What are the top goals of business leaders in any organisation? While some goals are organisation-specific, others like increasing operational efficiency and productivity, improving customer service, and reducing costs, are common and remain high on every business leader’s agenda. As Business Process Management (BPM) promises these benefits, more and more organisations are embarking on process mapping and improvement initiatives.
Increased adoption is powering the BPM sector’s positive growth trajectory. An industry report forecasts that the BPM market will grow from USD 8.8 billion in 2020 to USD 14.4 billion by 2025. With businesses bracing for uncertain times in 2023 amid recession fears, the BPM market is expected to witness a further demand boom.
Top Process Mapping and Improvement Skills to advance your career
We look at five skills and competencies that will help you prepare for career growth in the in-demand Process Mapping and Improvement space in 2023:
1. Standardised process mapping using worldwide accepted modelling notation
Process maps are the foundation of any business improvement initiative as they give visibility into how the processes work and function. Creating an accurate, easy-to-understand process map is a must to ensure that anybody in the team, from the non-specialist workforce to business analysts, can understand the map and identify inefficiencies and gaps. Hence, learning a worldwide-recognised standard for process modelling, such as BPMN, is a massive value-add to your skills. Choosing the right standards for documentation ensures consistency which proves vital not only in your improvement initiative but also for your future initiatives. For instance, a repository of all process maps created using consistent symbols and notations comes in extremely handy for any future system implementation or digital transformation initiatives.
2. Process Analysis Techniques based on the business objectives:
Learning which processes to analyse and improve to achieve your targeted goal, whether it is increasing productivity, cost efficiency or improving customer service, presents excellent opportunities for improvement success. A comprehensive analysis of the current processes gives insights into areas that are resulting in delays or lags and need improvement.
Some of the effective process analysis techniques include:
Process Value Analysis: Value analysis aims to eliminate unnecessary activities, expenses, and steps incurred in the process. For value analysis, each activity in a process is analysed and classified into: customer-value-adding activity, business-value-adding activity and non-value-adding activity. Eliminating the non-value-adding activities from the process improves the process performance.
Process Cost Analysis: It helps understand role cost and overhead costs in the process.
Process Cycle Time: Points to important metrics, such as execution time per activity and delay time or lag associated with any task in the process.
Process Cycle Efficiency: This helps understand value-adding time in a process by considering process execution time and delay time.
Understanding these advanced analytics techniques helps you identify process issues and make suitable business improvement decisions.
3. Gathering Process Attributes
Creating a regular flowchart with just activities and tasks in a process is not enough. To see substantial results in process performance improvement, capturing the key attributes is essential. Enhancing your understanding on how you can accurately capture process attributes, such as KPIs, RACI matrix, compliance details, etc., and use them effectively helps you maximise the output from your process mapping initiatives.
4. Identifying the Right Process Improvement Ideas
Given that a business has a plethora of processes, how do you know which ones require urgent attention? Expanding your skills on which processes to prioritise for improvement will help you substantially increase the output from the initiative. Learning how to identify high-frequency, high volume, high customer touch, high risk and high manual intervention processes in your business and how to start improving them ensures fast and effective results in the shortest possible time.
5. Change Management Techniques
While the change may be small, the transition is always big. Hence, effective change management skills are a must-have to fill the gap between implementation and adoption. Understanding proven techniques for involving everyone in the staff, from the frontline employees to SMEs, in the process improvement initiative and making them feel connected to goals come in handy in smooth process adoption and avoiding resistance to change.
Enhance your Process Mapping and Improvement Skills
A professional course is a great place to start if you are looking to prepare yourself for growth in this sector. Look for a course that balances theory and practice and includes relevant exercises to ensure you can apply the concepts learned. Choosing a process mapping and improvement course created by BPM experts gives you the advantage of learning from their vast practical experience. Packed with expert tips and learnings, these courses will equip you with the right skills to springboard your process mapping and improvement career.
One online training program that is highly reviewed and rated by BPM professionals is PRIME BPM’s Business Process Management Concept Courses. The two-part program, including BPM Foundations and Process Mapping Course and Process Analysis and Improvement Course, has been developed by BPM experts with over 20 years of experience in training hundreds of leading organisations and techniques gathered from over 200+ successful BPM deployments.
Read more about the concepts covered in the courses, https://www.primebpm.com/bpm-training/