Business Process Change,: A Guide for Business Managers and BPM and Six Sigma Professionals The MK/OMG Press: Amazon.co.uk: Paul Harmon: Books

Review

You've picked up the right book for just about any goal you have in process management. If you're an enterprise process architect or manager, Harmon tells you what you need to think about and do at the enterprise level. If you are an owner or improver of a particular process, there's an entire section devoted to managing particular processes. If you're charged with using IT to support processes, you are similarly in luck. The book should be on the desk, in the briefcase, or on the bedside table of anyone who believes business processes are an important way to understand businesses and make them better. From the foreword by Thomas H. Davenport, Director, Process Management Research Center, Babson College Paul Harmon has done a great job updating his 2002 classic. BPM has changed significantly over the past 5 years and Paul has integrated those changes with the interrelationships of six sigma, lean, ERP, BPMS, SOA, and other enablers. Paul makes sense of the proliferation of BPM tools while recognizing the fundamental management changes that underpin them. As a result, this book is an excellent tactical reference for cross-functional teams to implement and sustain BPM as a platform for business transformation and to execute strategy. -- George F. Diehl, Global Director, Process Management, Air Products and Chemicals, Inc. Paul Harmon is without doubt the best informed and most trusted observer of all things BPM. True to form, in this book Paul provides a comprehensive and insightful summary of the current BPM landscape. -- Geary Rummler, Founder & Partner, The Performance Design Lab., Coauthor Improving Performance It's a relief for process professionals to be able to move beyond theoretical BPM with case studies and find techniques and methodologies which provide great results in applied BPM. Paul Harmon's writing has been an invaluable guide for me for several years, and his methodologies in combination with the open-standard framework based on SCOR(R), benchmarking, and methodologies we have been using at Supply-Chain Council provide a complete end-to-end approach for organizations to take themselves not just to the next level, but to place themselves permanently on the top-level of performance. This is a must read for process professionals, whether you're coming at it from "the business" or "the IT" side, a "Wade-Mecum" for the Third-Wave Generation of process experts. -- Joe Francis, CTO, Supply-Chain Council Six Sigma plays a role in business process change -- but this role is often not well understood. Contrary to the proclamations of certain pundits, Six Sigma is not the be-all, end-all first and last word in process change. Nor is it an isolated tool used only for solving problems or optimizing performance within existing processes. It's more subtle than either of these extreme views, and it's critically important to get it right. Until now, no one has effectively addressed the role of Six Sigma in this larger context. But Paul Harmon hits it square-on. Every Six Sigma practitioner should read this book -- and better understand the nature of Six Sigma within the greater world of business process change. -- Bruce Williams, Vice President & General Manager, BPM Solutions, webMethods, Inc. and coauthor of Six Sigma for Dummies and Lean for Dummies. Harmon takes a clear-eyed look at the "movements", the standards, the strategies and the tactics and distills it into a clear picture of how to manage an agile business in the 21st century. As change accelerates and margins fall, this book becomes a must-read for survivors-to-be. -- Dr. Richard Mark Soley, CEO, The Object Management Group (OMG)

Product Description

Every company wants to improve the way it does business, to produce goods and services more efficiently, and to increase profits. Nonprofit organizations are also concerned with efficiency, productivity, and with achieving the goals they set for themselves. Every manager understands that achieving these goals is part of his or her job. In this balanced treatment of the field of business process change, Paul Harmon offers concepts, methods, cases for all aspects and phases of successful business process improvement.Updated and added for this edition are coverage of business process management systems, business rules, enterprise architectures and frameworks (SCOR), and more content on Six Sigma and Lean - in addition to new coverage of performance metrics. It includes an extensive revision and update to the successful BPM book, addressing the growing interest in Business Process Management Systems, and the integration of process redesign and Six Sigma concerns. It is the best first book on business process, the most up-to-date book to read to learn how all the different process elements fit together. It presents a methodology based on the best practices available that can be tailored for specific needs and that maintains a focus on the human aspects of process redesign. It offers all new detailed case studies showing how these methods are implemented.

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1 of 1 people found the following review helpful

Hugely disappointing 29 Oct 2010

By Paul D. Kay

Format:Paperback

I had high hopes, after reading all of the favourable reviews that this was going to be a really enlightening read on understanding and implementing strategic business change. I've been hugely disappointed.

It's so, so verbose and bloated, like someone who has spent too long on the conference circuit eating endless courses of rubber chicken. I was looking for the priceless golden nuggets, but instead found nothing more than the very occasional tiny golden fleck.

A picture often paints a thousand words. But the diagrams in the book are amongst the poorest that I've seen, almost to the point of appearing amateurish in presentation. The one case study is just plain weak. And frankly, the large section at the back of the book about different product offering is nothing more than shameless padding.

Save your money - there'll be resources on the net that are far, far better.

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Better and Broader than most others 9 Mar 2009

By Danny Kerdine

I've used this for a BBA program course in Business Process Re-engineering. It works for that very well. It's fairly clear; covering the main aspects of BPM, BPR, Six Sigma, and TQM. A small problem that one can easily get around is that the order of presentation is somewhat top down, so that a student can get confused very easily if the course followed the book. I'm using it again this semester, but supplemented by Aalst & Hee's book on workflow management. The combination, presented in the correct order, provides a good fundamental course for a second or third year student.

A thorough overview of the landscape 30 Mar 2012

By Marcus Price

The first edition of this book is now showing its age and this edition brings the material up to date in a fast-moving field - indeed over half of the material has been re-written.
The sub-title is "A guide for business process managers and BPM and Six-sigma professionals" gives a clue to the changes in the four years since original edition. Interest in business process management and the popularity of implementation techniques such as Six-sigma and Lean, have increased markedly in the time-period and the new edition puts these practices into context of a wider business-change programme.

The enterprise-level section focuses on how organisations can build corporate competitiveness, based on the work of some real business heavyweights:
* Michael Porter's ideas on value chains and competitive strategy;
* Treacy and Wiersema's views how organisations should excel in one of three disciplines;
* Kaplan and Norton's balanced scorecard approach.

The author advises to aim to increase corporate competitiveness by process management and efficiency rather than simply outsourcing, or responding to competitor's latest initiatives, or implementing an ERP vendor's off-the-shelf software modules. Like the first edition, the author advises those contemplating large-scale process redesign to consider alignment with process management frameworks such as SCOR or project management frameworks such as those advocated by PMI.

In addition, the book gives clear exposition of process management compared to functional management, and the combination of both to give matrix management. The author also gives details on how to handle outsourcing within the redesign process and how to run a business-change programme alongside an ERP software implementation.

The modelling notation in the previous edition focussed on Rummler and Brache's process map notation (devised to map Porter's value chains). This edition uses the Business Process Modelling Notation (BPMN) diagrams, the new de-facto standard for modelling processes. Like their close cousins - UML activity diagrams - BPMN can be ferociously complex, but sticking to the basic notation allows practitioners to communicate with business people using diagrams that look very similar to Rummler and Brache's original process maps - still the most efficient way to communicate process information.

Experienced practitioners will be interested in what the author labels project scoping diagrams. They show four-faceted view of a process or activity:
* inputs: the inputs to the process, in terms of material or information;
* inputs: the results of the process;
* controls: information referenced (but unchanged), methods and rules guiding the process;
* enablers: people assigned, technology and facilities to be used.
These types of diagram have been around for some time in one format or another. It is derived from the software engineering-based IDEF function-box diagrams and, in a simpler form, from the familiar SIPOC [Supplier-Input-Process-Output-Customer] diagrams, used in value stream analysis in Lean approaches.

The book also describes a framework for business-change initiatives - the "BPTrends Process Architecture" method. This high-level approach is a useful guide for those undertaking such an initiative but those wanting more detailed guidance may wish to look at that of Jeston and Nellis.

The implementation-level section also covers modelling tools and Business Process Modelling Suites (BPMS). Modelling tools, used for documenting and storing business processes, are relatively mature. BPMSs, which extend this modelling capability to use workflow and execution engines, are relatively immature and the author rightly advises caution in the face of optimistic sales-talk.

This book gives a thorough up-to-date survey of the business-change landscape - the author even gives a nod to recent OMG initiatives regarding business rules. The advice given is sensible and method- and technology-agnostic. The lists of future reading at the end of each chapter are comprehensive and although the case study is a little brief, it is illustrative. Overall, highly recommended, and worth buying even if the reader has the first edition.