Musings by one of the founders of the Lean movement, Jim Womack, prompted me to explore the barriers to successful process improvement initiatives in organisations. When looking back at more than 30 years of working on Lean programmes in manufacturing in general and the automotive industry in particular, Jim considered whether the current Lean surge gripping the (public) service sector over the past five years might be coming to an end. His main contention is that - and I quote - ‘many of us in the Lean Community have focused our attention on improving core processes in organizations by deploying brilliant tools when we should have been focused on improving the management process itself. That is the fundamental problem’, and: ‘I increasingly believe that unless we in the Lean Community press the necessity of this conversation, lean risks becoming another rising and falling wave in the long history of organizational improvement, one pursued as a technical rather than a management challenge’. This would appear to be a fairly sombre outlook and potentially an indictment of Lean as a successful transformational change management approach.

Picking up on Jim’s concerns, I highlight here three issues that the BPM movement needs to address to sustain itself and its tools:

1.To be able to take centre stage and be valued and adopted as a management discipline, BPM needs to be presented more as a holistic change discipline that covers all aspects of transformational change: from ‘burning platform to business case’, from ‘benefits identification to integrated (end-to-end) business solutions’. When creating business cases in the public service sector, I adopted the sound MSP principle that when describing a target operating model or blueprint, the improved process is an integral piece of the jigsaw, alongside organisation, technology and information. In this way, BPM becomes a key component of change design and delivery to all participants in the change programme.

2.To achieve a successful BPM implementation and adoption, a fine balance needs to be struck between top-down approaches (setting scope, boundaries, key performance indicators and controls) and bottom-up initiatives (discovering and developing  creative process solutions to meet customer demands and the requirements of suppliers and management). Although executive sponsorship and direction may at times raise a number of difficult issues, managing upwards as a BPM professional is as important as facilitating and promoting individual and team participation and collaboration in driving process improvements.

3.Too much focus on the technology and BPMS side of process improvement somehow limits BPM to its enabling and supporting role for a business and results in the fragmentation of process issues into business requirements stipulating application solutions. This is where BPMS competes with other - sometimes equally fragmented technology solutions - such as ECM, ERP and CRM. The IT background of many BPM practitioners tends to act as a barrier to attempts to overcome the corporate mindset of ‘building solutions around individual issues’, without considering the full picture of the end-to-end process.

Advances in BPMS, and in particular collaboration features offered by the vendors, will continue to support and strengthen the overall proposition of the BPM Practitioner. However, it is essential that these systems be perceived as a technical challenge, and not the overall solution to the BPM issue.

These issues are not isolated to the Lean movement - they are equally applicable to the advocates of other similar methods, such as Six Sigma, Kaizen and Continuous Improvement. By no means the end of Lean, but a serious re-orientation and repositioning appears to be necessary.