Successful Business Process Management

CHAPTER 1

Understanding Processes and Procedures

LET'S START FROM THE VERY BEGINNING, with definitions of some essential terms. This is an important thing to do any time you're working on process documentation. Words are all you have to convey your ideas, but in many cases people understand the same words in different ways. That's especially true for seemingly simple terms like “process.” You don't want to learn, several days or weeks into a project, that the conversations you thought you were having sounded very different to the other people involved. Thus, clear definitions are critical to getting everyone on the same page.

Once we have a shared understanding of processes and related topics, we can go on to consider why they're important. ...