As an analyst, you spend your day designing your organization’s processes, measuring their performance and ironing out the fine details. You focus on the “how”. You’re very good at it, but maybe you’re more interested in the “what”? If you want to move past the nitty-gritty of processes and devise end-to-end models and strategies instead, then you’re looking make the leap to business architect.

The necessity of architects is a byproduct of digital transformation.

“There’s a growing need for talented pros who can reduce complexity, establish solid technology processes and ensure tech’s used consistently across business units and functional areas.” — Sharon Florentine, CIO

What is a business architect?

As a business architect, you will design the structure of the business as a whole by looking broadly at systems design and requirements. Your aim is to improve the business’ operations in line with goals and strategy. Architects do this by theorizing and testing the components of a system (the technology, the flow of work, the deliverables) and overseeing the implementation of the systems by someone in a business analyst role.

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If you want to employ approaches like business process management in your business it’s best to have a solid understanding of how these theories work.

One crucial aspect of using these theories correctly is understanding their development.

It’s common for managers to want to employ cutting edge ideas in their business, but without a deep understanding these methods can be misapplied.

These errors will reduce the effectiveness of your process management and hold your business back.

It’s not just business where process improvement efforts are regularly being undermined! In a recent meta-study from the British Medical Journal, researchers found only 2 out of 73 studies had applied the PDSA process improvement methodology in a way which fully met criteria. Commenting:

To progress the development of the science of improvement, a greater understanding of the use of improvement methods, including PDSA, is essential to draw reliable conclusions about their effectiveness.

In this Process Street article, we’re going to look at some of the fundamentals and pick out key historical thinkers whose work we can trace from in order to better inform how process improvement methods should be done. Including:

• Who is Frederick Winslow Taylor?
• What is Taylorism?
• What W. Edwards Deming can teach us about continuous improvement
• Why Taiichi Ohno helps you cut waste in your business
• What Ludwig von Bertalanffy tells us about systems
• How Bill Smith changed the way we view defects
• What Ray Dalio can show us about company culture

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A-Team Lending was a California-based mortgage broker with more than a dozen full-time employees and 20 commissioned salespeople. The company hired process consultant Cary Wan to improve its marketing and business systems.

Within the first month, Cary had automated a large part of its HR system. He estimated that the automation avoided at least $30,000 in additional staffing costs that the same work would otherwise require.

Only 9% of information security professional believe their organization has effective incident response processes. The biggest issue? Well, you’re reading Process Street so you probably guessed it: the lack of standardization. Almost half of the respondents to the SANS Incident Response Survey said that their lack of a formal incident response procedure was holding them back and causing security issues.

It’s not even like preparing for serious security incidents is wasted time or that you’d be going overboard with precautions; 61% of companies have experienced critical incidents in the last two years — that includes data breaches, unauthorized access, and denial of service attacks.

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Whether you’re submitting a draft of an article for review, collating a report for senior management, or presenting a product design, you probably need someone to sign off on your work.

This happens day in day out in organizations all around the world.

Yet, the sign off process can be slow and littered with delays.

Anyone who has worked in software development will know the pain of submitting work for review, only for revisions and changes to drone on and on. The time spent waiting can sometimes be as much as the time spent working.

And this, friends, is bad for business.

Last week I published an article on Muda – waste in production systems – and laid out the different ways poor processes create waste and damage business performance. One of those wastes is referred to as Time on Hand, or waiting.

In this article, we’ll look to cover the most common occurrence of this waste: the approval flow. We’ll look at:

• What an approval process is
• What common approval workflows are
• Best practices for approvals
• How you can use Process Street to streamline your approvals

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“FACEBOOK ACQUIRES INSTAGRAM”

“TWITTER ACQUIRES VINE”

“GOOGLE ACQUIRES WAZE”

The biggest acquisitions of the hottest startups are hugely public. But because the most newsworthy acquisitions are the biggest, we’re led to believe those are the only kinds of acquisitions that happen. That’s simply not the case.

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The Dodson Property Management case study shows how a Richmond-based operator used Process Street to standardize and track property management workflows across approximately 3,500 rental properties.

In 2018, Dodson used Process Street to coordinate work ranging from recruitment and employee onboarding to tenant operations, maintenance, legal duties, and monthly owner reports. We spoke with Tim Wehner, then Vice President of Single Family Management, about how the team worked. In 2022, Dodson’s single-family, small-multifamily, and association-management divisions joined Evernest and adopted the Evernest name, while the multifamily division joined Atrium. This case study documents Dodson’s operating model at the time of the interview.

Staring at the tiny LCD progress bar of the vending machine in a lobby, I realize nothing pisses us off more than indefinite waiting times. Especially people waiting for their coffee, their cheap flight comparisons, or their computer to finish doing whatever it’s doing.

Since the creation of software, there has always been loading times. An early example comes from Bob Stahl’s way-ahead-of-its time article in February 1986’s Computerworld.

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TechMD is an award-winning IT solutions firm specializing in strategic consulting and managed services. To help TechMD manage cybersecurity operations and client workloads, the company turned to Process Street to facilitate the necessary process management efforts.

We spoke with company President Sebastian Igreti about TechMD’s experience of Process Street.

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“Why didn’t they see this coming?”

I had just learned of yet another company catastrophically failing to understand their audience. Who thought it would be a good idea to host an AMA after your company was involved in one of the biggest financial scandals in modern history?

Then it hit me. Every team makes silly mistakes. It’s all down to forgetting to ask yourself some basic marketing questions.

While this post was originally going to be reviewing Getting Goosebumps by Bryan Adams and Dave Hazlehurst, the examples and theories they pose in that book (which is well worth a read) are perfect for demonstrating how easy it can be to avoid marketing disasters. All you have to do is keep asking these questions to form a coherent strategy with no nasty surprises.

But enough rambling – it’s time to learn how to avoid marketing disasters!
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