A few years ago – all this confused me – a lot. Such an important thing, taken so lightly.

I challenge you to ask a few people in your organization to tell you what a process is. I’m sure you will be baffled by the different meanings people tend to give.

It seemed that everybody had a different take on what a process is, how it should be labeled, and how we can present them. How can this be, I wondered? What is going on?

A process is a process, isn’t it?

Who cares about this? I hope you do because when processes are misused, our improvement projects are all at risk. It’s rather difficult to optimize, automate, model, measure something that isn’t a process, isn’t it?

Some people can create perfect process models with all the correct BPMN elements, but struggle to see where their model fits in the bigger picture of the organization as a whole. Others are perfectly capable of defining the process landscapes of their organizations but don’t know how to drill down to the details they need. Even others are calling things processes but are nowhere near defining real processes, causing struggles later on. I challenge you to draw BPMN diagrams or define metrics of the Hire-to-retire process, or the customer relationship management process.

A process is not a trivial thing. A process is a very specific thing, with clear characteristics. So some things are a process and others are not.

Isn’t there anything out there that can help us to get this right?

Of course, there is! Meet our

This three-part survival kit offers you all you need to know to become a real process expert.

First of all, we want to make sure there is no more discussion about what a process is and isn’t. If you apply this five-step sanity check, you’ll discover the five key characteristics of an end-to-end business process. Each thing you call a process, should have very specific and clear answers to each of the characteristics.

If you ever want to call yourself a true process master, this should be the mantra you chant every night before going to bed.

Once you get that definition right, you’ll be one step closer to correctly identify processes in your organization. But if you do it right, you easily discover hundreds of end-to-end processes. Soon you’ll need a better way to structure these processes. For that, we need to take a closer look at our process hierarchy.

This process hierarchy represents…well the hierarchy of processes. The discovered end-to-end processes are the key component of the architecture. Although we call these end-to-end processes, this is not the end.

A company can only generate value (hence the value-chain) and realize products and services when these end-to-end processes interact. These related processes can be described and visualized by building a process hierarchy. The top of the hierarch shows what the organization does and the bottom details how we do it.

Download the survival kit to know more about the different levels.

If everything goes to plan, it’s now time to draw BPMN diagrams. Wait…more than 100 processes equals 100 BPMN diagrams – that will take me like, let me think … 1 BPMN diagram 2 days of work …. 1 day for validation. And 1 day of rework. That’s about…400 days.

No just stop there. Building BPMN diagrams is great but it’s a huge effort as well. There must be a better way. Let’s bring in the third part of the survival kit, the process profile. The process profile shows eight of the process’s most important characteristics. Sometimes you don't have to model every single process in your organization, sometimes filling in all the elements of this profile is enough to get an overview of your process.

Do you want to learn more about the process definition, the process hierarchy, and the process profile? In our new course "Process Discovery" we give tons of examples, practical tips, and tricks and we discuss a hands-on method to identify your process.

Go discover the course here.

Enjoy,

Manu