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Business Processes: Success by Designing Unstable Business Processes
It may seem counterintuitive, but Gartner has come to the conclusion that business processes consciously designed to be ‘unstable’ have a 70 percent chance of success. And that kind of success rate really blows away the rate achieved by standard stable processes. By ‘unstable’, Gartner means that processes should be designed to be able to adopt to the inevitable changes in environment, customer requirements and strategy. Flexibility is key.
Gartner’s advice breaks well established rules for how to design a process. For example, handbooks for designing business processes have warned in the past that “lack of stability and predictability may cause additional problems to occur, preventing the team from achieving the process improvement objective.”
Julie Short, research director at Gartner, said that “many organizations are either beginning, or in the midst of, digital business transformation initiatives. We expect that only 30% of these efforts will succeed. To be part of that 30%, business and IT leaders must be ready and willing to innovate rapidly from a business model, business process and technology perspective… It’s imperative to break away from linear business processes and deploy a spectrum of standardized and variable processes to reap the benefits of digital business… Large, stable processes that have no ability to dynamically change according to new information will not enable organizations to deliver on the promise of digital business.”
Rather than stability, Gartner recommends resiliency. Processes need to be able to adopt to a changing landscape. And to do that, processes that are firmly cemented in place will only hinder the success of a business.
Marc Kerremans, research director at Gartner, said that “with adaptive change, the goal is not to try to tackle big change on every front. Rather, the focus is on coping with the external nature of major change and its impact on organizations, cultures, governance, technologies and metrics. Change agents may need to employ several change response types to advance BPM maturity to the point where traditional business process improvement initiatives can turn into big change initiatives capable of supporting sustainable competitive advantage in a digital world.”
