Learning business process management

"Whatever Whenever". That's W Hotels philosophy". Rishabh, a young and communicative person designated as W Insider explains to me while arranging a chef's curated not on menu lunch for us in W -Goa which most hotels would deny. Intrigued, I asked Rishabh why he was going out of the way for guests. Rishabh sat down to explain as how W, as a hotel chain has managed to infuse so much of Business Process management and almost every person, follows it diligently. Rishabh gleefully talked about how Training, Educating, Sensitizing and Following ups are basic values each employee has to imbibe as strong and flowing as a blood transfusion. " It runs inside all of us". My curiosity led me to meet another young person, Saadhvi , Assistant director of marketing and later to GM Cajetan Araujo as well. " We are proud that whether it is about arranging a physiotherapy waist belt in Goa at 2 am morning or managing a helicopter ride, we do it all. Whenever is a department of its own in every W. We strongly dictate this understanding of what predictable processes a guest needs and then act accordingly. As long as demand is legal, it will be fulfilled. Our mission at W hotels is to Fuel the lust for Life." Saadhvi and Cajetan echoed similar sentiments gushing over how the brand works around Design, Fashion, Music and Fuel. That is where W manages its business processes embedded strongly with strategy.

Well, not rocket science but how many organizations understand this simple stuff? I thought to myself. So, what is B.P.M. actually and how does it adds up in success?

Business Process Management is creating, analysing, redoing and implementing every predictable process of any organization. Each department in a company has many different processes. Each of them may be a new implementation or a decades-old practice that may have lost its relevance.

With Business Process Management, an organisation takes a critical approach and looks at all of these processes in totality and each one separately. The current state and identification of areas of improvement to each process is done then. It indeed is a herculean task but no one said that growth comes easy.

Where is the first step of managing your business process begins? The first and foremost begins with Creating a Strategy. This may sound fancy but most organisations fail to draft a clear yet evolving strategy to take the company ahead. Generally, the start-ups begin without putting a clear strategy and once they embark on the journey ahead, the mistakes or unpredictable problems keep cropping up. Precious time is gone in firefighting. If half the work is done on Where the organization is headed and how will it get there, the other half will fall in place.

I have worked with many start-ups to scale up their operations. Most of them roll their eyes if I ask them to put strategic plans before anything else. You don't want to build a company where every person does not have a basic understanding of the road map of the company's vision. While discussing it with a Research and Development company's HR business partner, Apoorva gave another insight. Most shared services departments like Research or Purchase do not care about any strategy what the company has. They think of themselves as a support mechanism and serve at the pleasure. " Does it backfire ever?" My question was answered with a scoff by Apoorva, who confirmed that most of the time these departments make mistakes that violate the basic culture model of the organization and it is blamed on the ignorance.

Two steps to start successful strategy implementation are here. The first step is to ensure that the strategy is not a reflection of the past bitter experiences. Just because something went wrong in the past, good practice should not be decarded without reviewing. The same goes for past success too. The second step is to make sure that once a company has outlined a viable strategy, every functional resource should be available. Difficult sure but can be achieved to a large extent if Business Processes are aligned.

The writer is a strategic advisor and premium educator with Harvard Business Publishing