In my SAP's BPM Approach: The Building Blocks of BPM Transformation - Part 3 I defined the Building Blocks of BPM Transformation as …
…the essential and interconnected elements that have to evolve in a coordinated and gradual way to enable increasing maturity levels and benefits of BPM across functional units on an enterprise level.
As already shown in SAP's BPM Approach: The Building Blocks of BPM Transformation - Part 2 we identified around 30 Building Blocks that have to be considered to turn SAP into a process driven company.
In this part I want to focus on the area People and try to give you an examples with some details about what has to be achieved to increase their respective level of process maturity (which in parallel contributes to the overall process maturity of the company).
People:
The effectiveness and efficiency of processes depend on the behavior, motivation, skills, abilities and competency of the people that design, implement, run and monitor them. These people can be located within the organizational boundaries of the company or can come from outside, e.g. customers, employees from partner companies or outsourcing partners.
Example:
To give an example, let’s have a look at the first Building Block of this area, “Human Capital Allocation”. In companies that are organized in a classical, function oriented manner (e.g. R&D, Development/Production, Sales, HR, Accounting…), headcounts and employees are normally assigned to these functional units. But the result of this procedure is often not what you needed to operate your processes as good and efficient as possible. The problem starts with the definition of roles and the recruiting of employees.
Seen from a functional perspective companies normally tend to specialization in defining roles and headcounts. This is something covered by the tightly interconnected Building Block “Roles and Tasks” which you can find in the area “Structures” of the above figure. As these role definitions are the basis for job advertisements and for the recruiting, you will receive applications from candidates that are attracted by this job description and most probably you will decide for the specialist that fits best to this defined role.
Seen from a process oriented view highly specialized roles and employees are a con. Next to other effects this results in too many business interfaces with all the disadvantages involved (e.g. increasing wait times, total cycle times, loss of information, error rates, etc.). To increase the performance and quality of your End-to-End process operations you often need to recruit and assign case workers that are able to deal with a broader range of the process flow and across functional boarders. This can also result in changing team structures towards integrated teams (covered by the Building Block “Organizational Structure”).
Need for changes:
Here my summarized recommendation of what has to be achieved for the Building Blocks in the People area to contribute to a higher level of process maturity:
- Human Capital Allocation: Assignment of employees not on functional business units or application oriented IT units but along E2E processes.
- Skill Profiles: Development of skill profiles to meet the requirements of process-centric operations.
- Training: Set up and execution of trainings for employees to meet the required process oriented skill profiles, including BPM methods.
- Knowledge Management: Creation of new and (re-)documentation of existing knowledge along E2E processes to re-use it.
- Performance Management: Definition of personal goals on the basis of process related goals and process performance indicators.
- Communication: Provide information about BPM, promote collaboration along End-to-End processes and enable active participation to support the transformation towards a process driven company.
In the next blogs we’ll have a look at the other areas (Structures, Processes, Technology) and discuss some more examples. I'm looking foreward to your comments!
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