System model

If we are working from the mission to identify processes we would go through the following sequence of steps:

1. Ask what is the organization trying to do (right now) and thereby define the Mission

2. Ask for whom is the organization doing it and thereby define the Stakeholders

3. Ask what the stakeholder's needs and expectations are relative to the mission and thereby define the required Business Outcomes. (See Stakeholder Analysis for typical outcomes).

4. Ask what will the stakeholders look for to assess if their needs and expectations have been met and thereby define the Stakeholder success measures or KPIs (See Stakeholder Analysis for typical KPIs).

5. Ask what outputs will deliver successful outcomes and thereby define the Business Outputs

6. Ask what factors affect our ability to deliver these outputs and thereby define the Critical Success Factors. From these one may be able to identify business objectives, constraints and key sub-processes. E.g if innovation is critical there ought be an innovation objective and an innovation process to achieve this objective. If a constraint is that we must minimise our carbon footprint, the innovation process has to enable the innovation objective to be achieved while reducing our carbon footprint.

7. Ask in what area are we going to concentrate our resources, which segment of the market, with what products, what services and with what values are we going to be the leader and thereby define more constraints such as the priorities, policies and values.

8. Ask “what processes will deliver these business outputs with these imposed constraints” and thereby define the critical processes. This may result in identifying many processes such as sales, marketing,  innovation etc rather than generic business processes  

9. To identify the generic business processes ask “what contribution do these critical processes make to the business” and thereby define the Business Processes and their associated sub- processes (See table below for typical example)

The American Quality and Productivity Centre published a Process Classification framework in 1995 with 13 main processes to encourage organizations to see their activities from a cross-industry process viewpoint instead of from a narrow functional viewpoint. If we take the AQPC processes and ask the following question we can reduce the number of processes to 4 as illustrated in the table below.

What contribution do these activity groups make to the business?

This is the approach taken by Peter Drucker in the Practice of Management in which he wrote, "a business function is a collection of activities that make a common and unique contribution to the purpose and mission of the business." Drucker used the term function and not process but he was not referring to departments. As we derive business processes from the mission we can draw the conclusion that business function in Drucker's day = business process in today's parlance.

For more information see Quality Management Essentials