Change Management: Process Classification Framework and Best Practices

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When French novelist Jean-Baptiste Alphonse Karr wrote “Plus ca change, plus c’est la meme chose,” he could have been penning an epigram about change management. For over three decades, academics, managers, and consultants, realizing that transforming organizations is difficult, have dissected the subject. They’ve sung the praises of leaders who communicate vision and walk the talk in order to make change efforts succeed. They have sanctified the importance of changing organizational culture and employees’ attitudes. They have teased out the tensions between top-down transformation efforts and participatory approaches to change. However, the more things change, the more they stay the same. The Process Classification Framework was created in collaboration with many experts and practitioner panels in 1992. It is a globally recognized business process model that defines activities and processes across thirteen enterprise-level operating and management categories. The Process Classification Framework enables companies to understand their inner workings from a horizontal process viewpoint rather than a vertical functional viewpoint. Moreover, the framework does not list all processes within a company and every process listed in the framework does not represent in every organization.The framework can help answer the question of how a company is doing and therefore help validate the company’s operational objectives. The benefits of employing the Process Classification Framework includes reduced inventory, improved customer/suppliers relationships, improved sales, improved profit margins, and more enriching jobs for employees. The globally recognized business leaders armed with the taxonomy of the business processes: industry best practices, benchmarking tools and risks and controls, will definitely outperform the competitors.