In his Column this month, Paul asks where business process improvement is today and where it’s likely to go next. You will want to read his surprising speculation on that question.
Paul Harmon
Executive Editor and Founder, Business Process Trends
In addition to his role as Executive Editor and Founder of Business Process Trends, Paul Harmon is Chief Consultant and Founder of BPTrends Associates, a professional services company providing educational and consulting services to managers interested in understanding and implementing business process change.
Paul is a noted consultant, author and analyst concerned with applying new technologies to real-world business problems. He is the author of Business Process Change: A Manager's Guide to Improving, Redesigning, and Automating Processes (2003). He has previously co-authored Developing E-business Systems and Architectures (2001), Understanding UML (1998), and Intelligent Software Systems Development (1993). Mr. Harmon has served as a senior consultant and head of Cutter Consortium's Distributed Architecture practice. Between 1985 and 2000 Mr. Harmon wrote Cutter newsletters, including Expert Systems Strategies, CASE Strategies, and Component Development Strategies.
Paul has worked on major process redesign projects with Bank of America, Wells Fargo, Security Pacific, Prudential, and Citibank, among others. He is a member of ISPI and a Certified Performance Technologist. Paul is a widely respected keynote speaker and has developed and delivered workshops and seminars on a wide variety of topics to conferences and major corporations through out the world.
Paul lives in Las Vegas.
Paul can be reached at pharmon@bptrends.com
Roles Evolve As Organizations Become More Mature
January 31, 2022 , By
Roles in organizations vary according to the overall process maturity of the organization. Further, the focus of different people in the organization necessarily changes as an organization becomes more mature.
Processes and a Decision Modeling Notation
January 31, 2022 , By
Paul explains that taken together, the BPMN Business Process Management Notation) and DMN (Decision Management Notation) represent a merger of business process and business decision (or business rule) technologies. This represents a major step forward in our ability to smoothly integrate these two, seemingly separate technologies, into a common approach.
Harmon on BPM: Process Problems and Solutions
January 31, 2022 , By
This month, Paul considers the range of problems that a business process practitioner might address. He includes a basic list of things to check when analyzing a specific process problem.
Harmon on BPM: Management Processes
January 3, 2022 , By
This month Paul turns his focus to Management processes which he believes are less understood than either manufacturing or service processes. Nonetheless, they are just as important to anyone who is engaged in trying to understand how businesses work and how they can be improved.
The Theory of Constraints
January 3, 2022 , By
In essence, the TOC holds that any given process is limited in what it can achieve by one, or at least a very small number of constraints. It is a straightforward approach that provides a number of suggestions for identifying problems and improving them.
Deming, IT, and BPM IDEF0 Diagrams
December 6, 2021 , By
As process emerges as a unified field and practitioners become familiar with the practices of other groups of process practitioners, we will find that we have developed a wide variety of techniques to achieve similar purposes and we will benefit from the different uses that different groups have derived from similar approaches.
Harmon on BPM: Service Processes
December 6, 2021 , By
Systematic business process analysis and design began in the US at the beginning of the 20th century and was focused on the manufacturing process. In his Column this month, Paul suggests that at this point, we are all focused on service processes and learning more about how to help customers have good experiences. Read to learn why this is the case.
Steps Toward a Discipline for Process Managers
December 6, 2021 , By
Processes–not departments–describe how an organization creates value. You only get what you measure. If you don’t measure value chains and their subsidiary processes, you don’t achieve consistent results. And, finally, someone has to responsible for achieving results if you are to get them.
Culture Change
November 1, 2021 , By
Different groups have defined Culture Change for different purposes, and the term has been becoming increasingly fuzzy at the same time that it has been becoming increasingly popular. In this overview, Paul Harmon has tried to sort out some of the basic relationships among the different varieties of culture change.
