What is a process owner and how is that different from process manager?
What is a process owner or a process manager? What are the responsibilities of each role?
What is a Business Process?
The general question of what a business process is cannot be answered easily because there is no uniform definition. However, it is important to have a uniform understanding of the meaning of the term, business process, in real life.
Answer: Real Life
But how do we get out of this dilemma? In real life, you should communicate your understanding of a business process and align it with your project team members and other contact persons. It is not important how you define the business process, but that all persons involved use the same definition.
Answer: a more professional approach
Characteristics of business processes that you can find in many definitions include:
• They involve several actions, steps, and activities.
• They usually involve various organizational units (departments, enterprises, etc.).
• They are targeted.
• They basically describe an action, decision, and cooperation.
• The result represents a value for an (internal or external) customer.
Other critical characteristics of business processes can be as follows:
• They describe how the enterprise (or other organizational unit) operates.
• Actions can be assigned to organizational units or roles.
• The more branches a business processes has, the more complex it is.
Who is the Process Owner?
A process owner is a person who is given the responsibility and authority for managing a particular process. Most organizations find it useful to appoint individual process owners and define their responsibilities as ensuring the implementation, maintenance and improvement of their specific process and its interactions with other processes.
Process owners take an organization-wide view of their processes. They may not truly “own” the process in that some of the people who are involved in carrying out the process may not report to them.
Instead, the owner is responsible for the design of the process, in other words, how it is carried out, how it interacts with other processes and how it is measured. This responsibility is an on-going task.
Process owners have responsibility for their specific process, end-to-end. However, as stated earlier, this does not mean that all the staff involved in a process actually report to the process owner. Process owners usually have responsibility for most steps in the process and are able to influence other key areas outside their direct organizational control.
Who is the Process Manager?
Process managers evaluate and improve the business process. They perform their tasks in multiple departments and work across all industries, although they most often work in manufacturing or production. Process managers ensure the efficiency of business operations and create and implement changes or improvements when necessary. They generate documentation of existing processes and improvements and forecast expected results of process changes.
Process managers analyze implemented changes and make further adjustments to workflow, schedules, or other protocols and processes as required. Process managers break down various business processes using flowcharts, manuals, and other documentation, which outlines their practices. They arrive at a big picture by assembling data and studying ways to improve it using steps to increase productivity, reduce costs, or make necessary changes to other aspects of the process. Process managers need a bachelor's degree in business management or administration, finance, or accounting.
In smaller and less complex environments, the process owner and process manager role could be performed by the same person. As the organizational and process complexity increases, it is recommended to separate the process owner and process manager roles to balance the need for robust strategic planning and execution excellence.
What do the most effective process owners and managers do?
The most effective process owners and managers:
Apply their business process management expertise (based on ITIL or other disciplines) to proactively identify opportunities to improve how their process works
Collaborate with peers (e.g., tech leaders, admins, other process owners) to coordinate process management and improvement activities
Work with the relative Software Product executive sponsor and platform owner to help improve process performance through the relative Software Product implementations
Influence process stakeholders (e.g., process users) to adopt change
Resources
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Sincerely,
Stathis 👋