Who owns business process

As a result, the process user, who might have little understanding of the internal workings of the process but has a significant stake in its success, can be selected as the process owner.

We develop cost effective business management tools that will evolve with your business as it grows…. Who Owns the Process. A business process seldom improves if there is no one who feels that he or she owns it.

Therefore, the first criterion for improvement must be ownership. One way to decide who feels or should feel the most ownership of a particular process is to answer the following questions. Who is the person with the most:. He or she should be:. It allows process owners to quickly identify bottlenecks and opportunities for improvement. Once your process owners have access to data insights, you can hold them accountable for suggesting process improvements, determining key performance indicators and measuring business benefits.

In other words, what happens if they get hit by a bus? If a process owner disappears, can the company still function? While a process may still be able to be executed, there will be no one to monitor performance or resolve issues. Process documentation can mitigate the bus factor. Effective documentation allows anybody to manage, troubleshoot and complete a process without asking the process owner for guidance.

When we work with clients, we ensure that process owners are tasked with developing clear and simple documentation. In addition, we ensure this documentation is updated as processes evolve. Process owners need to understand how their processes fit into the grand scheme of the business. This is especially important when it comes to process improvement because it gives the process owner insight into what outputs are commonly used downstream. Reengineering a process around a rarely used output is not a good use of time.

No individual process operates in a silo. In fact, process changes often disrupt systems and processes downstream. When process owners understand this, they can help the company develop a change management plan that ensures a smooth transition for affected employees. Process maps are useful in many scenarios. For example, if an employee sees a failure in a process and understands the downstream processes that are affected, they can warn the process owner in charge of those systems.

This gives the process owner time to fix the problem, work around it or push back timelines. Process maps are also useful when a company is gathering ERP requirements.

Requirements gathering sessions are essential for a successful ERP selection. Empower End Users An excellent example of this mindset is illustrated in the Japanese phrase, Kaizen, meaning continuous improvement. Toyota is a company that embraces Kaizen principles. This means employees at every level of the company can make process improvements. Because of movement of people, skills and responsibilities into an organisation, out of an organisation, and between various work-groups with an organisation, ownership will always be fluid.

To facilitate the active management of the identification, and communication of ownership and various custodianship roles, this article also contains a proposal for a business process ownership database. The ownership problem 1. Ownership In general society, even outside of the corporate workplace, ownership is often a problem - a two-way problem. Ownership is an abstract human relational concept. Ownership can therefore be both a blessing and a curse.

Which it is depends on the relative value placed by people on the balance between the social costs and benefits of acknowledging or rejecting ownership. Ownership has another element of relativity to it. Various parties have a real interest in a specific object, but for different reasons.

Some parties have a critical survival interest in an object, while others may have only a passing interest in the same object. True ownership can be described as having the primary responsibility for the object with all of the rights and obligations that arise from this recognition.

Other parties may indeed have secondary responsibility or interests in an object, but the success or failure of the object has a lesser impact on them than on the party with primary responsibility. Ownership in the workplace In the workplace these same social forces come into play. Business processes are company social currency.

Social standing in the company is based on how many high value business processes are owned. There are desirable business processes to own, and there are also undesirable business processes, which it seems better to disown. Each business process carries a different level of reward or stigma.

These rewards often have both monetary and status value attached to them. In the corporate world business processes are often traded like real objects among managers to achieve what they believe to be an equitable balance.

When this balance shifts and is perceived to be inequitable by one or more parties, office politics arise. Office politics can be seen as the heat generated by friction over business process ownership in the quest to advance corporate social status.

The parties involved in business process ownership disputes are various layers of management. The actual business process performers and lower level business process owners seldom have much of a say in the higher-level ownership of a business process. They are part of the business process and are often traded between higher-level managers along with the business process itself. The cost of unclear ownership and other roles Unclear business process roles carry a high business cost.

These costs can be related to business process ownership gaps and overlaps and resultant confusion and conflicts. Ownership gaps Some business processes have a number of stakeholders, but no apparent owners.

This results in a gap into which many good ideas disappear. Often a lot of budget and effort is spent on developing an idea, but when it comes to implementation nobody wants to take responsibility for giving a final thumbs-up or thumbs-down decision or allocating portions of their budgets to the required change effort.

The work gets filed for future reference and is never heard of again. Ownership gaps result in monetary and opportunity costs. Some compulsory business process changes as the result of e. This may lead to legal risks, adverse auditing findings, actual penalties or bad publicity damaging the corporate brand.

To try and cope with such situations business process change requirements are often broadcast by e-mail, via the grapevine or in corporate publications - hoping that through this shotgun approach all interested parties will somehow get to hear of it, understand the relevance and take action. Often one or more of these expected results do not materialise.

If clear ownership is not evident project managers are also forced to hold huge project initiation sessions, absorbing many hours of expensive company resources, in the bid to cover all bases. A more knowledge-driven targeted approach to the real business process owners can save much of this cost.

Ownership overlaps Some business processes have a number of stakeholders who all think they are the owners of parts of the process or the whole process. When this overlap happens, each supposed owner often identifies his own strategy for the business process and issues his own process change instructions to conform to his understanding of the purpose of the business process. These conflicting instructions lead to frustration by all parties and confusion for other stakeholders and change agents who have to try and implement the varying changes.

In this confusion change agents tasked with implementing change instructions start playing the role of referee and decide which instructions to implement — effectively creating an additional owner of the disputed business process, and further complicating an already complex situation.

The IT department is often stuck in the middle as arbitrator — and scapegoat if things go awry. There is also a cost to ownership overlaps. Some of these costs are inefficient processes, organisational disharmony and wasted energy that could have been better spent on other business process improvements.

The benefits of clear ownership and other roles Establishing clear business process roles holds direct and indirect benefits for a company. Clear business process roles allow management to direct scarce corporate resources towards a more clearly defined target knowing that less time, money and effort will be wasted fighting uncertainty and more resources will be used in achieving company objectives. The cause of unclear roles Unclear business roles result from a number of causes.

One of these is the housing of multiple specialist skills in the same work-unit or individual. This may be because of gradual accretion of business process ownership over years and even decades without these being explicitly defined. Some processes are irregular or operate on a long cycle. As they are not clearly known, they are not passed on to new owners, or are incompletely passed on.

Another cause is the migration of knowledgeable and skilled individuals from one position in the company to another. They often drag a comet-tail of partial responsibilities along behind them, leaving a trail of confusion as to the real ownership of the business processes. The overall problem can therefore be pinned down to incomplete formal identification of business process ownership. This is closely followed by insufficient attention to transition management whenever there is an organisational restructure or whenever there is movement of people into, out of, or within a work unit.

The resolution to unclear roles Resolving the confusion around business process roles is advantageous to all organisational units at all levels.

To achieve this there are a few steps to resolve and prevent the situation. Firstly the importance of a clear-cut ownership paradigm has to be understood by the most senior levels of management of the business area wanting to achieve this. It is of little use if all of the departmental managers in a business unit agree on an ownership model if this is not acknowledged and respected by at least the lowest-level common manager above them in the organisational structure.

In other words, the most senior direct business process owner in the business area under scrutiny has to be fully involved in the process. Secondly, the role matrix has to cover all of the significant roles related to every business process. There must be one and only one primary business process owner for every business process. All other roles have to be clearly identified and responsibilities clearly described. The roles need to be described in terms of position rather than individuals, because managers come and go, but business processes are forever.

All of the role players must agree to their inclusion in the responsibility matrix and the scope of their involvement in the business process. Ideally there would be a few general relationship roles with clear definitions accepted and understood by all stakeholders. Thirdly, the role matrix needs to be maintained. This should happen via a clear transition management process that is invariably followed whenever there is a change of person, structure or function.

The practical implementation of a role matrix The debate about who the owner of business processes is has been raging for many years. Few people in the various roles that affect business processes will argue against this conceptual statement. However at an implementation level there are a wide variety of responses that range from lip-service, i. What is a business process Before we can define business process ownership and other roles, we need to have a common understanding of what a business process is.

We can use a common definition that:. A business process is a set of coordinated tasks and activities, conducted by both people and equipment that will lead to accomplishing a specific organisational goal. These objects require clearer identification when it comes down to practical identification and implementation of an ownership model. Assignment of process ownership is one of the indicators of an increasing level of process maturity.

One of the most important questions to consider when embarking on a process journey is "Who should we select as our Process Owner s? But why is this difficult? Ironically, one of the most neglected areas of transformation in any type of change is definition and assignment of roles and responsibilities.

Although there is now a general acknowledgement that people are one of if not the most critical success factors in any type of business transformation, most organizations are not very accomplished at implementing 'people' oriented changes. In an attempt to understand this aspect of business process management, we need to define the responsibilities of effective Process Owners.

The Process Owner is responsible for the governance of process performance and process change — and specifically:. Next, we need to define the skills and capabilities for Process Owners. Table 1 outlines those skills and capabilities at a high level, broken down by knowledge, skill, and expertise.

Knowledge is defined as a general awareness and understanding of the topic, sufficient to make basic decisions and provide general guidance. Skill is defined as the knowledge plus the ability to do the work related to the topic, make general decisions, and provide the coaching to others. Expertise is defined as knowledge plus skills with proven experience coaching and helping others, making directional decisions, setting policy, and taking the lead.

There are very good reasons for this. Many technology solutions are focused on solving problems in specific functional areas in the organization. As these solutions are implemented and become part of how the organization delivers value to its customers, the business often realizes that they needed the information in these systems to be available to other functional areas of the organization. Integrating the systems takes time and often causes data integrity problems as well as constraining the flexibility of the organization's processes.

As the pace of change increases every day, organizations are finding it more and more difficult to respond quickly and effectively. As a result, many of the resources assigned to work on the processes are in the technology organization. The question is "Should Process Owners be former technologists, business subject matter experts, or process experts?

With responsibilities, skills, and capabilities outlined, the final choice for most organizations is one of subject matter expertise. In an ideal world, we would select individuals who have all these types of expertise. However, individuals with a background that is this broad are rare.

Since Process Owners are fully responsible for the process — including the process performance, process maturity, process improvements, and the performance of the resources in the process — the selection of a Process Owner is critical to the success of an organization's Business Process Management implementation.