Developing a Method for Prioritizing Business Process Improvement Initiatives

For continuous improvement and innovation in business processes, prioritizing processes is one of the top strategic decision-making tasks for chief information officers and business executives. However, most of the methods for prioritizing process improvement initiatives pay little attention to analysing the characteristics of processes. In addition, in the design process of these methods, the users (e.g. managers, process stakeholders) rarely participate. More importantly, how these methods can be adapted to managers’ decision-making process has not yet been fully explored. This paper addresses the need for a new method supporting managers’ decision making in prioritizing process improvement initiatives. We describe the design and evaluation of a prioritization and categorization method (PCM). The PCM consists of two models, the process assessment heat map (PAHM) and the process categorization map (CM), as well as five iterative activities. The evaluation results from Ericsson show that the PCM can produce a good-quality analysis of processes. It facilitates the decision-making process by eliciting the “collective intelligence” from key process stakeholders and managers. The findings also reveal the implications of improving the PCM to make it more configurable and dynamic. The paper contributes to business process management and proposes a novel method for prioritizing process improvement initiatives.