Jim Sinur

The Harmonic Journey

In an ideal world, BPM at your organization moves in a steady and straight line through the stages of BPM maturity in a nice sequential manner with a dedicated and consistent effort. This means you probably have progressed from a project driven/functional focus to a coordinated program that seeks to deliver processes that considers the health of end to end business process while blending functional excellence across multiple functional organizational units. This probably means that you have not experienced significant levels of sub-optimization in the sole quest for functional excellence at the expense of other organization units and/or constituents (clients, partners, employees, stock holders etc.). You probably are delivering innovative and differentiating processes in your industry. Organizations that have experienced this direct route are few, but I would love to hear from you, if that is the case for your organization. This is what I call a harmonic journey.

My iconic and ironic analogy for this harmony is demonstrated by one of my favorites 80’s group Journey.

Journey Web Site

I have a complete wall of my office dedicated to Journey including a signed guitar.

The Artistic Meander

Most organizations, that I talk to on a routine basis, have evolved in a natural manner that takes a natural course that moves downstream in the path of least resistance in a most opportunistic fashion. This means that their BPM efforts takes natural turns, but make progress towards the end goal. This is similar to a river making its way to the ocean by going around difficult/solid objects and or join convergent streams. This is what is termed a meander.

My iconic and ironic analogy is depicted below by one of my favorite abstract artists Robert Weerts, who is current dedicating his new art series to the meander.

Robert Weerts Web Site

I have a number of Bob’s works hanging on my walls at home and ironically he is an expert consultant in process management and optimization. Contact Bob at bob.weerts@adaptiveAnalyx.com

In reality, every organization probably experiences periods of each kind of evolutionary pattern, but recognition of this situation might help going forward. In our current economic environment that needs to produce more with less, one can make a case of either pattern. Some organizations will make a bee-line towards process maturity fused by economic drivers where others will experience a detour looking for only low hanging fruit and financial returns.