Dynamic Process Management: Visibility, Control and Flexibility

InfoManagement Direct, March 2007

Scott Byrnes

The "ding" from the computer means another email has arrived. But it's not just one email; there are dozens of new messages. One is a meeting invite from the CEO, asking you to present your quarterly budget at Thursday's board meeting. Before you can answer the CEO's note, his administrative assistant, courtesy copied on the original request, writes you with a deadline for your PowerPoint presentation. Several more messages arrive from your staff members, providing status updates to various tasks you assigned them last week. Unfortunately, you have also been courtesy copied on the responses from their direct reports who have been gathering the detailed information necessary to respond to your request. You are struggling to assimilate it all.

Sound familiar? We can all relate to the daily influx of email we receive, and at times we feel buried by it. According to a report from the Harvard Business School, "While all knowledge workers surveyed used email, 26 percent felt it was overused in their organizations, 21 percent felt overwhelmed by it, and 15 percent felt that it actually diminished their productivity."¹ 

In today's world, email is the primary tool for facilitating daily work. The increasingly common problem of email overload, however, makes it difficult for workers - who receive and are courtesy copied on too many emails - to keep track of projects. Executives and managers, already stretched thin, must read every email within their inbox to know whether a primary assignment has been subdelegated, what tasks require immediate attention and the status of mission-critical activities.

Today's dynamic environment - emails, instant messages, phone calls and informal meetings - leaves executives and managers with almost no visibility into the operational activities of their direct reports. While quick and efficient, email lacks the enterprise visibility necessary to monitor work in real time, identify issues as they unfold or take corrective action before larger problems arise. Fed up with these challenges and seeking a proactive way to drive visibility, control, accountability and productivity, executives are taking a new approach: dynamic process management.

Why Traditional Business Process Management (BPM) Falls Short

The goal of traditional BPM is to drive consistency and efficiency of operations by modeling and automating an organization's core business processes - expense reporting, employee on-boarding, benefit claims processing and more. These processes are static and structured, making them easy to document, model and automate.

Unfortunately, most of the work performed within organizations today is executed in an unstructured environment of emails, meetings, phone calls and face-to-face meetings. In other words, everyday work is happening in a dynamic environment that cannot be modeled in a static way. This often means that senior management has no visibility to ideas as they are proposed, plans as they are formulated and problems as they are solved. Senior management gains visibility only after the work is completed and the documents, revenue figures or sales plans have been reported. The result is a reactive, nonagile enterprise that is not driven by the directives of senior management and cannot improve based upon an understanding of what is or is not working on a daily basis. In order for BPM to positively impact today's unstructured work environment and provide the necessary visibility and control for business leaders, it must become more dynamic.

Static Versus Dynamic BPM

The advantage of static, structured BPM is that processes have been modeled based upon best practices. They include links to information assets, subject matter experts and forms that help knowledge workers execute the task optimally, based upon an understanding of what has worked well in the past. Whereas traditional BPM provides structured workflow to route tasks through multiple parties and approvals to completion, it is too rigid to accommodate the dynamic nature of today's business environment. There is often no way to know in advance what a task will entail and, therefore, no way to leverage a predefined model.

Enter dynamic BPM. To find a middle ground between structure and flexibility, a type of BPM that is dynamic in nature, has evolved to model and display work in real time. What was once a series of disjointed peer-to-peer emails is now a single, centralized dashboard, clearly illustrating the journey of all work items from creation, to assignment, to sub-delegation, to completion - including all individuals involved, all collaboration, all attachments and all related status information.

Because an increasing percentage of work is conducted on-the-fly, the next-generation of BPM helps overcome a lack of structure by dynamically modeling the day-to-day activities within an organization and providing visibility, control, accountability and productivity for mission-critical activities.

Visibility

Traditional BPM provides executive visibility into structured work, such as the approval of a high-value loan application. Dynamic BPM takes this to the next level by providing visibility into the real-time status of an entire work item's lifecycle, understanding the players involved and their collaborative discussions, versioned documents that support decisions and any involvement by individuals external to the enterprise.

Additionally, managers gain visibility into goals tracking and trends, collectively providing a succinct and clear picture of organizational performance. Through dashboards, they are able to view assignments and status, whether assignees have divided and sub-delegated work, who has been tasked as a result, which actions are completed or still pending, where bottlenecks exist and if tasks will be completed on time. This level of visibility proves highly beneficial when deadlines are approaching or work items are overdue.

Furthermore, executives achieve insight into performance standards such as how long it takes an employee to complete a task, how many activities an employee can successfully undertake at once and how often an employee delegates tasks, thereby enabling better business decisions in the future.

Control

Dynamic BPM's enhanced control enables leaders to act on information quickly and create, cancel, suspend or restart tasks as needed. Business leaders can modify tasks, add assignees or reassign work upon acquiring new intelligence. Leveraging dynamic BPM to exercise and gain this control, executives can quickly create ad hoc yet high-priority tasks that in turn can be subdivided and forwarded to leverage the most knowledgeable human and system assets while being monitored continuously.

Accountability

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