Who are your process customers?

Authors: Dr. Johannes Tenschert , Dr. Julia Gamradt

Business process modeling rarely happens just as an academic exercise in a vaccum – actual business processes in practice may have a wide range of internal and external stakeholders. While the role ‘Customer‘ in a BPMN model almost always is a good hint on who should get special attention, it is rarely the only one. In this article, we depict an overview of whom to consider.

1 Introduction

Today’s customers, regardless of B2C or B2B settings and their role in a buying center, expect the same buying experiences that they already know when they listen to music, stream movies, or buy a new washing machine with one click [3].

While manual, bureaucratic processes can have a manual, bureaucratic digital twin, successful digital businesses typically put a special focus on how to reduce efforts, complexity and inconsistencies in customer-facing processes. The term?customer journey?[8, 4] typically describes the touch points throughout a buying process from the customer’s point of view, which might not directly translate to process instances from the supplier side.

With the shortage of skilled labor in many areas, organizations currently also learn that they might have more than one customer, and that recruiting yields similar topics. Hence, terms like?candidate journey?[7] and?employee journey?[2] arise as well.

Recognizing that there might be more than one customer in a business process may result in the questions “who are my customers?” and “when are they my customers?”. In the following sections, we look into common internal and external stakeholders during a BPM initiative as well as roles in the resulting business processes, and outline how to start a stakeholder analysis.

2 Common Stakeholders in BPM Initiatives

Being customer-focused entails knowing?when?stakeholders are customers. When looking into BPM initiatives, there are additional stakeholders during different phases of the lifecycle of a process. For many consulting firms, these stakeholders in fact are the customer during the initiative. But even if BPM initiatives are performed internally, some stakeholders need to be treated as customers as well. The following role names are heavily influenced by Dumas et al. [6]:

Process Owner.?A process owner is responsible for the process, and interested in its budget and performance. Hence, s/he is responsible for planning, organizing and monitoring the process, as well as securing the necessary resources. A process owner is responsible that the process is compliant with internal policy and external regulation.

Management Team.?The management team typically consists of a small group of people in C-level positions, and is responsible for overseeing all processes, resources, and the strategic direction of the organization. More than one person of the management team might have responsibility for a single process, i. e. in regard to its very existence, the budget, process performance, information system infrastructure, and human aspects (e. g. HR, work council). For strategic processes, the CEO of a company might be involved as well in regard to the overall organization performance.

Process Participant.?A process participant is directly involved in the executed process, by performing activities, determining decisions, or communicating. During a BPM initiative, process participants are involved as domain experts. Section 3 outlines how to determine which roles they assume during process execution. As the activities performed can influence attrition, internal roles could be “customers” as well.

Process Analyst.?Process analysts are involved in all phases of the BPM lifecycle [6], with an emphasis on process identification, discovery, analysis, and redesign. During the process implementation and process monitoring phases, they stay involved to coordinate activities. Process analysts thereby interact with all stakeholders during the BPM initiative, and translate business as well as IT requirements.

Process Methodologist.?Process methodologists have deep knowledge on methods, notations, techniques, and appropriate BPM software (architectures). During different phases and for different aspects of a BPM initiative, they can provide this knowledge in an advisory role, during training sessions for process analysts, or as a work member directly involved. Process methodologists are rare and therefore typically available only in large organizations, specialized consulting firms, and in founding teams of startups in the realm of business process management.

System Engineer.?During process redesign and implementation, system engineers collaborate with process analysts to capture system requirements and translate them into a system design. They implement, test, and deploy the process. As low-code platforms more and more enable process analysts to deploy business processes themselves, the role can increasingly be filled directly by the process analysts that initially modeled the process.

BPM Center of Excellence.?A BPM Center of Excellence (CoE) is established by organizations that have undergone multiple BPM projects – and consequently collected experience and process documentation. A CoE is an established organizational structure to preserve this knowledge, implement consistent standards across business processes and BPM initiatives, and design an overall process architecture that is consistent with the organization’s strategy. A CoE is common in large organizations, and can yield future process methodologists that gain practical experience in their respective expertise.

“Customer”.?The customer of the process at execution time. Here, you should have a broad view on who can be a customer, as sometimes it might for example be a candidate (HR processes), an employee, a potential supplier, or someone consuming your products and services in the typical meaning of a customer. Customers are often concerned about slow cycle times, costs, lack of transparency, traceability, or flexibility, and they typically do not care about why their preferred performance indicators do not match their expectations.

3 Roles in a Business Process

In this section, we focus on the roles that process participants can assume within process instances. Determining the roles in a business process is hard to generalize – they will vary drastically for different processes and organizations, and highly depend on the actions to be performed.

3.1 Examples

In figure 1, you can see a very simplified order-to-cash process model in BPMN. The pool “customer” makes it clear who the process customer probably is, but you also see swimlanes that represent the corresponding departments taking care of the activities.

Figure 2 is an additional example that is more complex in level of detail but also in the roles involved. The model depicts the process of continuously improving a medical product from beginning a substantial change to determining that the risk is acceptable and the product can be prepared for an update. Determining the customer here is not so easy and only indicated by “begin substantial change”, i. e. the customer could for example be a manager deciding to improve a product in a certain way, an auditor determining that the product has to be changed, or a paying customer or candidate requesting that the product needs to be improved according to his/her requirements.

3.2 Determining roles

Dietz [5] describes roles in a process as?actor roles?that have competencies to produce certain artifacts and responsibilities that determine which activities they need to coordinate. Even though most process modeling notations would indicate otherwise, actor roles are not triggered by events, but have a reason to act or not to act, and take actions of different business processes based on their agenda and priorities.

Moreover, for some business processes it is necessary that the concrete person acting within the role has?not?assumed another role in the process, e. g. considering the 4-eyes-principle in reviewing documents or other artifacts (control of records / documents, ISO 9001), or exam situations in which one should not be able to be their own examiner.

Hence, to determine the correct roles to be applied within a process, we first have to find out which activities are to be performed. Afterwards, we can for each activity ask the following, non-exhaustive questions:

1. Should the actor of this activity be internal or external to the organization (e. g. is it a request)?
2. Which actor has or which actors have the re- sponsibility over the activity?
3. Which actor is or which actors are competent to perform the activity?
4. Are there legal reasons that prevent certain actors from performing the activity?
5. Are there practical reasons that prevent certain actors from performing the activity?
6. Are there interdependencies to other activities preventing actors from or forcing actors to perform the activity?

If the activity should be external to the organization, then at least in BPMN you should consider applying a black-box-pool, as you can only make assumptions on how external participants act. For the concrete role names in your process models, you can often apply the position or department of the actors you identified with the previous questions. For new processes, you may often need to think of new role names, and probably training for those roles as well. Roles by interdependence requirements almost always need some new name, e. g. reviewer or examiner, that have to be annotated with the corresponding interdependencies as well.

4 Stakeholder Analysis

There are many methods in project management to analyse stakeholders. For BPM initiatives, this is useful both within the BPM initiative itself, but also for the resulting processes.

For a successful transformation, you almost always need a sponsor in management promoting the initiative and making sure it has sufficient resources to be performed. But for the time after the initiative, the success depends on many stakeholders as well – and they do not always need to be directly visible in your process model. For example, important stakeholders to think about in regulated domains are internal and external auditors. However, other stakeholders like shareholders, suppliers, partner organizations, the environment, interest groups, and more could be involved as well.

Methods of stakeholder analysis and stakeholder mapping therefore typically determine stakeholders and rank them by metrics to help in prioritizing their needs. For example, Cameron et al. [1] rank by needs and relative importance. The metrics to apply will revolve around power, interest, and being affected by the initiative and process execution.

Regardless of which stakeholder analysis method you apply, the plan typically is to unveil stakeholder interests, potential risks and chances, and knowing who to keep informed. The metrics will most likely vary between different phases of the BPM initiative and after deployment, so it is often sensible to perform multiple analyses for different stages of the project.?Important?stakeholders unveiled during the analyses should be treated as customers.

5 Conclusion

In summary, at different phases during a BPM initiative, and at execution time, there are many stakeholders in different roles involved. Not all stakeholders are directly involved as project participants of the BPM initiative, or as process participants of concrete process instances.

As soon as you make different roles and concrete stakeholders transparent, you can determine their importance and impact to the success of the BPM initiative, to process performance and runtime, and to the overall impact on organization performance. At different phases, other stakeholders will have characteristics of a “customer” and should be treated as such.

References

[1] Cameron, B.G., Seher, T., Crawley, E.F.: Goals for space exploration based on stakeholder value network considerations. Acta Astronautica?68 (11-12), 2088–2097 (2011)

[2] Claus, L.: HR disruption – time already to reinvent talent management. BRQ Business Research Quarterly?22(3), 207–215 (2019)

[3] Desmet, D., Markovitch, S., Paquette, C.: Speed and scale: Unlocking digital value in customer journeys (2015)

[4] Detscher, S.: Digitales Management und Marketing. Springer (2021)

[5] Dietz, J.: Enterprise Ontology: Theory and Methodology. Springer Science & Business Media (2006)

[6] Dumas, M., La Rosa, M., Mendling, J., Reijers, H.A.: Fundamentals of business process management. Springer (2018)

[7] Schill, D., Kracklauer, A.H., Rasche, C.: The quality of the candidate journey as an important aspect of the employer brand. In: Cambridge Conference Series — December 2017. p. 7 (2017)

[8] Winters, P.: Customer Strategy – Aus Kundensicht denken und handeln. Haufe-Lexware (2016)

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Authors

Dr. Johannes Tenschert focuses on agile process management, adaptive case management, process mining and regulated processes. Based on his doctoral thesis (computer science), Pertuniti has brought ultra-flexible business process management into practice.

In her doctoral thesis (business administration), Dr. Julia Gamradt specialized in transformations in companies, flexibilization, new work, and new approaches in HR. At Pertuniti, she enables our clients in mastering the requirements of the digital transformation.