20 August 2017
Understanding Business Processes
Working in a new paradigm
A “way of seeing things” is also a way of not seeing other things and the business process perspective on organisations emerged in the 20th Century as earlier perspectives on business were found wanting in various ways.
The earliest management writers and theorists focused on defining the role of the manager or designing the organisation structure in a manner which would achieve the best results for the enterprise, but it was relatively recently, in the post-War period, that more attention was given to business processes, typically as part of a Total Quality Management or “lean” approach to understanding businesses and achieving continuous improvement.
Business Process Re-engineering, which started to be implemented in many businesses in the 1990’s became a major trend for consultant-driven business change across the advanced industrial economies. It was based on the combination of a radical “bottom-up” examination of the way in which businesses added value to their inputs with a “holistic” perspective on the need for all components of a business to be working in a balanced and well-coordinated manner so as to achieve greatest efficiency and effectiveness.
At one level the process perspective was driven by very detailed examination of the chain of steps through which different parts of a business added value to raw material inputs. This was closely associated with the “lean” manufacturing approach pioneered by Toyota which sought to identify and eliminate all forms of waste in production processes and is perhaps most popularly known as “Just-in-time” production, which focused on minimising stocks of materials used in manufacturing.
At another level, the process perspective was associated with the pioneering work of Stafford Beer reflected in his book “Brain of the Firm” whose distinctive approach was to regard an organisation (whether in commercial business, in government or the “third sector”) as if it were a living organism located within an environment. His “Viable Systems Model” viewed an organisation as being in a continuous process of exchange with its environment where it could survive, thrive, or die depending on the success with which the its five critical systems, necessary to survival, worked together.
The combination of the detailed analysis of value-adding production process steps with the holistic perspective, emphasising the need for a balance between different parts of the organisation, sets a context within which many themes of management thought since the Industrial Revolution can be embraced.
For example, the mechanistic models of man-management associated with F.W.Taylor and the “Human Relations School” of Elton Mayo, the linear programming production management and “statistical process control” perspectives can be combined in a pragmatic mix of approaches tailored to the circumstances of individual businesses or organisations.
The training course sets out some of the historical background for this thinking, while focusing on the way in which these perspectives can be applied in practical ways to the challenge of achieving beneficial change in today’s organisations.
