What is it about process?

What is it about process and why do we want to manage it?

I am always pondering on ways to explain this to clients and watching Shane Warne retire recently from Australian international cricket gave me another insight. Warne, with perhaps an unimpressive track record off the pitch, is without doubt one of the world's best cricket bowlers, if not the best to date - even I who doesn't follow the game with much passion or attention can see this much.

Bowling of course is a process, a process that many of us are completely hopeless at and one that Warne is simply spectacular at. With a combination of talent and practice he consistently manages to bamboozle the opposition batsmen and take the wickets. The problem for the Australian cricket team now is how do they replace the loss of such an important "processor" in their business? Indeed the loss of three very competent cricket "processors" as Glenn McGrath and Justin Langer also bowed out on the same day.

This is the problem with manual processes (and processors) - you spend a lot of time and money training and skilling someone up to perform the task efficiently and effectively and in doing so you become exposed to the risks of losing that person with catastrophic effects on productivity and results. From a human resources management viewpoint you also want to be able to offer personal development and growth opportunities to individuals and this will be hampered by your reliance on specific people doing specific tasks above all else. Procedural documentation is all very well but "processing" is all about doing, not describing.

This is where a business process management suite (BPMS) can protect you from the storms of workforce turnover - not much help admittedly for the Australian cricket team - but masterful for directing and controlling the everyday business processes that earn you your crust every month. If a business process can be codified by a set of rules, then it can be orchestrated and trafficked through a BPMS. So anyone in your business can disappear tomorrow and your operations will survive the day.

Obviously there will still be training, productivity and efficiency challenges as people move in, around and out of the organisation however the rules and escalation points defined in a quality BPMS implementation should keep things moving along very nicely.