Process Strategy

The process strategy defines and describes current and future goals of business process management and operational processes. It’s closely related to a company’s corporate strategy. If the process strategy changes or if the future process strategy differs from the existing strategy, the processes should be adapted accordingly. This ensures that processes will correspond to the internal policies of the company. The development of a process strategy is part of the process management lifecycle.

How is a process strategy developed?

Developing a process strategy requires distributing the company’s goals among the processes and breaking them down. To begin, analyze the existing strategy of the company and company goals. This, in addition to company structure, reveals the process architecture. Points that may affect the process architecture’s structure include the type of process optimization (continuous improvement or complete re-engineering), the introduction of process standards, or the outsourcing of individual process steps or entire processes. 

Once you’ve developed the process architecture, create a rough overview of the main processes, or a process map. In order to create a map, you’ll need to identify the company’s existing processes. This can be done via research with executing employees, including tactics like interviews, workshops, or shadowing employees, or you can use process mining tools. 

When this is complete, split and transfer the company goals into the individual processes and process levels. Your work here will create operative and strategic goals for each individual process. 

Define key metrics for these goals so you can see later whether they’ve been achieved. If the process management lifecycle is executed repeatedly, you can compare the old key metrics and the new keymetrics recorded or created in this run.

These are the steps involved in developing a process strategy:

1. Analyze the corporate strategy and corporate goals.
2. Derive basic principles for the process architecture.
3. Create a process map of the main processes.
4. Acquire detailed process knowledge and identify individual processes.
5. Break down company goals to each process (process goals).
6. Define suitable key figures / Check key figures.

Related Terms: Conformance Checking, Business Process Management, Process Management Lifecycle