INTRODUCTION

There are business plans, department or division plans, and information technology (IT) plans? These all address organizational concerns and needs. None of these specifically deals with where the money is either won or lost. After all, the success or failure of an organization is determined by its business processes. That is why it is interesting that so little attention has been devoted to this area developing the process plan.

This chapter details how to go about developing and using a process plan. This is not something you do for all processes. You will initially want to do it for the key processes in your process group for the improvement effort. You can then later expand it to, probably, no more than 10 processes.

What is a process plan? It is the counterpart of the business plan.The process plan includes the following information:

• How the process works and relates to other processes

• The process scorecard, as developed in Chapter 5

• The challenges and issues that relate to the business process

• The impacts of the process on constituent audiences such as customers, employees, management, and suppliers

• The long-term vision of the process the benefits if you had the perfect process

• The role of automation and IT in the process over the long term

Why bother with this? Don't we have enough to do? Well, you can go right past this chapter and start designing the new process. However, you are less likely to get management support since the long-term goals of what you...