Getting started on that process architecture

 In my previous posting I effectively started a sequence on the Riva method for building a process architecture for your organisation. I stressed that the central purpose of the process architecture is to tell us what processes we need in order to be in the business we are in. (By the bye, this makes it a very useful approach for getting started when you have an entirely new organisation do an entirely new job – it’s hard to know where to start without something like a Riva process architecture.)

In my book Business Process Management – A Rigorous Approach­ ­­I introduced a couple of useful characters: a Tutor and Pupil. They had some valuable discussions next to the water-cooler and it feels like a good moment to bring them back onto the stage. I’ll pass the baton to them . . .

Pupil: Well, I know you like to be both economical and clear in your use of terms so I should point out that you’ve already used two words without saying what you mean by them: organisation and business. I’ve heard you talking about ‘the business of the organisation’, and ‘the organisation doing its business’, and ‘the organisation being in business to . . .’ – just what do these mean?

Tutor: When I talk about an ‘organisation’ don’t assume I’m only talking about some corporate identity such as Venice Consulting, or the Ministry of Defence, or a department in the Ministry of Defence, or a particular bank, or a scout troop, or a church hall committee. Those certainly count as organisations, but an organisation can also be any grouping of people and/or corporate bodies. How about a service company and its clients, a manufacturing company and its immediate suppliers, or a manufacturing company and its entire supply chain? Or a police force, or a police force and the justice system together, or the justice system and the social welfare system together.

Pupil: I think you’re saying it’s really whatever grouping of people we want to talk about.

Tutor: I knew you wouldn’t like that but it’s true. And it’s important to feel the freedom to think about these more complex gatherings if we are to avoid the silo trap. The other thing I want to point out is that one organisation can have many businesses, or many aspects to its business.

Pupil: But surely one organisation is in one business?

Tutor: At some level of abstraction that might be true for some organisations.  But take a Local Authority they are a gathering of many different overlapping ‘businesses’ – a real A-Z organisation, from aliens to zoos – they deal with all human life. So we might want to concentrate on the ‘business of traffic management in a local authority’.

Pupil: I like the idea of characterising both the business and the organisation in the one phrase. I can imagine things like ‘the business of crime prevention in a local authority’ or ‘the business of street safety in a local authority’ – I guess that we might want to investigate the processes of these ‘businesses’ and to do that we will want a process architecture for them.

Tutor: Exactly – and I can go a step further because we might have a very focused organisation yet identify particular aspects to its business: ‘the business of asset management in the Ministry of Administrative Affairs’ or ‘the business of retaining staff in our retail arm’. We can think of these as supra-departmental practice areas or disciplines. Here are some more for you: ‘the business of emergency surgery in a hospital’, ‘the business of research and development in a pharmaceutical company’, ‘the business of customer care in a retail chain’. Can you push the idea a bit further?

Pupil: Well I guess I could generalise it to think in terms of any sort of ‘venture’? How about raising money for a charity?

Tutor: Perfect. Any method worth its salt should allow us to construct a process architecture for ‘the business of raising money at a charity’. And I’ll give you a nice example I came across recently: ‘the business of getting innovations into the National Health Service’. It’s a big complex affair involving many organisations operating as one large virtual one: governments departments, venture capitalists, health authorities, regulatory bodies, and so on. How do you get your arms round that one? With a Riva process architecture – it’s been done.  So, right at the start of the exercise to prepare a process architecture it’s good practice to focus minds by deciding what business and what organisation.  Next time we meet we’ll talk through some of the problems you’ve been having with the concepts of essential business entities and units of work. They’re central to getting to that process architecture and the clearer you are about them the easier it becomes.

Pupil: It’s a deal!

Best wishes, Martyn Ould