Defining your Process

Considered in the broadest terms most organisations have very few core business processes. Try thinking about the core processes of your institution i.e. those that relate to your strategic objectives and are fundamental to the nature of the organisation and its relationship with clients. Most probably you will come up with no more than four or five. If you end up with more than nine you are not considering process at a strategic level. Michael Hammer maintains that no organisation has more than eight core processes.

Organisations that are intending to re-engineer will be focussing on those top-level processes. Most of the process review and redesign that is achievable in the education sector will be at a lower level but it is important before you start reviewing a process to ensure you correctly define what the process actually is and establish what the boundaries are.

Take the example of the process of going on holiday. Some people may say it starts when you step on the plane and ends when you collect your suitcases from the airport carousel on the your return. Others might argue it starts with looking at maps and brochures and ends when you've unpacked and exchanged your foreign currency back to sterling. Neither view is right or wrong and each way of looking at it has its advantages and disadvantages.

Our recommendation is to start with a rapid end-to-end view of the process. The risk of missing opportunities by narrowing your thinking too soon tends to be the greater risk at the early stage.

It is also worth stressing the need to remember when you are defining a process that it's not about what a particular department does. You need to follow the process from start to finish right through the organisation and, especially in education, that frequently means crossing departmental boundaries. The diagram below illustrates how the business process cuts right across the organisation structure. Analysing a process is a very different approach to carrying out a functional review within a single department. The latter approach is typical of a 'smokestack' or 'silo' mentality. It is sadly the case that many colleges and universities still view themselves not as enterprise systems but as a series of discrete departments and functions.

Most importantly when defining a business process you need to determine the relationship of that process to the CLIENT. A theme you will find repeated throughout this infoKit is that the client is almost always the learner. If you think about a process from start to finish and you can't find the learner at either end of it then you need to return to the question of WHY you are doing this in the first place.

Let's look at an example of what we mean by this:

A large university introduced an Absence Management Policy for staff. This, on the face of it would seem to be purely about internal management and nothing to do with students. Indeed when asked what this policy was about and why it existed most respondents within the organisation thought it was about managing sickness absence and encouraging managers to deal with problem absences. Needless to say the policy (and associated process) was viewed in very negative terms by staff and managers alike. Using the JISC infoNet approach it was possible to turn this around and say the WHY of the policy was to have a fit and healthy workforce able to deliver services to students. This gives a very different perspective on the process and you can see how this affected the outcome of a business process review in a case study.

There are some examples where there is another type of client in a process e.g. a statutory body but for the present we will focus on internal processes which are usually the easiest processes to change.