Business Process Analysis | Michael Clark

Business Process Analysis?

Business Process Analysis (BPA) controls the processes that are present in an organisation. It is a practical method to ensure that the operations are efficient and effective, resulting in a better and more cost-efficient organisation.

The term business process analysis covers how we

• • • study
    • identify
    • change
    • monitor business processes

BPA is a business practice, encompassing techniques and structured methods. It defines and changes existing procedures (As-Is), so they align with an improved future state of affairs (To-Be). It is about formalising better methods to complete a task.

Successfully using BPA involves:

• • • Organising around outcomes, not tasks, to ensure the proper focus is maintained
      
    • Correcting and improving processes before (potentially) automating them; otherwise, all you’ve done is make the mess run faster
    • Establishing processes and assigning ownership lest the work and improvements drift away—and they will, as human nature takes over and the momentum peters out
    • Standardising processes across the enterprise so they can be more readily understood and managed, errors reduced, and risks mitigated
    • Enabling continuous change so the improvements can be extended and propagated over time
    • Improving existing processes, rather than building radically new or “perfect” ones because that can take so long as to erode or negate any gains achieved

BPA should continuously evaluate the processes and take actions to improve the total flow, leading to a continuous cycle of assessing and developing the business.

The recognised steps in BPA are:

• • • Analyse
    • Re-design and model
    • Implement
    • Monitor
    • Manage
    • Automate

Getting information from Point A to Point C when it needs to be there is only part of the solution. The rest involves requesting the insights you need and then having those ideas communicated to you in an immediately usable format.

Workflow is more than just simply moving things from A to B to C to D because it allows teams to perform tasks in parallel, saving time and increasing productivity. It ables the management of multiple processes concurrently and accommodates exceptions and conditions by applying user-defined rules.

It involves much operational analysis and flowcharting to identify bottlenecks or issues related to people or the underlying infrastructure.

We must remember business processes should include the mobile workforce and how mobile devices factor into the accomplishment of the overall business goals.