Explore effective strategies for managing business processes as multiple clients converge on the topic of process hierarchy, featuring insights on functional and end-to-end structures.
A new blog post of a LinkedIn newsletter was published on Feb 28, 2025 with the original title:
The Process Hierarchy and Politics
Overview:
The latest discussion focuses on the concept of process hierarchy in business management, emphasizing the importance of maintaining both a functional hierarchy and an end-to-end process structure to enhance governance and efficiency of business processes.
Core content:
- The process hierarchy is crucial for effectively governing and managing business processes within an organization.
- Maintaining two interconnected hierarchies—functional and end-to-end—enables better process management across different departments.
- Process ownership can be politically challenging, especially when assigning responsibility for end-to-end processes.
- Variation in processes across countries or product lines requires careful consideration in the hierarchy design.
- Despite similar discussions across meetings, conclusions may still vary based on organizational context.
Learnings:
- Understanding the distinction between functional and end-to-end process hierarchies is essential for effective business operations.
- Approaching process ownership with a strategic lens can mitigate political challenges in organizations.
- Flexibility in process design is necessary to adapt to different operational contexts and needs.
- Listening to different stakeholder perspectives can lead to diverse solutions, even on the same topic.
- The process of designing hierarchies should start with foundational principles, even though it can become complex.
The original content was published in English.
