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The process owner: who or what?

A process owner is committed to the proper management of a business process. This could be a process within a single department or one that spans multiple departments across an organization. Their goal is to monitor, evaluate, and improve the process as a whole. A process owner takes responsibility for maintaining and sustaining focus on the process.
Not everyone is inherently suited to be a process owner: the person you appoint—or better yet, who volunteers for the role—must have a vested interest in ensuring that the process they are responsible for runs smoothly.

Director

A good process owner is ideally situated in the middle of the organization: they should preferably work closely with colleagues to be able to see and feel how the steps in the process actually unfold. On the other hand, they should also possess a certain level of maturity within the organization, enabling them to see the big picture and understand the strategic business goals. Think of them as the director on a film set: guiding and instructing the actors while keeping an eye on the bigger picture and the ultimate goal.

Responsibilities

A process owner typically performs this role alongside another job; only in exceptional cases is it a full-time position. Their responsibilities include:

• Identifying: what processes exist, and what are the priorities?
• Determining: what do the processes specifically look like?
• Analyzing: what can be improved? What is waste?
• Designing : how should the process look in the future, from AS IS to TO BE?
• Aligning : are the process goals in line with the organization’s strategy??
• Improving : collaborating with stakeholders to implement changes in the process and the corresponding software.
• Informing : ensuring adequate and timely communication with all involved parties, possibly combined with training.
• Monitoring : are the changes delivering the desired results? Is the organization making a return to old ways? Is everyone sticking to the new methods?
• Motivating : helping stakeholders maintain focus, continually emphasizing the benefits of process-oriented work (efficiency, effectiveness, quality, timeliness).

Skills and challenges

As a process owner, you want to ensure smooth collaboration between the various stakeholders in your process. Ideally, a process owner should possess a number of skills:

• Leadership qualities
• Process-oriented thinking
• Empathetic
• Strong analytical skills, while still seeing the big picture
• Good communication skills
• Customer-oriented

Social skills, in particular, are crucial and should not be underestimated: when you change processes that may have been executed the same way for years, you can expect some resistance.

The role of process owner also comes with challenges. Interpersonal dynamics can complicate the work:

• Who reports to whom?
• How much influence does a head of department have on the implementation of change?

Especially if you, as the process owner of a cross-departmental process, are part of one of those departments, it can be challenging to get everyone’s mandate. Much of this depends on the culture within the organization itself, as well as within departments where different dynamics may exist. Taking that into account, identifying potential difficulties, and addressing them is a valuable exercise.

Our training for process owners

It’s worth taking a moment to consider the role of the process owners within your organization. Do they need more insight into their role, or could their responsibilities be more clearly defined? We offer training for both new and experienced process owners:

• Office game : this business simulation game focuses on process awareness and serves as an introduction to process ownership.
• Process ownership : in this in-house training, we delve deeply into the roles and responsibilities of your process owners. The training is tailored to the level of the process owners in your organization.
• BPMN : you’ll learn to map your process using this international standard modeling language.