Delivering Business Strategy Through Process Management

There is no shortage of planning activities in organizations today. However, the concept of a process to develop the connections between an organization’s intent and its capabilities to enable that intent is woefully weak and inconsistent in most cases. This chapter strives to outline how an organization can develop a more rigorous statement of strategic intent as the starting point for all investments in change. It delves into what is needed to ensure that the hope expressed in such strategic plans and annual reports is actionable and becomes a reality. It provides a structured and repeatable method to articulate environmental pressures, intent, stakeholder interests, strategy, business processes, and various other capabilities and the relationship among them with integrity. It provides a process for establishing the business process architecture of the organization and uses it as the alignment linchpin to provide traceability from choices made in prioritized programs of change in technology, human capability, policy, and other supporting mechanisms back to their raison d’être: the enterprise strategy.