Harvard Business Review has process all wrong

Today Mitch Gooze from Customer Manufacturing Group disagrees with a recent article in HBR.  You can find Mitch’s complete white paper in our whitepaper section of www.processgenie.com .  Enjoy!

What is a process? One definition is “a set of activities that turn inputs into outputs.” What makes a good process? We claim that would be a process that does what it is supposed to do when it is supposed to do it …reliably. What makes a great process? One that is effective and optimally efficient. And are there some business functions that are not amenable to process management?  We think not.

Recently The Harvard Business Review published an article that suggested that some activities are art and not amenable to process management. In fact, process management would make such activities function badly. In considering this article, it dawned on us that this thinking was at the root cause of many people’s misunderstanding of what a “process” really is, and
what process management really means.

People often consider that all processes need to be rigid. That is not true
and would result in many bad processes. The authors of the aforementioned Harvard Business Review article, despite their Ph.D.s fall into that trap, and further believe that the solution is to abandon process thinking for these “artistic” activities. We think they are misguided. Our thinking on this subject is more completely described in the white paper you can download free at www.processgenie.com

Tags: BPM, Business Process, Business Process Portal, SOA