Due to some conflicts and a general desire to keep things simple, my husband and I decided to spend New Year’s Eve at home this year. As could be expected, we started the evening by taking stock of 2021 and what we wanted to prioritize or do differently in the new year. However, once we got past the obvious choices to learn new skills and dedicate more time to writing, the conversation meandered through the past and back into the present. We spent the rest of the evening talking about who we each were, how we’ve changed, and how our relationship has evolved over the last two decades. In other words, how our skills and priorities shifted over time and what that means for how we work together. 

APQC recently closed its annual process and performance management (PPM) priorities survey taking stock of the trends and challenges impacting PPM professionals in 2022. This made me think about that long conversation on New Year’s Eve and how process and performance management and its relationship to the business have evolved over the last seven years that we have been conducting these priorities surveys.

In 2018, process management began a paradigm shift. Mainly driven by needs of the organization—an emphasis on customer centricity, pace of change, and digital transformation. Which required PPM teams to align with the organization, shift to end-to-end processes, and expand their toolboxes to include better analytics, people-centric methodologies, and technologies like automation. 

So, what did this year’s survey reveal?

Elements of a Strong Foundation

PPM teams continue to embrace their ever evolving journey and some priorities have become mainstays. 

• Harmonize across silos—over the last 4 years, end-to-end process development has been the number one priority of process teams. This is due to upgrading systems (e.g., ERPs)—that are predicated on end-to-end processes—and the unification around how work gets done—to focus on the customer and scale productivity—rather than artificial boundaries created by departments. 
• Drive alignment—whether its staying in sync and executing on the goals of the corporate strategy or aligning improvement efforts across the organization, alignment is vital to providing value and removing redundancies. 
• Make data-driven decisions—making sure that measures are fit for purpose, used consistently across the organization, and clear criteria are used to “rack and stack” improvement opportunities are still a priority. Because they ensure objective decisions around performance and improvements. This also goes hand-in-hand with analytics and the development of dashboards to aggregate data and make this information visible as part of decision makers’ processes. 

Emphasis on Culture

As noted, last year, corporate cultures have been put through the wringer since early 2019. Organizations continue to struggle with maintaining their core identity, while transforming their norms and behaviors to stay successful.  

However, the need to embed specific norms and behaviors has been a recurring theme, across the years in our priorities survey results. Notably PPM respondents cite a need to embed a culture of continuous improvement, data-driven decision making, and/or process-thinking. Customer centricity is a key driver of PPM teams’ paradigm shift. However, customer centricity doesn’t just mean the people who buy the organization’s products and services. It also includes the engagement and participation of the internal customers of our processes and support services.

Consequently, there are two big reasons behind the evergreen emphasis on a culture.

1.  Team sport. To be successful all these topics require a specific mindset, norms, behaviors, and skills. Good process and improvement efforts typically require active participation by people at all levels of the organization—from leadership support to SME input and frontline adoption. 
2.  Sign of success. It means the organization and the people that comprise it see the value of and have internalized PPM teams efforts and methodologies. 

Evolution of Purpose and Needs

The survey responses also indicated additional evolutions and opportunities for continued improvement. 

Over the last few years, process teams have continued to push beyond productivity improvements (e.g., cost and throughputs) and expand their portfolio to include several strategic foci. To better understand this shift, we asked the survey respondents, how do their process teams support the organization and its goals. The top four include: 

1. Operational improvements—the traditional core of process teams efforts which focus on improvements in productivity and cost savings. 
2. Strategic initiatives—supporting the execution of strategic initiatives, either as advisors or as part of related project teams. This has been a growing focus for teams and some progress has been made. According to research on BPM teams most have an annual roadmap that is guided by functional or business goals. Consequently, there are still opportunities to tie process efforts explicitly to the organization’s strategy.  
3. Organizational transformations—transformations typically require taking a hard look at how work is executed and require the support of process teams to assess and redesign processes to fit new models.  
4. Technology implementations—as organizations emphasize the replacement of legacy systems and streamlining work, process teams help them understand the current state, identify the future state, and support the implementation of a range of technologies from ERP systems to AI and automation. 

While organizations continue to rely on process teams for tactical responsibilities around improvements, they are increasingly tapping into their process teams to support strategic priorities that impact the entire organization. 

While PPM teams have made strides in building out their technology toolkit, they are still working out some minor kinks. This isn’t due to a lack of desire to leverage technologies, but the ad hoc nature of technology adoption and integrations. Less than a fifth (12%) of survey respondents indicated that their BPM technologies are standardized and integrated across the enterprise, most say they are ad hoc. The good news is that the vast majority (96%) use selection criteria to pick the best fit technologies—typically around cost, ease of use, and feature requirements. 

One final place of continued growth is around the need to build in flexibility. Agile methodologies are more commonplace among PPM teams. However, many still emphasize the need to build them as a core competency in their project management and continuous improvement methodologies. 

Conclusion

Overall PPM professionals and their teams’ skills and priorities have shifted over the last five years, which is reflected in the expanded responsibilities and relationship with their organizations. Many of the changes in how we work started in 2018—end-to-end, data-driven decision making, flexibility, adoption of technologies, and customer centricity. But all good things take time, and as the survey results indicate they continue to be relevant priorities we strive for today.  

You can check out the full survey results from our 2022 Process and Performance Management Priorities Survey here and join me on February 3 for a webinar where I’ll talk more about these results and answer your questions. 

For more process and performance management research and insights, follow me on Twitter at @hlykehogland or connect with me on LinkedIn.