The release of the Academy Award nominations last January might seem to have little to do with business process management. But it does. In many ways, movies are the quintessential process industry. Moreover, they demonstrate that process management is still more of an art than a science.
The film industry has an interesting hybrid structure. For most motion pictures, a movie studio, either large or small, serves as the bank, distribution arm and marketing department for an independent film company that actually makes the movie. On the one hand, funding, distribution and marketing are discrete functions. On the other hand, they are deeply implicated in the process of creating a blockbuster movie that makes a lot of money. The studios are permanent operations. As one project comes to a close, studio executives turn their attention to the next project.
The independent film production companies, in general, are small companies that run on a largely ad hoc basis. When they get the green light from a studio–in other words, their project gets funding–they swing into action. Most movie productions have three distinct stages: pre-production, production and post-production. At each step, the producers hire outside contractors to perform specific functions, from acting, to set design, to accounting. Food services is outsourced. Wardrobe is outsourced. Casting is outsourced. Even direction is outsourced.
Function and Process
Each function involved in making a movie is well understood. Producers use the best talent available for each of the functions. And, each of those functional areas is recognized at–yes, you guessed it–the Academy Awards. Moreover, the process of making a movie is a familiar one. It hasn’t changed that much over the last 50 years. People know what has to be done and how to do it.
But if BPM relies on envisioning an end-state and then knitting the relevant functions together into an appropriate process to reach that end-state, perhaps people in the movie business do not really know how to make a great, or even successful, motion picture. After all, they do not really understand the process that results in the product they want. How to make a successful motion picture is largely a mystery. If this weren’t true, you would have fewer flops that cost hundreds of millions of dollars to produce. Far more films would actually be entertaining.
Art and Science
Despite a deep knowledge of all aspects of film-making, the process that allows the producers and the studio to arrive at the end-state of making a really entertaining and profitable picture is not well understood. Making the sub-processes more efficient or repeatable is not enough; the processes combine in unanticipated ways. In the movie business, the unanticipated intersections may be where success is born.
The complexity involved with the interaction of processes is why many BPM experts suggest starting small. That allows companies not only to gain experience, but also to begin to understand how smaller processes intersect with the overall operation of the enterprise. That can be considered the science of BPM.
Too often, people who get excited about BPM tend to view enterprises as a big collection of processes–all sitting there waiting to be managed. And to some degree they are right.
But the precise ways all those processes intersect to produce a desired end-state is not always clear. In fact, applying BPM correctly on successive process layers is still an art, requiring creativity and risk taking.
