The primary use case of this solution is to raise process maturity in this UK government agency. The organisation is a 'trading fund' which has both publicly funded and commercial produces and services.
We began, in 2016, with a very low level of process maturity. Some inconsistent and non-standard policies and procedures had been published on the corporate intranet. There were no BPMN 2.0 workflow models or process architecture to any industry-standard; mainly models produced in Microsoft Visio or PowerPoint.
We needed to raise awareness of the value of effective business process management, document processes consistently and promote process performance management across the process governance roles prior to moving into process improvement and automation.
One if the biggest drivers for this was our ISO 9001:2015 certification which is a contractual requirement for some of our biggest customers.
So we are looking for the solution to help raise our process maturity from a zero base through: awareness of the value of process management, understanding what we do and proactive performance management of cross-functional processes - to help break the silos and shine a light on the pockets of activity that are not aligned with business strategy.
We didn't want a solution that produced a static diagram such as is produced by Visio, we didn't want process models to be something that sat on a shelf and were never looked at. With this solution, the models are living: stakeholders can go to them for reference or comment. The whole process architecture can be navigated by drilling-down or following lateral links. Documentation and custom fields can be linked with and displayed in the models.
We are still on a journey with the adoption, but we have some users outside of the core team in functional areas that we have trained to be modelers and they are happily using it.
Signavio has also awoken the organization to the reality of cloud adoption and the deployment of managed SaaS solutions.
An example of how this solution has improved our organization is the modeling of baseline and target processes and architecture for our HR department. HR are implementing a new IT application (Ciphr). We approached the project with the recommendation to model their baseline processes prior to looking for an IT solution. This enabled them to do 3 key things:
1. Have a legitimate cost and resource baseline for benefits tracking
2. Enable the identification of 'change impacts' on functions, roles, processes, and other process model elements.
3. Provide a basis for 'what if' simulation of target models prior to deployment.
When the IT vendor arrived to run configuration workshops, HR had the majority of the information they required at their fingertips. This made it easier than it would have been otherwise and now HR recognizes the benefits of using this approach.
Although it was difficult to convince them upfront of the benefits, HR are advocates for this approach and the Signavio solution.
I would say that this solution gives everyone in our organization everything that they need to effectively manage their processes.
It has helped us introduce process thinking and most people have embraced it. I think that it will help the careers of managers because they can now visualize and understand their processes and how they link upstream and downstream.