Business Process Governance: Best Practices, Tools, and Examples
Business process governance (BPG) is the practice of overseeing, monitoring, regulating, and managing how a company's business processes are executed. This includes making sure that all business processes are aligned with the company's strategy, carried out in a consistent manner, meet regulatory requirements, as well as ensuring that all stakeholders have visibility into and input into the company's business processes.
In this article, I will provide some insights into best practices for having a Business Process Governance program, detail an example of a business process governance scenario, and finally, discuss tools that can be used to manage your BPG.
Business Process Governance Best Practices
Let's take a look at some best practices for implementing a business process governance program.
Have clear and concise policies in place. These policies should be aligned with the overall goals of the organization.
Select the right tools and technologies for monitoring and regulating the performance of business processes. I will be discussing BPG tools further down in this article.
Put together a team of process experts who can help implement and oversee the business process governance program. This team will work with Process Owners to make sure the process is performing to its expected measurements.
Define clear roles and responsibilities for all stakeholders. One of the most important aspects of BPG is ensuring that everyone involved in the company's business processes understands their role and what they are responsible for. This will help to avoid confusion and duplication of effort.
Create transparency around your company's business processes. All stakeholders should have visibility into the company's business processes. This includes understanding how the process works, what the inputs and outputs are, and what metric(s) you are using to measure success.
Maintain a continuous improvement mindset. BPG is not a static process; it should be continuously reviewed and improved upon. One way to do this is to establish a business process improvement team that is responsible for identifying opportunities for improvement and implementing changes.
Communicate, communicate, communicate. Effective communication is essential for successful BPG. Make sure that all stakeholders are kept up-to-date on changes to the company's business processes and that they understand the rationale behind those changes.
If you're looking to implement business process governance in your company, these best practices will help you get started. Remember, BPG is an ongoing process, so be prepared to continuously review and improve your procedures. And, as always, effective communication will be key to your success.
A Business Process Governance Example
Here is a short example of business process governance practice.
A consumer product company has a policy that all customer service requests must be logged into a central database system. These service requests are logged by a customer service representative via a phone call from a customer. This process was set up several years ago and is critical to the goal of providing ongoing value to the company’s customers.
To ensure this continued value delivery, the company would have a business process governance practice that would monitor the performance of the customer service team to ensure that all requests were being logged in a timely manner. If there were any issues, the organization would work to resolve them through a process improvement project so that the customer service team could continue to meet its goals.
If you recall from earlier, a Business Process Governance practice is about overseeing, monitoring, regulating, and managing how a company's business processes are executed. This means having eyes on important processes to make sure they are performing up to expectations.
Business Process Governance Tools
Depending on how many processes your business has, you may need a formal set up for keeping track of all your processes. There are a few different tools that can be used for business process governance in order to ensure that all processes are up to par. By using the right tools, businesses can save time and money while also ensuring that their processes are running smoothly.
Here are some of the most popular business process governance tools.
Checklists and Flowcharts
Checklists can be used to make sure that all the necessary steps are being completed in the process. Flowcharts can be used to map out the process and ensure that it is being followed correctly. Flowcharts are also great for providing a visual representation of a process, which can be helpful depending on who you are showing a process to.
Both of these tools are important for business process governance. Using both of them will help to ensure that the process is being followed correctly and efficiently.
Document Control Tools
These tools ensure that all documents related to the process are up to date and compliant. This is important because it can help to prevent errors and delays in the process.
Process Mapping Tools
These tools help businesses map out their processes in order to identify areas of improvement.
Process Improvement Tools
These tools help businesses streamline their processes and make them more efficient.
Process Monitoring Tools
These tools help businesses track the performance of their processes over time and identify areas where further improvement is needed.
By using the right business process governance tools, organizations can save time and money, ensure that their processes are running smoothly, and can provide a significant return on investment.
Get Your Business Process Governance Practice Up and Running Today!
If you're not practicing business process governance, now is the time to start. Implementing these best practices and tools will help to monitor and improve your business processes. Your business will run more smoothly and efficiently. Don't wait any longer, start implementing business process governance today!
Here is a great video that expands into more detail about Business Process Governance that I recommend you watch.
