Broken Business Processes

Why do Business Opportunities Exist in Organizations?

Business Enterprise Mapping

Broken Business Processes

Business processes define how work gets done in every organization, regardless of size, shape, or type. Did you know that about 72% of all organizational problems lay hidden in broken business processes?

What Are Broken Business Processes?

Broken business processes fail to consistently deliver expected results. They often lack clarity, structure, or alignment with business goals. These issues can persist even when work appears to move forward, creating hidden inefficiencies that impact outcomes.

The Cause

Organizations are traditionally managed by hierarchical, vertically organized departments. In contrast, work flows horizontally, from department-to-department, function-to-function, and job-to-job. The gap created by these process inefficiencies offers a substantial untapped improvement opportunity.

Addressing broken business processes requires a structured approach to process design and alignment. Business Enterprise Mapping’s Perigon Method outlines how organizations apply that structure in practice, helping organizations improve.

Top 10 Reasons for Broken Business Processes

Process Not Defined

Good process management begins by defining a process, its customers, suppliers, inputs, outputs, and tasks. Because most business processes are created ad-hoc to solve a business problem, and then evolve, most organizations don't have processes adequately defined.

Process Not Owned

Most organizations are managed vertically, where the organization chart lays out a hierarchical structure of responsibilities and accountabilities. Effective performance improvement must include managing the individual ownership of processes that cross these boundaries.

Purpose Not Understood

Processes can be complex or simple, long or short, and produce one or many products or services. Regardless, a process must have a worthy purpose or it should be eliminated.

Process Not Followed

Organizations often try to overcome broken processes by hiring superheroes to address the many obstacles to solving problems. Superheroes burn out, while processes stay broken.

Customer Not Understood

Every process serves a customer. Organizations rarely know the customers of their internal processes, what those customers need to succeed, and to what extent their internal processes are meeting customer needs.

Supplier Not Understood

Every process is also served by a supplier. In general, companies do not know the suppliers to their internal processes, what their processes need from those suppliers and to what extent process needs are being met

Cumbersome to Execute

Because processes frequently grow into existence without intentional design, they meander across organizations through the development of “good ideas” that add extra steps and additional work-around activities.

Loaded with Waste

Value-added tasks are tasks the customer would be willing to pay for. When processes have not been fully defined and analyzed, we find that non-value added work is usually in the 80 to 90% range.

Performance Not Measured

Most companies measure what is easy versus what is valuable. Good process measurement captures both effectiveness (the extent to which the process delights its customer) and efficiency (the extent to which the process uses minimum resources.)

Not Linked to Strategy

Strategy without strong process is like a head without a body. Process is how leadership implements its strategic intention.

Broken Business Processes