disposition to a solution mindset. We reset those limitations by giving people new perspectives and a solution mindset that addresses the very causes of the problems we face.

And it doesn’t take years. It doesn’t demand automation. It doesn’t require a new architecture. These may all be part of the “solution matrix” over time as we improve our processes on an organizational scale but it is characterized by short-term success stories one after another.

Isn’t that what we all want?