Business Activity Management
Business processes are not the best way of thinking about, describing or designing core business functions for me, but activities are. I accept there is wide scale promotion and adoption of business process management and hence often work within it’s limitations but it’s not always capable of helping me to fully understand, innovate and manage a business. This blog starts to unravel why.
The word “process” implies a series or sequence of events and more specifically implies that rules exist to control the flow. Wikipedia says it well: “A process describes the act of taking something through an established and usually routine set of procedures or steps to convert it from one form to another”.
Initially because of it’s definition and implications I never solely relied on business process analysis and management to measure and design for business. I needed to also look beyond those constraints, to the area of human activity management. As a result while I’ve learnt business process analysis, modelling and management techniques, I’ve been aware of their limitations. For around the last twelve years I’ve always used activity analysis and management which happily address the failures of a process approach for me.
Core Business Function → Key Tasks
A core business function, e.g. Sales, can be described with key tasks each of which has goal related outcomes. These tasks may or may not be sequentially related. And if they are related then sequence is not the only type of relationship that may be necessary. In addition to being related sequentially, key tasks can be related through being conjoined, parallel, iterative, mutually exclusive, shared, simultaneous, and synchronous. They can also be unrelated and omnipresent. Not every task that is required is series related, nor can it be described correctly as a process.
I assign a key task wherever there is an exchange of value between the business and other parties. These value exchanges are the fundamental building blocks required to model an existing or new business.
Key Task → User Activities
Every key task can be analysed, designed, funded, implemented, monitored, measured, changed, replaced and retired, by understanding the user activities that are required to deliver it’s outcomes. In each of it’s inherent activities lies the fundamental success or failure of the key task and of the wider business.
User activities will often be related with rules (as can key tasks). And there will sometimes be rules enforcing sequence, i.e. a process, but I find it’s never to the degree that it fully describes the fundamentals required to design and deliver a key task successfully. The process approach forces all activities to be sequentially related as that is the defining characteristic of a process. But of course this is not the way people work (and increasingly it’s not the way that computers work). It is not useful to define a way of working as a process if it’s not carried out that way. Instead by defining work the way it is observed and carried out i.e. as a number of sometimes unrelated multi-tasking user activities, we also expose natural relationships, inherent rules, and allow for evolution of new activities and relationships.
To get this complete picture of what is happening in an existing business, or for a new business design, we need to go beyond process analysis and adopt an activity viewpoint.
I always refer to activities formally as “User Activities” as a reminder that even when an activity appears to be fully automated there is always human involvement of some kind. This could be simply at the level of managing, auditing, monitoring, or exception handling. An activity describes an undertaking of some kind as one part in achieving a task outcome so by definition it requires a human touch point of some kind. An activity will always belong to somebody.
People & Machines
Activities imply people, processes imply machines (that includes computers). Machine-like mechanisation requires analysis of sequentially dependent events and the rules for controlling the flow i.e. a process. Not surprisingly where business process analysis (BPA) and business process management (BPM) really excel is for replication and automation.
Human behaviour and work on the other hand regularly demand wider consideration. In successful human activity there is more than rules (for process or otherwise), there is experience, psychology, environment, tools, image, understanding, role, division of labour, status, reward, language, context, and more. All these are present in each of the user activities that are required to successfully deliver a key task. And as I mentioned before, an activity always belongs to someone, this is why business process analysis and business process management miss many of the key issues impacting the success of core business functions today.
If you would like more information on how business activity management works in practise please contact me: ben@cautionyourblast.com
Ben Stewart
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