Process-driven Business Transformation: Achieving process, system, data, and people readiness with one methodology

Markus Wolf

A holistic readiness for transformation requires structures weaving together the areas for readiness of processes, systems, data, and people. Tying it all together into one methodology allows for project specific customization of the approach by program and project management while ensuring consistency and transparency.

The readiness idea and process focus

Processes are at the center of every business transformation. They facilitate well-structured discussions and decision making, as well as training and communication. The aim is to link the company strategy, operating models, and targets of the transformation to the to-be design, as well as required system support, and data. The intended future state and necessary adjustments are made easy to understand for various stakeholders.

Getting people to understand processes, systems and data in their daily context creates business readiness. That is what we do as Business Integrator. 

Our methodology ensures senior stakeholder buy-in and process understanding early in the transformation by covering the business drivers and operating models of their business and linking those to harmonized standard core processes. 

The readiness idea and system focus

Having established clear strategic targets broken down per process area allows process owners and experts to determine requirements and changes both on business, as well as system perspectives. Requirements can be translated directly into solution design in context with the envisioned future state of business operations.

Offering guidance along standard processes, best practice, and system expertise protects the integrity of the solution design. The amount of system customization can be limited to where it is required to achieve the targeted strategic benefits.

Early contributions and decision-making responsibilities of process owners and experts lead to in-depth understanding of targets and design, to intensive knowledge build-up within the customer organization and fosters later acceptance of changes.

The readiness idea and data focus

Data, and especially master data represent the link between the various business cases and the applicable business processes, and consequently processing within the solution design in a highly automated and digitalized world. It is hence pivotal to establish already throughout the design and transition a widely shared understanding of how data steers processes and functionality.

The readiness idea and people focus

Discussing and elaborating on business processes naturally leads to identification of impacted organizational areas, and to an early assessment of change impacts on the daily operations and on core business KPIs. It also allows for a clear location of changes, thus providing a sound basis for planning and preparation of the actual implementation of adjustments. Furthermore, the structured and interlinked documentation of change impacts enables identification of essential business and design decisions.

Over time objectives might change and adjustments to the design must be made for several reasons on all levels. We enable the orchestration of changes by efficiently documenting all transformation aspects, including business and design decisions in an interlinked and comprehensive manner.

We believe in these re-enforcing factors of our process-driven business transformation methodology.

Example – business-relevant testing

When using our process-driven business transformation methodology, test cases and test scenarios can be derived directly from the respective flows or underlying operating models, from the related business cases and further connected to the defined End-to-End processes. This already contributes to identifying the relevancy of test cases in combination with pertinent data for the users’ future daily lives. It allows testers, like business key users, to generate valuable insights both for training preparation, but also as feedback for small improvement ideas which can boost acceptance of the solution amongst affected user groups. The reporting on test status can be tailored to the needs of various stakeholder groups. The respective process owners can receive a status for their area of responsibility, like Pl2P, O2C or A2R. Business managers can be provided with details on testing progress for their relevant operating models and core business activities. Reported errors from testing, as well as improvement ideas can be reported directly to the relevant stakeholders. This makes testing results and related information more tangible.

Key messages:

The fully interconnected process-driven business transformation methodology improves understanding of relevancy of the planned transformation on individual level of all stakeholders. As a result, decision making can be accelerated and the quality of decisions can be increased, while fostering an identification with and acceptance of the transformation.

  • It is not sufficient to adress all those aspects individually; you need to tackle them in an orchestrated approach across all stakeholders and throughout the whole transition period

  • Your business transformation vision requires a managed and transparent break-down, and a translation to manifest in people, processes, systems, and data

  • The key for agility and sustainability of your transformation is the capability to coherently reciprocate along the path of intention, decision, and implementation

Call for Action

A special occasion to learn more is our Business Transformation Day on the 10th Nov. 2022. Alternatively request a free demo anytime.