Business Process Owners touch other peoples stuff

This is a big conundrom in the process management world - when your business is structured in a vertical org-chart or traditional cost centre model and you start down the path of business process improvement just about everyone will tell you that you need Business Process Owners (BPO). They are champions responsible and accountable for the process end-to-end regardless of the edge-to-edge execution across divisional lines.

What that actually means is the BPO needs to be authorised to make changes to processes and tasks within the divisions that intersect with their process. In other words - they touch other people's stuff!

How do you reconcile that in senior management meetings?

I don't think there are any easy answers to this however I have heard of a few approaches to it, some very radical, others less so.

Extreme radical approach - transfer the IT budget out of the CIO role and into the CPO (Chief Process Officer). Budget only gets allocated on a process basis rather than a divisional basis. Of course you probably need to appoint a CPO first. This is for the maturity level 5 organisation perhaps.

Less radical - identify a set of KPIs for the Divisional Managers that are based around the performance of end-to-end process quality and link them to the annual performance bonuses.

Least radical - define service level agreements between the divisions and measure and monitor the process hand off activities and publish the measurements (effectively a leader board/shame list).

BPO's need the authority to make changes in order to improve a process even though the executors of the changes may not be in their reporting line. Indeed, an improvement to a specific process in one area may directly correlate to an increase in cost or responsibility within a division and come with little or no direct benefit. People in general loathe to have multiple bosses as the prioritisation of issues inevitably clash. Companies need to find ways of achieving the process improvements necessary without tearing the business to pieces.

I think in the end the relationship, and maturity, of the senior management team is pivotal in resolving this challenge. Finding common enterprise level goals and methods of measuring and reporting on these is perhaps a good place to start.