Is Business Process Management Necessary?

0:01 This program is designed to provide general information with regards to the subject matters covered. This information is given with the understanding that neither the hosts, guests, sponsors or station are engaged in rendering any specific and personal medical, financial, legal counseling, professional service, or any advice. You should seek the services of competent professionals before applying or trying any suggested ideas. Hello, and thank you for tuning in to a Sharp Outlook on pay for HD radio and Talk or TV. I am Angela Sharp, Your host our arm chair discussions with industry experts will give you the steps, tools and information to be successful in business and to prepare you to be your best self. Hello, I'm Angela Sharp, and welcome to a Sharp Outlook. Today. I'm going to be talking about business process models, something that every organization needs to be aware of, and I want to take the time to give some deep explanation of what that is.

1:14 I've been working as an executive management advisor for many years and many clients and assisted them to restructure their organization and to develop or restructure their business process module models. There are many typically used methods which are business analysts may use when facilitating business transformations, and they all got a lot of fancy names, some of them kind of scary too. Katwell c ATWOE. It stands for Customers, Actors, transformation, process, worldview, owner, environmental, regulatory constraints. Then we have most Most. It's a system that's looking at the mission, the objectives, the strategies, the tactics.

2:09 We have most cow mos cow must have, should have, could have, would like to have? You know that statement should have would a good I think this is what is referring to. Then there's the pestle. If you go back to my previous podcasts, I've did a training on the pestle. Political, economic, sociological, technological, legal, an environment. These are all things that affect the business. And then there's also the model that's called SWAT SWOT. I've also done a training on SWAT, which is as they are the strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats. Then we have the six thinking hats, a structured thinking technique created by Edward de Bono. It has the blue hat, which is talking about the process, white hat talking about gathering facts, green hat looking at creativity, the yellow hat what are the benefits, Red hat feelings and emotions and the black hat cautions. These are some important models. Then we have the six sigma. A lot of people talk about that, THEAIC defining the process, measuring, analyzing,

3:41 improving and control, vpect values, policies, events, content, and trust. These are all kinds of business process models that are used to go in to assess what's going on in the organization. And all of these are impressive. Acronyms help to describe an individual approach that aim and however it remains the same. All of them are trying to find out how to better your organization and get you to the point where you are successful. You're receiving more profited your bottom line, and your processes are moving and everything's efficient.

4:24 Business processing engineering, which is regarded to be the backbone and most important foundation of every well managed organization, regardless of the size or the way they operate. They all have these same things in common. The optimization process requires human intervention and skilled insightful ideally experienced professionals. We're moving now to what we call AI artificial intelligence, that is going in and doing a lot of analysis and going in and doing review, been coming up with solutions and conclusions.

5:05 But as I mentioned, before. I work as a software engineer, and I also have a background in finance as a controller, a chief financial officer, director of finance, a VP of finance. I've been working a lot of years and I have seen a lot of things, and as a consultant now and an advisory to the executives of an organization, I see some things that I feel that I would like to go through this information because there should be expectations when you're having someone come in to look at this stuff, they should be able to give you solutions that actually work and interesting enough. Though, according to my experience, the perfect analyst should not be the specialist in the actual technical or scientific process, but part of a team. You need a full team to be able to get this process done correctly. I was once ax asked what I did know about food technology, and I said basics only.

6:11 But I hope my counterpart, who is a professor with a PhD, would be the expert on our team, as I know nobody could handle this as well as he could because of his expertise. I am convinced that a consultant claiming to be an expert on the subject matter not only limits the project, it actually disturbs the project. A successful business analyst needs to be able to understand each organization, seeing the whole process and how with a neutral bird's eye view. You have to be able to know and see a lot of things that you may not have experienced as an analyst, so you have to bring in others or you use the professionals that are on site to be able to be helpful in it.

7:06 It is helpful helpful to comprehend a business process as an ongoing living cycle, which pictures how work gets done. By identifying the particular sequence of work events across time and place, with the beginning and an end, and with clearly defined inputs and outputs, the analysts identify shortcomings and savings potentials, but critically reflecting on how business works. Typically typically goes hand in hand with the reorganization and can in my experience, achieved conservatively between ten percent and twenty percent savings without hurting anybody too much. So this is the ideal set up a willing, supportive client, a group of skilled business analysts together with internal process experts forming the project team. But despite perfect arrangements, why do business process management projects ever so often fail or at least do not achieve the expected result. That's a good question, Angela.

8:22 We analyze problems, suggest solutions, accompany transformation, manage the change, and when it fails, we feel pointing the finger at the client, saying, oh, it's their internal politics, nepotism, ignorance, the good people left incompetence of implementing team resistances change. I don't want to play the whistleblower. Of course, I had similar projects. I had clients who only implemented the processes, but they to change them once I left, and we know what happens there. There's going to be failure. I was asked to leave prematurely sometimes and then the client made all sorts of peculiar alterations. And I learned my lesson.

9:21 If my name is at stake, it is of utmost importance to see the implementation phase through to the end, despite of the lack of adherence in the future use. Yes, it does demand that you stay until the job is complete. And yes, you're going to have people that are probably not going to want to agree with you, because the fear begins when change is starting. But my forty five plus years of experience illustrates a more reasonable explanation for failing like this. Once we leave, we barely get the chance to see our recommendation live over a period of time.

10:04 Hardly ever, we are hired to act as a permanent advisor. We are kept uncertain about the short much less the long term of success. And pretty much like the Taxpayers Association, they write fancy reports where the taxpayer money is wasted and by next year nothing's really changed. The same with us. We actually actually do not leave an ultimate, an intangible legacy behind. And that's what I want to talk about. What do we need to do to change that. Currently, I am evaluating a solution, solution which might fix the problem, which I will share publicly once I complete it. It's simple, reasonably inexpensive, but workable solution which ensures that the process are imp implement it as defined or we've altered, remain functioning.

11:09 It is something that I've seen quite often. I'm even called in to come in and look at a system that has been put in place and look at processes that are operating, and they're not functioning how the system is supposed to function, and the processes are not in compliance with standard business practices or standard or regulatory requirements and so then as you begin to assess what's happening or what has happened, you notice that there have been changes in this system, and those changes do not actually follow the system design, the process design, the information flow design.

11:59 And when so much money is invested in a business management process and then somebody goes in and changes it so that it doesn't function to it's a complete purpose. That does make things fail and it does make things appear as if, you know, maybe the analysts or the advisor did not give the right information. And as I said before, I'm the type of advisor I'm going to stay there till I see that every function is working properly to the maximum, and even going to advise you that there's any changes to this what could be the downfall and areas where changes could not be made because of various reasons, then I'm going to also advise you that this is what the outcome is going to be because things are not designed the way they should be so that everything is functioning and you receive the efficiencies and you have the savings that you deserve as an organization because all of those particular processes have been put in place so that you can expect that particular outcome.

13:27 This training today covers the six key analysis and improvement tools, and I'm going to go through them step by step so that if someone actually is coming in to do work for you, you can actually know what you should be expecting. What is the business process management is a mapping and management how workflows. As I mentioned, the cat will understanding stakeholders and perspectives. The most is aligning work with strategy, vpect analyzing values, policies, events, content and trust, secism, data driven process improvement, and most cow prioritizing requirements. They can be used together in projects to go from strategy to understanding to design, improvement and delivery. But based on the definition of the business process, management is a disciplined approach to identify, design, execute, document, monitor, and improve business processes to achieve consistent and targeted outcome. There shouldn't be

15:00 happening in your business process once it is established if everything is being followed. The purpose, the whole purpose of even doing that, the whole purpose of having someone come in to assist, to advise, to help with the restructure and the redesign, is to understand how work actually gets done, improve efficiency, quality, speed, and control, provide a visual model for analysis and communication. You start with giving them a visual giving you a visual to see exactly what it is that you should be expecting. The steps are to identify the process. You scope out what's going on from start to end. You map the current process. You should always call it as is. Often with flow charts or swim lanes. We analyze issues, use bottlenecks, delays, rework errors, redesign a better process. That's your two be as is and to be after we restructure and make things better.

16:15 Implement changes and changes can be in various areas. System changes, your software changes, your equipment actually changes so that you can have the efficiency of maybe not having to be on site to make changes because your systems in the cloud excuse me, and you can access it from any place at home on the beach. But you want that flexibility so you're not always having to come to the office to be able to get things done. You monitor and optimize using metrics, time, cost, quality. You're looking at roles and procedures. You know, for example, you have a customer order handling. How are orders handled? Let's just go through the steps. So you have a customer places an order, and then the system logs that order. Then the stock is checked, and the order is picked and packed, and the order is shipped, and the invoice is sent and if it's not returned, you receive payment for that particular product.

17:55 Having a business process model provides the process that that other methods like six Sigma can improve. Is able to look at that process and see where are there inefficiencies in the process that's there and catlow catwe stakeholders and system view. It's a soft system analysis tool to understand a situation by examining the customers, the actors, the transformation, the worldview, the owners in any environmental constraints, the customers, who benefits or suffers from the transformation. You have to look at that. When you're looking at the actors, who carries out the activities that are in that particular business process, the transformation, what is transformed, the input or the output worldview, what bigger view makes this system meaningful, makes this system important, makes this system necessary? And the owner who can start

19:27 the process, who can stop the process, who can change the system, who can change what's going on in the process. So who is owning all of the various steps of the process, itself. No one person does all the functions, and that's because of generally accepted accounting principles, GAP and other regulatory requirements. No one person can do it all because you need to have oversight, you need to have reviews, and you need to have approvals. So who owns their particular function in this process that's important. And then environmental constraints external limits like laws, culture, tech, budgets, recessions, so many different different things can impact and all of that needs to be incorporated so that even when you have your system, you can see different things, you are able to make changes so that these environmental constraints aren't damaging you and aren't affecting you in a negative way. The whole purpose is to clarify who is involved and what matters to them, surface different perspectives and assumptions. When you're

21:00 going in and assessing and talking to different users of the system and recipients of the information. It's not just the users. They're not the only ones that should be included in the team talking about this, discussing this, but those that receive the information. They may need to receive it in a specific and particular way. So someone needs to be at the table that can say I need it in this particular format. I need this kind of information because of reports I have to send to the government or to the grant or to the supplier, or whoever it is that you need to provide this information, or your sales department to see whether they're pricing is correct for the market and for the success of the organization.

21:53 You clarify who is involved in what matters to them, and also surface different perspectives and assumptions. But avoid designing a process that ignores all of the key stakeholders. As I said, for an example, patients and a doctor, receptionists and it support no appointment, confirmed appointment, patients value easy quick access to healthcare, clinic management, health regulations, data, privacy laws, system availability, all of these. There's so many different departments, steps, reviewers, stakeholders, all of those have to be considered so that everyone's needs are met and then one of them. One of the wonderful things is having a strategy alignment, a strategy to align with the goals the objectives. What are you really needing to have right now? I would say, because everything is like sixty seconds or less, you need real time information. You can't wait until the end of the week to find out what your cash flow is. You can't wait until the end of the month to find out if you're profitable. You should should have a dashboard

23:24 that is designed, that's given you KeyPoint indicators, that's telling you exactly what it is that you were expecting to receive from the system. It's at your fingertips. It's showing up every day, so that you can look at it, read it and be able to make good, strong decisions, or at least pull together your teams in a meeting and say, Okay, this is what our budget was, this is what our expectation was. Where did we miss it? What's gone wrong in this process? Where was the weak spot? Where was where do we drop the ball? You have to have information. You have to have processes that you can get information at that real time level so that you are able to guide your organization, guide your business, guide your sales department, guide your customer service so that you can find out what's going on. Maybe people are having to wait too long on the phone to talk to customer service, or let me say this, I know you're using AI to have customer service, but you don't have enough questions to answer all of the people that are calling in really think about what it is a person could possibly be experiencing, and you need to have that question. If the first five don't work, it's frustrating

24:56 to be on the other end of that call and it doesn't ask you the right question. It keeps forcing to do it, it keeps hanging up on you because you didn't think about all of the different things it could be occurring in the process of the customer. And so you have frustrated customers out there. And you know what the old saying is, if you do a great job, they might tell one person. If you get one unhappy customer, they're going to make sure they talked to fifty and now with social media they're probably to talk to one hundred or two hundred people. That within itself, that reputation that is being created because processes are not working smoothly, that process is going to harm you. Because people are frustrated or they're upset. There's so much going on, people just don't have the time to have to keep calling back, waiting on hold, and then your AI is not asking the right questions, so needs a little more expansion. If that's the tool you're going to be using, or you need to design it so that if these questions have not asked, it gives them the opportunity to transfer to another department where they can get their answers. Most. MOST

26:26 is a strategic and analysis framework that ensures activities aligned with organizational mission objectives, strategies, and tactics. Most the mission overall purpose. Why do we exist? That's a question every company should be asking. I know you ask it when you first began, but do you repeat that? Do you look at it when you change your budgets or your forecast and you do your five year forecast, you do your ten year forecast. Is it still answering what you wrote those years ago? Is your mission still on track?

27:14 Why do we exist? Is that still being answered in the positive manner that your dream began in the first place. Your objectives, specific measurable goals. What do we want to achieve? These plans should be there at your fingertips that you can go and look at when you're comparing information that you're receiving in a financial format, Are we achieving the goals that we thought that we were going to reach. I go out and I do systems and some people don't want to. Ah, we don't want to do a budget.

27:56 You do need to do a budget because it helps you guide you to goals and objectives and you look at it to see whether you're still on track for those goals and objectives. Also keeps you from overspending when you're not meeting your goals and objectives. Strategy high level approach. How will you achieve it? What's your path? What is your thought pattern? What is it that you're thinking that is important? The tactics, detailed actions, What exactly will we do?

28:37 These are things that are part of someone advising you and setting up a business process system. It should be answering those kinds of questions for you. The purpose is to ensure projects and process changes support Those strategies provide a clear line of sight from day to day work to top level goals. For instance, let me think about a training company. The mission enable professionals to gain practical skills quickly. I don't know about it quickly, but some people think that is an objective. They can hand have increase course completion rate from sixty percent to eighty percent and twelve months. The strategy make learning more engaging and supported tactics, add weekly live Q and A, introduce progress tracking, and send automated reminders to inactive learners. You can use all of those particular steps processes to keep energizing those that are in your training to ensure that they show up for the training, that the achievement. At the end, you had one hundred people, You at least want to

30:08 have eighty that completed that particular training. You don't want all of them to have fallen off. But that's the time to reflect if that is what is happening. What about the materials? Are the materials important? Are they interesting? Are they really providing what the student was looking for in the first place. All of these are systems that can be developed in your organization so that all of these goals have answers, All of these questions have answers, all of these thoughts have answers. Values and Information lens VPECT is a framework to analyze complex systems by looking at the values, policies, events, content, and most about trust values, what stakeholders care about most? And those are questions you need to know before you start making changes. What are you looking for speed, quality, privacy, efficiency data? What are the values that you're looking for policies, format formal ones, informal rules, regulations, guidelines. Well, you and I both know you're never going to get rid of compliance. There's always

31:41 going to be rules and regulations. I love rules and regulations. It keeps consistency in the organization. It keeps consistency in businesses operating around the nation and around the world. It keeps consistency. It makes all of us follow the same rules that a competition is fair and equal. Well, everybody's not following those laws, but there are consequences when you don't follow those laws. Events things that happen and cause actions. They trigger situations. When you're building something, you discuss what could cause a problem? What are things that could trigger something negative happening in the organization? Where could this happen in what area? Could it happened in? What place? Could it happened in your warehouse? Maybe not packaging as quickly as you would like and shipping as late, or maybe some of the safety measures that should be in place are not in place and you have OSHA on you and causing problems because people are getting injured. Because maybe during all of the process building you never thought about thinking we need to make certain that we have processes,

33:13 policies and compliance in our warehouse, in our manufacturing shop wherever. That is, to make sure we don't have injured employees. I remember when I was working in several clients with several clients in manufacturing, and they always had a daily notification that went out, no one was injured today, no issues today, no problems today. And then if there was, there was an immediate in this investigation as to what occurred, how did it occur, Where was the deficiency, Where was the rules not followed? So that con mitigate that issue issue immediately and it would not be some long recurring issue that was coming up. Events content, information and data being created, stored and used. There's a lot of information that's being processed, generated, created, and stored in an organization.

34:29 The thing is are you reading it? Is it written in a manner that you really truly understand it and you get a true concept of what is going on? And then trust, Trust is very important. Who trust whom I've seen when I've gone in to do assessments, I've seen departments not getting along with other departments. I've seen employees in departments not even able to get along with the ones in their specific departments, but outside, you know, always battling with another department.

35:11 There. Everyone has their responsibilities. I remember in my years working as a senior finance person, the sales and marketing department always had conflict with finance, and a lot of it had to do with pricing, making sure the margin was there. We did our work, preparing the budgets, preparing the forecast, preparing the analytics, and when we would present there was always, you know, resistance to following what's needed to do to meet the goals and objectives. And so sometimes those things you know are happening. So who trust whom and under what condition? Well, if we're understand that a business is an organ organism, it is an organism, a live, breathing organism that goes through changes, just like our bodies do.

36:19 It goes through emotions, it goes through a lot of different things, and then you have people in the organism that are facing things daily. These have effects on what's going on. It should not be in a situation where people cannot come to the door of the manager, the director, the CEO. Even you should have open door policies where people can come and tell you there's something going on, there's a problem here, and then don't let them come to your office and tell you something and you ignore it as if they're wasting your time. You just say uh huh, uh huh, and you don't do anything, especially when you know that what they're saying is true. You have to be strong enough to make decisions, and sometimes they're not what you might want to do, but if it is going to improve the health of the whole organization and help you maintain those goals and objectives, then yes, you need to do something about it. You need to make decisions. One of the things as being a senior person in the organization, I made sure that if I'm having lunch with one group, that I have a lunch with all groups. If I always made sure that I did not have kind of like personal relationships with the

37:54 people that reported to me, because I needed them to understand even though we have a wonderful relationship in our working environment and all of these things, I instill the one that has to make decisions. And I don't want you to ever think that I'm so close of a friend of yours that I'm going to look past and competence and bad behavior. You have to have that kind of trust in your organization that they know where you stand at all times. Understanding the information and the rules environment around a process is really really important, and your staff really needs to know that you have certain responsibilities being in that particular area of work. I used to tell the accountants that we're in under me or the IT department. I always used to tell them, you may not like it, but you are the compliance police. That is the job you chose. That means that you are going to always be there to make sure that regulations are followed, rules are intact. If there are problems, you're

39:25 going to speak out so that you can get into compliance. You're going to you know, anticipate, you know that there may be security and trust issues, but you may need to get hardened up a little bit. But you have to be with the cybersecurity. You need to make sure that people are following the rules so you don't have threats that are able to penetrate your organization. You know, and all of this stuff is really really important to be able to do that. Like the I T you ask for strong password rules, you tell them there's going to be a two factor authentication. You know, you have to key y see regulations, those are policies. Those policies have to be followed. In organizations where I was a fractional senior there, we always made sure that anyone or while I was there, I would always tell them during you know, their orientation, anyone that's coming to work for the company should be going through a specific type of training so that they know what the system is, how the system is used, how the passwords are. They're not allowing,

40:56 you know, opening up emails that they shouldn't be opening. They go through the little lass, they go through and get the testing done. All of these things are important and that's all part of processes that need to be in an organization. Key concepts focus on defect reduction and process capability. You're using structural problem solving, strong use of metrics and statistical tools. Define the problem, the goals, the customers, and the scope. Collect data on current performance, identify root causes of defects and variations, develop and implement solutions. Controls A lot of people thinks that's a dirty word, but what it is it makes sure that you're able to sleep at night, that you're not going to have some surprise when the auditors come in or or if you're in nonprofit or you have a grant or federal war or whatever, you're not concerned if they do a single audit because you have followed all the processes, you have communicated with them. You have not don't have disallowed costs, you don't have situations where the rules haven't been followed.

42:18 You've got oversight. You've got all of these things going on, and if all those fail, you are doing self monitoring so that you can find the issue and remediate it and say, Okay, this is what we've put in place to make sure this doesn't happen again. All of these things are really important. Develop and implement solutions, put controls in place to sustain the gains. You know. Too many you know, for instance, my example about the call center, too many abandoned calls, customer dissatisfaction. Find what the root problem is. Do you not have enough staffing? Is your system that you have not fast enough? Needs to be changed, needs to be updated. The whole process needs to be looked at. Too many abandoned calls, customers dissatisfied, the wait time, the call volume, the abandonment rate. Look at those to make sure that they're meeting your goals and objectives. You know, analyze you know the peak time? When is the peak time when most of this UH is occurring? Is it because you're understaff poor call routing? You know? Need to adjust staffing schedules, Introduce skill based routing using the better you know, using better tools. Maybe you haven't changed your

43:50 system in a while. Need to update because everything is becoming so automated that people are expecting answers right away, expecting the phone to be answered right away. You know, monitor the wait times weekly, trigger alerts if thresholds are exceeded. All of these are part of good business processes and being able to look at those and find what it is that might be causing problems. Prioritizing your requirements. The moscow is a technique to prioritize requirements into must, should, could and won't have time or must should, could, we'll do at a later time. The categories are really important, they're essential. Without them, the solution is not visible. Should have important but vital for the first release, Could have desirable if time and resource is allow. Won't have at this time, but agreed to look at it at a different time, at a different level. The purpose is to manage your scope and expectations and trade offs and sure critical needs are delivered first, provide a common language between

45:20 business and delivery teams, and as I mentioned before, not just having one person coming in, but having a whole team, because one of the things I've found out, you need everyone, even the file clerk, to be there. Not saying anything negative about them, because if they don't have things put away where they can be easily found, you're going to find out they're one of the most key people in the organization because you need data right now for the audit, You need data right now for the report that you need to have. You need data right now to be able to explain the thing to your board of directors.

46:01 So everyone is important and everyone should be spoken to when assessments are done and you're looking at building a new process and restructuring, how information is flowing in your organization. So I'm going to kind of sum this up here. When you're looking at the strategy code, most clarify strategic direction, what are we trying to achieve and why? If you're looking at catwow c atwe understand the situation in the stakeholders.

46:43 Who is involved, and what is the core transformation VPECK VPECT examine values, policies, events, content and trust. Is really important that you have have all of these ideas in place. What rules, information and trust issues do we need to respect it? Should be aware of every new regulation because they have new regulation, new laws, new accounting principles, all of these things. They come out with notifications annually, and the people that are in charge and those specific departments should be receiving those notifications responding, not taking wait until the end of the year, responding as quickly as possible, because as you read all of those new notifications, you will find that maybe sometimes they don't impact you. That's the best thing. You don't have to worry about it.

47:44 Put it aside. Done, you have it, you filed it, it's over. But if it does affect you, you need to now make changes in the organization to place the organization into compliance, business processes, the map and design the processes. How does workflow now and how should it flow? That's what we're looking at. How do things flow now and how should they flow? And how do we get from point A to point Z without disrupting and erupting to a point where things do not flow at all, making sure all stakehold holders are a part of this. I'm bringing this information to you because one of the things that I would like to inform you is that a Shark Consulting, which that is the company, my company that I do consulting work for. I've partnered with several other companies and besides bringing the finance and the tech consulting, we're partnering with companies that do cybersecurity. We're partnering with those that do customers service training. We're partnering with those that work with healthcare organization. We're even partnering with organizations that are doing skills training because there's a lot of skills.

49:12 You know, we're talking about inspections, We're talking about plumbers, we're talking about electricians, and all of those most of them the guys have retired. We need a new generation. So you know, we're going out and doing trainings for skills. We're partnering with a lot of different organizations so then we can bring holistic solutions to organizations. So I'm just really happy to share this with you. You can contact me at a Sharp Outlook or a Sharp Consulting and we can talk about what your next steps are. Thank you for joining us here at a Sharp Outlook every Monday at eleven a Eastern time eight am specific time, and we are here. Our goal and purpose is for you to be informed, so stay informed. I want to thank you for joining us on a Sharp Outlook. We have been informed and energized to take the next steps.

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