Imagine launching a transformative project with clarity and confidence, rather than navigating through confusion and inefficiency. Consider two scenarios:
In the first scenario, your organization begins a transformative project with minimal documentation of current operations. Personnel spend hours upon hours explaining processes, systems, and integrations to external consultants. Meetings are repetitive, project scoping is vague, and identifying optimization opportunities is challenging. Requirements gathering is insufficient, and potential suppliers struggle to understand the business context during RFI/RFP phases. Each project starts from scratch, consuming significant time and resources just to structure your operations.
In the second scenario, your organization has a well-documented conceptual structure. As you plan your project, you can quickly identify major changes to the business, and involve relevant process owners quickly, initiating the change management in early stages of the project. Needs and critical requirements per process are gathered efficiently. Potential external consultants grasp the current state, which allows the planning of the future state IT-landscape to begin with significant efficiency. During RFI/RFP phases, suppliers understand the context better, providing more accurate proposals and estimates.
Which scenario would you choose?
Benefits and uses of process architecture in projects
As emphasized in my previous article, having a clear structure of business operations not only mitigates many risks associated with large projects, but also enables the efficient design and implementation of solutions which support the organizations goals. For instance, using processes as a backbone in projects allows for a more structured approach to:
- Manage further continuous improvement
- Understand the needs of the business in different operative contexts
- Understand challenges in current processes, and where there is significant potential for improvement
- Understand the scope of change, and to communicate this easily
- Identify needed project participants
- Elicit requirements for the future solution
- Design the new solution
- Design the future process
- Test the processes that have been designed (including process variations and E2E business scenarios)
Governance, project dependency management and solution quality
In our approach, we never consider business processes in isolation; we always map IT-components to the processes. For example, we ensure visibility into which systems are used by which processes. We also highlight specific integrations and data flows within processes. This allows us to connect processes to each other to create meaningful end-to-end business scenarios that showcase not only the business process logic, but also the IT solutions that enable the processes.
Considering project details, understanding critical process variations is crucial for solution quality. Process architecture allows for the consideration of important variations in solution design, ensuring that there is sufficient understanding and clarity over different variations of the same processes.
Furthermore, establishing governance over multiple projects becomes feasible by identifying processes with overlapping development initiatives. This perspective is extremely valuable for identifying and managing important project dependencies.
Conclusion
Although the choice between the two scenarios seems clear, many projects still start from scratch, always beginning with a blank page. However, we know that a different approach is entirely possible. By investing some time and effort into creating a comprehensive business process structure, you gain benefits not just for the current project, but for all future projects as well.
So, which path will you choose for your next transformative project? Will you go with the blank-paper approach, filled with confusion and inefficiency, or will you embrace a more structured, well-documented approach that provides clarity and efficiency? The choice is yours.
