In 2004, Sears began a series of strategic projects to improve its operational effectiveness. One of the projects was to make process improvements at the Accounting Services Center. Dave Fleer, a Business Process Consultant for Sears, helped the Accounting Services Center improve its processes.
Why Risk Management is Top of Mind
Risk Management – this single objective is critical to the success of both commercial and government organizations. The need to proactively manage risk has increased in importance recently due to several factors – including high-profile business failures, government breakdowns in security and the rise in terrorism, and the increasing amounts of regulation being mandated by various governments.
There are many approaches to documenting business processes. These include group and individual interviews, white boarding, reviewing existing documentation, and job shadowing.
Interviewing the people doing the job is an effective method to understanding how a business process is currently done. Whether you are documenting the current state or future state, successful interviews require planning, communication and a high-degree of people skills and intuition. Following are some ways to ensure that your interviews achieve the desired results.
Most any organization will surely concede that it desires improved performance. More precisely, most organizations expect their performance to improve. However, very few organizations actually plan to enhance their performance. They simply expect it to happen as a normal course of business.
After speaking at a Six Sigma conference I was asked what my definition of BPM is and what differentiates it from Six Sigma. The topic of my presentation was how to identify important change programs. I am not sure what exact wording I used but I must have first stated that I am not a Six Sigma expert, only a Six Sigma customer, but Six Sigma did not seem to use standards. The BPM definition must have included process measurement, modeling and change planning. Later in my hotel room I realized I never put to paper what my definition is of BPM.
Who?
Business Analysts identify the business needs of their clients and stakeholders to help determine solutions to business problems. They typically perform a liaison function to software developers by serving as business problem solvers. They play a vital role throughout the project life cycle by understanding and representing stakeholder needs, documenting and organizing the requirements for a system, and communicating requirements to an entire team.
In the previous article we established the service-orientation design paradigm as currently providing us with the following eight common principles:
•services share a formal contract
•services are loosely coupled
•services abstract underlying logic
•services are reusable
You have dedicated significant resources to creating a services oriented architecture (SOA), investing heavily in hardware, software and personnel. You have trained people, hired experts, engaged vendors and deployed small scale services under an SOA framework. You have moved beyond the crawling stage and are ready to advance to the next stage of SOA deployment. But there is an elephant in the room no one wants to mention – your existing systems.
This is the first article in an eight-part series dedicated to exploring the common principles of service-orientation. Acclaimed author Thomas Erl shares his insights into the service-orientation design paradigm by providing excerpts from his second SOA book “Service-Oriented Architecture: Concepts, Technology, and Design”, supplemented with additional commentary.
The adoption of SOA often comes with an expectation that many of the benefits commonly associated with service-oriented technology platforms will be realized simply through their successful implementation.
Is your organization challenged with the need to take an existing legacy system and re-architect it into new technology? But, what happens if that legacy application has no current system documentation, no available application SMEs or business SMEs who you can interview to identify how the existing system works?
The solution is the vision of Business Rules, with emphasis on business rule mining. Business rules are the most essential, non procedural statements behind business policy and requirements.
Everyone starts here.
You're looking for a way to improve your process improvement skills, but you're not sure where to start.
Earning your Business Process Management Specialist (BPMS) Certificate will give you the competitive advantage you need in today's world. Our courses help you deliver faster and makes projects easier.
Your skills will include building hierarchical process models, using tools to analyze and assess process performance, defining critical process metrics, using best practice principles to redesign processes, developing process improvement project plans, building a center of excellence, and establishing process governance.
The BPMS Certificate is the perfect way to show employers that you are serious about business process management. With in-depth knowledge of process improvement and management, you'll be able to take your business career to the next level.
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