Business Process Management and Six Sigma Success

Consumers are looking for more transparency when deciding how to spend their money or who to spend it with. At the same time, companies are seeking out ways to increase profits while offering a quality product or service that is consistent and reliable. In today’s competitive climate, the use of strategic Business Process Management (BPM) tools is becoming a critical component of a successful project manager’s repertoire of skills and knowledge required to succeed in this dynamic market.

Students, career changers and current project managers that would like to increase their project management acumen can consider adding BPM training to their professional development strategy. This set of strategies helps project managers bring about better results with repeatable success.

BPM is part of the Six Sigma Approach

Six Sigma helps business leaders:

• Define areas of process improvement
• Measure progress and collect data for ongoing adjustments
• Analyze data, customer feedback, and stakeholders’ input
• Improve all parts of the workflow, supply chain, and other business processes
• Control and re-adjust the process as necessary to work toward improving the effectiveness of a product or service and the effectiveness of the processes that support project delivery

Business Process Management curriculum covers specific tools that leaders can use to reduce errors and increase the quality of a product or service within the larger Six Sigma framework.

Originally applied in a manufacturing setting, Six Sigma practitioners strive for a manufacturing process in which 99.99966% of the products manufactured are statistically free of defects. This equates to 3.4 defects per million. Multi-national organizations have had particularly impressive results in implementing the Business Process Management tools of Six Sigma. In just half a decade, General Electric estimated that the implementation of Six Sigma resulted in over $10 billion in savings and increased profits.

While today the evolution of Six Sigma is moving right along with the expansion of the global marketplace, at the time of its introduction it was a radical change in the status quo business paradigm.

Today’s consumers want strong triple bottom line performance ratings from the companies they choose to support. Business Process Management strategies and tools allow a company to report data in a way that is engaging to a wide variety of stakeholders, as well as their target consumers. The tools allow for a more holistic and responsive approach toward running a company in today’s ultra-competitive environment.

Business Process Management gives business leaders the ability to:

• Clarify the vision for the project or create more focused strategies for adjusting functions and processes that better support a company’s mission statement or product development decisions
• Define the baseline goals for the organization and outline the specific processes that all contribute to the development of a better project or service
• Use metrics to build models or simulate changes to the process in an effort to reduce errors and increase consistency
• Analyze data from across divisions and engage with stakeholders to determine an optimal improvement strategy
• Improve the process or processes by selecting and implementing improvements that can be adjusted over time
• Control the deployment layers of the implementation by enlisting the use of customer or user-defined dashboards and other tools to monitor the improvement in real time
• Re-engineer or revamp the processes by analyzing performance data; re-adjust the simulation model and then prepare for the next improvement iteration; start from scratch when the original model no longer holds strategic benefits

In today’s constantly changing business environment, developing a breadth of knowledge that transfers to industry is a cost-effective way to invest in career development. Many professional organizations offer excellent opportunities for career networking and mentoring. Joining and being active in a professional organization is a great career development strategy for project managers and business leaders at all levels.

At the same time, with the convenience of online education, professionals working toward advancing their careers have more options than ever before. The flexible scheduling of online learning is one of the first things many people consider when contemplating enrolling in a class that takes place over the Internet. Also, reputable online programs hire industry leaders to teach their curriculum, which means that students can engage in a dynamic learning process taught by career mentors who have implemented these best-practice tools to build their own successful careers. In addition to having access to real-world knowledge, students are also interacting with career-minded professionals in a vibrant learning community which can yield additional long-term career connections.