Discover insights into process hierarchy in business management, exploring functional and end-to-end structures, ownership challenges, and the importance of adapting to variations across operations.
A new blog post of Caspar Jans was published on Feb 28, 2025 with the original title:
Process Hierarchy and Organizational Politics
Overview:
The blog discusses the need for a structured process hierarchy in business management. It emphasizes maintaining both a functionally decomposed hierarchy and an end-to-end process hierarchy to enhance governance and efficiency while managing organizational politics in process ownership.
Core content:
- Three consecutive meetings addressed the same topic: process hierarchy, emphasizing its importance in effective business management.
- Maintaining both a functional and an end-to-end process hierarchy is key to effective governance and management of business processes.
- The functional decomposition begins with high-level domains, which can be further broken down into individual business processes.
- End-to-end processes, like procure-to-pay, cross functional boundaries and require careful handling of process ownership to avoid conflicts.
- Each client’s unique perspective resulted in differing conclusions despite overlapping discussions during the meetings.
Learnings:
- Understanding the dual process hierarchies enhances the ability to manage and update business processes effectively.
- Identifying process ownership is critical and should be based on the processes that impact end-to-end functionality most significantly.
- Different variations of process execution across regions or product lines necessitate adaptations in process management strategies.
- Engaging different clients can reveal unique insights while still following shared best practices in process hierarchy structuring.
- Approaching process hierarchy requires a balance of structure and flexibility to accommodate organizational complexities.
The original content was published in English.
