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Process Management Basics

Process management is a structured approach to continuous improvement in performance that comes with systematic design and flawless execution of a company's end-to-end business processes. A business process is an organized group of related activities that work together to create a result for customers. The two most important words here are organized and together. All activities in a business process must work together; they must be aligned for the common purpose of serving customer needs. Which means that interface issues between various activities in the sequence is well understood and addressed. That means the outcome at each stage accurately meets the requirement of subsequent activity or in other words process goals are designed based on the requirement of the input requirements of the next activity in the chain.

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Chief Knowledge Officer
KM Basics
Major processes in an organization (generally there are five to ten of them) transcend functional boundaries and integrate customer service, logistics, supply management, finance and manufacturing to serve a common goal.

Although a functionally organized company performs all the activities involved in a major process through activities handled by departments pursuing different and some times conflicting performance objectives, which results in sub-optimum utilization of resources and increased overheads and non-value-adding work. There is no one to establish and enforce a precise and repeatable overall design of the complete process.

Process Centric versus Functional oriented organizations
Key Aspect Process Centric

Functional Orientation
Work group

Cross functional teams

Department
Work design

From customers' perspective (Outward looking)

From the perspective of departments strengths and weaknesses(inwards looking)
Focus Superior Customer
Performance measures

Aligned with final outcome of the end-to-end process

Aligned with narrow focus of departments' capabilities and constraints

Culture

Collaborative & learning orientated

Conflict & blame oriented
Job description

Broadly specified (people empowered to use the knowledge about customers to improve and standardize the process)

Limited (strict adherence to work instructions)

Liability of participants

Accountability

Limited to responsibility

Compensation

Results based

Activity based

Key responsibility

End-to-end process ownership

Functional managers

Managers' role

Coaching people to find smarter ways of conducting the work

Supervising the work and workers

The objective of Process Mgt is therefore to clarify responsibility for the process, clearly define process boundaries, establish process measurements so that processes can be managed effectively & improved on a continuous basis.

 
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