Business Process Change, Second Edition: A Guide for Business Managers and BPM and Six Sigma Professionals (The MK/OMG Press) [Paperback]

Paul Harmon (Author), Business Process Trends (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: July 27, 2007 | Series: The MK/OMG Press

Every company wants to improve the way it does business, to produce goods and services more efficiently, and to increase profits. Nonprofit organizations are also concerned with efficiency, productivity, and with achieving the goals they set for themselves. Every manager understands that achieving these goals is part of his or her job.

In this balanced treatment of the field of business process change, Paul Harmon offers concepts, methods, cases for all aspects and phases of successful business process improvement. Updated and added for this edition are coverage of business process management systems, business rules, enterprise architectures and frameworks (SCOR), and more content on Six Sigma and Lean--in addition to new coverage of performance metrics.

* Extensive revision and update to the successful BPM book, addressing the growing interest in Business Process Management Systems, and the integration of process redesign and Six Sigma concerns.

* The best first book on business process, the most up-to-date book to read to learn how all the different process elements fit together.

* Presents a methodology based on the best practices available that can be tailored for specific needs and that maintains a focus on the human aspects of process redesign.

* Offers all new detailed case studies showing how these methods are implemented.

Editorial Reviews

Review

You've picked up the right book for just about any goal you have in process management. If you're an enterprise process architect or manager, Harmon tells you what you need to think about and do at the enterprise level. If you are an owner or improver of a particular process, there's an entire section devoted to managing particular processes. If you're charged with using IT to support processes, you are similarly in luck. The book should be on the desk, in the briefcase, or on the bedside table of anyone who believes business processes are an important way to understand businesses and make them better.
From the foreword by Thomas H. Davenport, Director, Process Management Research Center, Babson College

Paul Harmon has done a great job updating his 2002 classic. BPM has changed significantly over the past 5 years and Paul has integrated those changes with the interrelationships of six sigma, lean, ERP, BPMS, SOA, and other enablers. Paul makes sense of the proliferation of BPM tools while recognizing the fundamental management changes that underpin them. As a result, this book is an excellent tactical reference for cross-functional teams to implement and sustain BPM as a platform for business transformation and to execute strategy.
-- George F. Diehl, Global Director, Process Management, Air Products and Chemicals, Inc.

Paul Harmon is without doubt the best informed and most trusted observer of all things BPM. True to form, in this book Paul provides a comprehensive and insightful summary of the current BPM landscape.
-- Geary Rummler, Founder & Partner, The Performance Design Lab., Coauthor Improving Performance

It's a relief for process professionals to be able to move beyond theoretical BPM with case studies and find techniques and methodologies which provide great results in applied BPM. Paul Harmon's writing has been an invaluable guide for me for several years, and his methodologies in combination with the open-standard framework based on SCOR®, benchmarking, and methodologies we have been using at Supply-Chain Council provide a complete end-to-end approach for organizations to take themselves not just to the next level, but to place themselves permanently on the top-level of performance. This is a must read for process professionals, whether you're coming at it from "the business" or "the IT" side, a "Wade-Mecum" for the Third-Wave Generation of process experts.
-- Joe Francis, CTO, Supply-Chain Council

Six Sigma plays a role in business process change -- but this role is often not well understood. Contrary to the proclamations of certain pundits, Six Sigma is not the be-all, end-all first and last word in process change. Nor is it an isolated tool used only for solving problems or optimizing performance within existing processes. It's more subtle than either of these extreme views, and it's critically important to get it right. Until now, no one has effectively addressed the role of Six Sigma in this larger context. But Paul Harmon hits it square-on. Every Six Sigma practitioner should read this book -- and better understand the nature of Six Sigma within the greater world of business process change.
-- Bruce Williams, Vice President & General Manager, BPM Solutions, webMethods, Inc. and coauthor of Six Sigma for Dummies and Lean for Dummies.

Harmon takes a clear-eyed look at the "movements", the standards, the strategies and the tactics and distills it into a clear picture of how to manage an agile business in the 21st century. As change accelerates and margins fall, this book becomes a must-read for survivors-to-be.
-- Dr. Richard Mark Soley, CEO, The Object Management Group (OMG)

About the Author

Paul Harmon is the founder and chief strategy officer of Enterprise Alignment and the executive editor of Business Process Trends Newsletter. He has coauthored many books, including Developing E-Business Systems and Architectures: A Manager's Guide, The Object Technology Casebook (Wiley), and the international bestseller Expert Systems: Artificial Intelligence for Business (Wiley).

Product Details

• Paperback: 592 pages
• Publisher: Morgan Kaufmann; 2 edition (July 27, 2007)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0123741521
• ISBN-13: 978-0123741523
• Product Dimensions: 9.2 x 7.6 x 1.1 inches
• Shipping Weight: 2.6 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 4.2 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (14 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #30,985 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
  • #12 in Books > Computers & Technology > Computer Science > Software Engineering > Design Tools & Techniques
  • #31 in Books > Business & Investing > Management & Leadership > Management Science
  • #35 in Books > Business & Investing > Organizational Behavior > Organizational Change

More About the Author

Education: Earlham College (Richmond Indiana) & Columbia University (NYC)
Spent adult life working as a management consultant.

Worked for Geary Rummler in NYC then started Harmon Associates in San Francisco. Wrote newsletters for Cutter Consortium in the 80s and 90s on Expert Systems and Artificial Intelligence, Object Oriented Technology and CASE. Co-founded Business Process Trends - www.bptrends.com - in 2003 and then joined with other to create the BPTrends Associates Methodology for organization and process change.

Have published a series of books on different software technologies that can be used to improve business performance.

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

32 of 32 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars The Best Overall Perspective of BPM, August 12, 2007

By 

Randy Sorensen (Phoenix AZ, USA) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Business Process Change, Second Edition: A Guide for Business Managers and BPM and Six Sigma Professionals (The MK/OMG Press) (Paperback)

In 2004, I worked in a business unit at my company that had experienced a period of declining performance. Our senior management felt that one of the causes was work processes that had become cumbersome and inefficient over the years. I was asked to sponsor a process improvement initiative to try to simplify and streamline how we did work. I didn't know where to start, so I went on a crash course to learn everything I could about improving business processes. I read some great books by Geary Rummler, Roger Burlton, Michael Hammer, and many others. I learned about things like process modeling, process redesign, process improvement, process automation, BPM tools, swimlanes, value chains, CMMI, process owners, Six Sigma, Lean, process architectures--and the role of IT in enabling all of this.

This intense study provided me with a valuable foundation of knowledge, but I still didn't know how pull all of the pieces together. Organizations are extremely complex systems. To improve performance, which approaches work best under which situations? Which tools to use? What skills are needed to improve and redesign processes? What's appropriate, and what's not?

In early 2005, I discovered Business Process Change, First Edition, by Paul Harmon. This book provided me with the big picture perspective of the BPM world that I sorely needed. It helped me to ask the right questions and to structure our process improvement plans more effectively. The issues we have been addressing require long term solutions, and this work continues today. But, we are building an infrastructure that will integrate people and technology into our process change initiatives to ensure the sustainability of our efforts and results.

The First Edition not only helped me organize a more effective process improvement strategy in our business unit, but I also consider the knowledge and perspective gained to be a significant factor in my being selected to lead our relatively new Center for Process Excellence (CPE), a central BPM group located in our corporate offices. The mission of our CPE is to promote a process-based culture throughout our company. We currently lead process improvement and redesign projects to solve specific business problems, and we have begun to develop process modeling skills in our lines of business. We are now focusing on establishing an enterprise business process architecture for our organization and securing executive support for large-scale business transformation.

Thankfully, I now have the Second Edition to consult as we continue on our process journey and take our work to even higher, more ambitious levels. I bought my copy two weeks ago, and while I haven't read it cover-to-cover yet, I have read enough to know that this is not the First Edition with just some cosmetic changes. It is a complete overhaul. It reflects the newest and best thinking in business process change and management today. Like the First Edition, it is a surprisingly clear, practical and useful guide. That's the bottom line for me--what works and how can I use it.

If there was ever a must read book for business process change professionals, this is it.

12 of 12 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars The Second Edition in Virtually a New Book, July 31, 2007

By 

Paul Harmon, Editor, Business Process Trends (San Francisco, CA, USA) - See all my reviews
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Amazon Verified Purchase

This review is from: Business Process Change, Second Edition: A Guide for Business Managers and BPM and Six Sigma Professionals (The MK/OMG Press) (Paperback)

Readers of the first edition of Business Process Change should know that the second edition is virtually a new book. It has been reorganized to emphasize enterprise level process activities, process level projects and implementation level activities. Major sections on enterprise frameworks, process problem diagnosis and BPMS have been added and most chapters have been reworked to add information about changes that have occured since the first book appeared in 2003.
Paul Harmon, author of Business Process Change

8 of 8 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Very good discussion of business process - applicable to a broad arena of work, October 19, 2007

By 

L. Atha (Rocket City, USA) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Business Process Change, Second Edition: A Guide for Business Managers and BPM and Six Sigma Professionals (The MK/OMG Press) (Paperback)

I think this is the best book that I have seen that allows an organization to consider business process at the enterprise and department level. I have been engaged in business process management in the government for years, trying to define the processes, trying to communicate them, trying to improve them. This is by far the best treatment and guide I have seen. This is what I have been looking for and couldn't find.