Publications

Please see the following recently published articles:

Mindset Matters in Oncology Clinical Trials

Clinical trial experience – a case study

Please see this article on Digital Improving the Odds of Success with Digital

Improving the odds of success with digital programs has much more to do do with shifting management attention than it has to do with technology.

We have known for over a decade that a major advantage of digital maturity is that higher digital maturity drives better financial performance. This article presents a maturity framework for digital.

The business benefits of focusing on customer experience have been known for some time. This article examines the central role of customer experience in digital success.

The track record for digital transformation has been bleak. This article examines three habits to nurture to improve the success rate with digital.

Is low code a promising trend or a Pandora’s box?

Focusing on digital maturity may yield better results than obsessing around digital transformation.

According to a recent survey – cultural challenges, not technological ones, were the biggest hurdle to overcome around Big Data and AI initiatives.This article sheds light on how to overcome such challenges.

Accurate, complete, and timely data has always been required for success with digital programs. This article presents our view of data, analytics and digital transformation success.

The four cornerstones of success with digital transformation.

Did you know that the very same practices that are central to breaking down silos are needed for success with digital transformation? Please see: Succeed with digital transformation by breaking down silos

Is your company still deploying digital tools one-by-one within departmental or geographic boundaries? Please see: Winning at Hyperautomation

Effective Digital Transformation Requires Shifting Management Attention

How Process Specialists Can Improve Digital Transformation Success

How to Take Best Advantage of Process Mining

The Evolving Role of Process Practitioners

Powerful departmental and product silos adversely impact the success rate of digital transformations – especially in the financial service sector. This article presents further details Digital Transformation in Financial Services 12 2019

How to Improve Customer Experience? Do you wonder why there’s so much lip service devoted to “collaboration” – but so little clarity on precisely who needs to collaborate and how? This article provides insight on How to Use Process Management to Improve Customer Experience.

BPM has made a significant contribution to improving the performance of business processes in many organizations, yet the “management” part of BPM is still far from realizing its full potential as this article 02-06-2018-ART-BPM-as-a-Management-Discipline-Spanyi outlines.

To succeed with customer experience in B2B please consider this article on CX and OPex

To succeed with business transformation, please see my article on the central role of collaboration.

Improving New Product Development with Predictive Analytics is currently a topic of keen interest. Please see the article I co-authored on this subject.

To request other articles, please write to andrew (at) spanyi dot com.

In order to download other articles, please visit our Downloads page.

Articles

Demystifying the Relationship between Processes and Capabilities

Published on BPTrends 02/03/2015
By Alan Ramias and Andrew Spanyi

Some have argued that processes are equivalent to capabilities. Others argue that capabilities are about the potential an organization has to accomplish its strategies. There is merit in both perspectives.

BPM versus Operational Excellence

Published on BPMInstitute.org, 2015
By Andrew Spanyi

The proliferation of process improvement methods over the past decade has become problematic. The range of process improvement methods now includes BPM, Lean, Six Sigma, Lean Six Sigma, Operational Excellence (OpX), Process Excellence (PEX), Reengineering (BPR) and several older techniques. BPM and OpX share certain challenges and opportunities. There are also some subtle but significant differences in various definitions of BPM and OpX.

The Truth about Business Transformation

Published on the PEX Network, 2014
By Andrew Spanyi

There’s been a lot of talk recently around business transformation. It’s been suggested that business transformation is needed in most vertical industries, the public sector and other not for profit organizations. But what is business transformation? What is it not? What are the critical factors for success? These are some of the questions this article explores.

How BPM Can Drive Corporate Strategy: Andrew Spanyi Explains

Published on BPM.com, February 2014

In this interview, Andrew discusses some of the latest developments in BPM and also provides some real world examples of some BPM success stories.

Processes -"The bigger they are, the harder they fall"

Posted: on the PEX Network on 04/03/201

Conventional wisdom says that “the bigger they are the harder they fall.” The bigger the process you’re trying to improve the more likely you’ll fail, with some studies claiming up to 70% of large process initiatives fail. Why is this? In this interview, Andrew Spanyi, author and consultant in process improvement, talks about the potential pitfalls of doing process improvement on a large scale and what you can do to avoid them.

Assessing Customer Experience from the Outside In

Published on Customers.com February 2014
By Andrew Spanyi

Andrew Spanyi encourages companies to take a customer-oriented focus on their end-to-end business processes. And how do you do that? Begin by shifting your attention from internal metrics to the critical Moments of Truth and associated metrics that matter most to your customers.

Monitoring the right stuff is vital, but just as important is instilling a customer-centric culture within the organization. And such a cultural shift is dependent on what the organization measures, manages, and rewards. Andrew advocates taking an outside-in approach, from the customer’s point of view, to make sure your business is linking customer experience priorities to business process monitoring and making that a key part of your senior management team’s daily scorecard.

Shifting Management Attention

Originally published on abpmp.org in 2013, revised 2015
By Andrew Spanyi

While business process management (BPM) has been effective in improving the performance of selected business processes, many organizations still find that the success at the enterprise level continues to be elusive. For success, there are at least five levers that need to be manipulated to move management attention and thereby shape organizational culture: metrics, models, methods, accountability and incentives. Just as in the days of Archimedes, where objects weighing several tons were moved by applying the right amount of force to well positioned levers, applying force to these five levers in the right way can significantly shift management attention.

Process Based Governance and the Role of SLAs

Originally published on BPMInsitute.org in 2012
By Andrew Spanyi

The root causes of excessive costs and errors, of delays and inflexibility, are often related to the non-value added handoffs across organizational boundaries. In most companies, work is fragmented across multiple departments, product lines and business units. No one has end-to-end ownership of the flow of work or responsibility for flawless service to the customer. In such environments, redundant activities and duplication of effort is common, errors are frequent, and overall responsiveness to customers’ needs is elusive. The key to resolving these issues is to implement a governance framework which assures cross departmental collaboration and encourages different units to work together for value creation.

How to be a Transformational CFO?

Published as the cover story in Strategic Finance magazine, December 2011
By Andrew Spanyi

Chief financial officers (CFOs) are particularly well suited to lead a major transformational effort. Yet few do so successfully even though most have a vested role in strategic planning and also determine what the organization measures and monitors. Operational excellence around core financial activities is certainly important—maybe even essential—but it’s becoming increasingly insufficient. What are the fundamental values and beliefs that a CFO needs to embrace to succeed with transformation? What are the obstacles that transformational CFOs face, and how can they overcome them? What are some of the best, albeit rare, practices for a CFO to use to lead transformational change?

Process Excellence Success: More Art than Science

Originally published on BPMInsitute.org in 2012
By Andrew Spanyi

Process excellence is becoming an umbrella phrase to describe the set of improvement methods such as Lean, Six Sigma, Lean Six Sigma, Business Process Reengineering, and technology driven BPM with the objective of improving operational performance. There has been a great of attention dedicated to the science of deploying each of these various improvement methods. Indeed, these methods of improvement have become increasingly codified and even commoditized. Much less attention has been focused on the art of succeeding with process excellence.

Leading Process Change

Originally published on BPMInsitute.org in 2011
By Andrew Spanyi

Many firms are actually quite good at improving performance on projects of small scope within traditional organizational boundaries and yet they struggle in achieving sustainable improvements to large business processes such as order fulfillment and new product introduction. What’s the problem? Lack of committed leadership typically surfaces among the top few barriers in practically every survey on the obstacles in making major improvements to organizational performance. Why do leaders continue to struggle in this regard?

Taking Process Excellence to the Next Level

Originally published with the Corporate Executive Board in 2011
By Andrew Spanyi

Many firms are actually quite good at improving performance on projects of small scope within traditional organizational boundaries. While most have the appetite to take Process Excellence to the next level, many firms struggle in improving and sustaining improvements to large business processes such as order fulfillment and new product introduction. The fact is that success in executing enterprise-wide process excellence (PE) projects requires a dramatically different set of leadership behaviors.

Lean at Your Service

Published in The Lean Management Journal, 2010
By Andrew Spanyi and Brenton Harder

The application of lean principles in the service sector has always promised significant potential as a method for process improvement. Yet, many organizations sub-optimize the application of lean by failing to see it as a major cultural change that may take years to implement. Lean implementation is not simply a matter of drawing value stream maps (VSM) and attacking pain points with kaizen events; rather, it requires active and engaged leadership to avoid mistakes in the application of the broad principles.

It’s Time to Change

Published in Strategic Finance magazine, October 2006
By Andrew Spanyi

CFOs must move beyond their traditional financial scorekeeping role and develop leadership skills in strategy and operations to succeed. Besieged by complexity, confronted by disruptive innovation and globalization, and challenged by increasingly demanding shareholders, regulatory bodies, and unsteady capital markets, the CFO must have the mind-set and the skill set to look beyond the numbers.

Enabling Execution

Published in Strategic Finance magazine, August 2003
By Andrew Spanyi

Since true customer and shareholder value is created through a series of activities that cross organizational boundaries, functional thinking can impede the leadership team’s ability to focus on what really counts. The traditional functional mind-set of many senior executives may well be the single most important obstacle to achieving sustainable performance improvement in what may be the most turbulent business environment that many managers have faced in their careers.

Books

More for Less: The Power of Process Management

More for Less: The Power of Process Management is the definitive guide for business leaders who are determined to deliver more for less to their customers and shareholders. What do your customers really want? “More for less,” of course! They want more value, more service, more consistent delivery, more accuracy, and ever more responsiveness. They want less hassle, less bureaucracy, and less sales pressure. Unless you can provide your customers with “more for less,” you can be assured they will find someone else who can, and sooner rather than later. There’s no magic to providing more for less, but it does require a management mindset that’s different from the norm–and that’s precisely what this book is about. The findings from exclusive interviews with frontline executives went into the making of this book. More for Less is one of the best sources of contemporary thinking about business process management.

Business Process Management is a Team Sport: Play It to Win

Business Process Management is a Team Sport: Play It to Win is a book with a compelling message about the resurgence of business process thinking for competitive advantage. It emphasizes customer centricity and cross-functional collaboration. In an easy-to-read, business novel format, the book outlines why and how thoughtful CEO’s and leadership teams can manage enterprise business processes as the means to transform their good companies into great ones. It outlines a robust framework needed by organizations to achieve strategic focus, organizational alignment and operating discipline.

Operational Leadership

Operational Leadership integrates and extends key concepts on leadership and process management and applies these to the improvement of operational performance. It presents a framework for action in an easy to read, actionable format. The importance of viewing operations in the context of a company’s key capabilities, or end-to-end processes, where collaboration across traditional organizational boundaries is essential, is emphasized. It’s an outstanding title that addresses an operational leadership mindset and paradigm which enables both breakthrough change and the discipline of continuous improvement in operations.