^The APQC Blog

In my last blog post I wrote about how HR shared service centers can be a powerful vehicle for perfecting HR operations—containing work force costs, speeding work force transactions, and delivering exceptional HR customer service. In this blog post, I want to talk about another strategy for improving the effectiveness and efficiency of the HR organization: process management.

Process management is an approach to governing the flow of work across an organization. When applied specifically to the HR organization, process management involves:

We’ve been getting a lot of feedback on the content in the Knowledge Base. So far the majority of the feedback has indicated that you are satisfied with our content. We’ve also gotten some requests for content on specific topics. Here are a few of these topics, along with content that may be just what you’re looking for.

A recent survey of finance executives found that many companies overlook or minimize 
so-called debt covenant compliance risk. This is the risk that a company could default on a bank loan because it failed to keep promises spelled out in a loan agreement.

When we surveyed our members about our Knowledge Base this summer, almost 10 percent of you said you wanted more content on communities of practice. I’m always publishing fresh content on communities and other knowledge sharing approaches, and I promise that APQC’s 2012 publishing plans will take your interests into account. However, I want to make sure you are aware of the reports, articles, and case studies we currently have available on this topic.

The goal of process management is to improve performance. Whether the emphasis is customer retention, cycle time, employee satisfaction, efficiency, business growth, productivity, or any other goal, organizations implement process management to improve something. Countless books have been written on the topic, and numerous techniques and methodologies exist to help organizations accomplish these improvements, such as Lean, Six Sigma, and Total Quality Management (TQM).

At the start the year, I identified six priorities for HR. Among them was the imperative for HR to perfect its operations. In the article, Human Capital Management 2011, I wrote:

Without proper change management, you can forget about moving your organization to process management. There is a reason change management is located at the heart of APQC's Seven Tenets of Process Management—number four of seven. All the other tenets, in a way, revolve around change management. The first three—strategic alignment, governance, and process models—lead naturally to change management.

On October 12, the U.S. Congress passed free trade agreements (FTAs) with South Korea, Panama, and Colombia. Originally negotiated five years ago, the agreements must be signed by President Obama before they go into effect.

APQC is probably most well-known around the world for its research in knowledge management. We’re not as acknowledged for our process classification framework (PCF), but in my humble opinion, the PCF is just as important as any work we do in knowledge management.

We’ve all worked in an organization that feels chaotic. Here’s a common scenario: You’re happily performing a process, doing some work you’ve done dozens of times before, only to find out that the one sub-process you depend on has changed, and not for the better. Another common horror story involves two individuals both improving the same process but not knowing it until they end up playing a sort of process tug-of-war, which usually ends in a standstill resolved by the manager who wields the most influence.