How can you balance process consulting with other business priorities in Business Architecture?

Align process initiatives with business goals. Engage stakeholders to integrate their needs. Implement agile practices for flexible resource allocation. Prioritize based on impact and urgency using a clear governance model. Use KPIs to ensure process improvements contribute to overall business objectives. Efficiency is key—automate where possible and maintain continuous feedback loops for iterative improvement. This ensures that process consulting not only coexists with but actively propels other business priorities forward.

Sadly, business processes are much like last summer's vacation photo hanging on the office wall. While the photo's always there and in line of sight, we might not give it a second's worth of thought unless it should happen to fall to the floor. Virtually everything in the Business Architecture has at least one supporting business process. We conduct our strategic planning using a process, we close the financials using a process, we grow our markets using a process. Business processes are our 'how'. If we don't regularly assess the efficiencies and effectiveness of our 'hows' (processes), the 'whats', the components in our Business Architecture are similarly likely to be flawed. "Straighten the cowpath before you pave it."

Balancing process consulting with other business priorities in Business Architecture requires strategic alignment. First, assess the overall business strategy and objectives. Then, prioritize initiatives based on their impact and urgency. Integrate process improvements into broader business goals, ensuring they enhance rather than disrupt operations. Regularly communicate and collaborate with stakeholders to ensure all areas of focus align harmoniously. Additionally, establish clear metrics to measure the success of both process consulting and other strategic priorities. This way, you can ensure that process improvements contribute effectively to the overall success of the business.

With many large transformation programs, expectations run high that “the project/program” will fix….. (everything). That’s a misalignment of expectations on day 1! My experience is that if the leadership team can focus on the top 2-3 priorities and expected results, success is better defined! That’s not to say other improvements or benefits will be ignored - in fact, many other improvements will come along. However, by focusing the team on the “top” priorities, it prioritizes the work and makes design decisions easier to manage!

If the scope and objective are clearly defined at the start of the business architecture design, the question of weaknesses should not arise. While the objectives may be clear in terms of the prime objective that a business aims to achieve such as operational excellence, quality, speed, customer intimacy or innovation, it is to be remembered, that the other objectives will also be important to lesser extents. Hence, the business process must optimize to achieve the prime objective but must also address the other implied objectives, to offer a solution which need not have weaknesses.

I would add that you need to confirm that your clients (both decision-makers and stakeholders) really WANT the changes being proposed and aren’t just paying “lip service” to the goals. A good project is going to expose, often in very stark and quantitative ways, inefficiencies and convoluted processes that people hide comfortably behind. When confronted with losing these “visibility hedgerows” they can suddenly lose their enthusiasm for the intended changes. This is especially true when things are “going well” even though there may be lots of room for improvement. It is easy to see project “support” transform into “foot dragging” or worse.

I am influenced by the book "Discipline of the Market Leaders" by Michael Treacy and Fred Wiersema, which states that while a business may choose to primarily focus on one discipline such as Operational Excellence, Innovation or Customer Intimacy, they need to focus, may be to a lesser extent, on the other two. Thus, a business which is focused on the Operational Excellence will also need to innovate to stay ahead in its business or Customer focused business may need to also work towards operational excellence to stay competitive.