Kaizen, BPM, and Agile Methodologies

Here is an article i found very interesting, it talks about how Business process management can be used for

implementing the japanese continous quality improvement technique kaizen.

Found it quite attractive and interesting , hence thought of sharing it too!


KAIZEN

In the field of business administration, the term Kaizen (which literally means "good change") has its roots in

1950s Japanese industry. It is now more often translates as continuous improvement.
One of the principles of continuous improvement is that the users of the processes, be they counter clerks or

central office executives, are the ones who are encouraged to constantly analyze their work and propose

improvements. At a high level, continuous improvement is a cycle of the following activities:

•      Standardize an operation.
•      Measure the standardized operation.
•      Gauge measurements against requirements.
•      Innovate to meet requirements and improve productivity.
•      Standardize the new improved operations.

HOW DOES BPM COME INTO THE PICTURE?

Business Process Management can be thought of as an implementation of the abstract concepts of continuous

improvement at the business process level: BPM provides a framework where an organization's business processes can

be optimized repeatedly. To quote Bruce Silver, a prominent expert in the BPM field, "BPM is based on the notion of

a cycle of continuous process improvement." Although no standard or overwhelmingly popular BPM methodology exists

currently, it is generally accepted that, at the high level, the cycle of BPM activities are as follows:

• Process analysis
• process modeling
• process implementation
• process monitoring.

The BPMS software products that excel are those that provide these capabilities to business analysts with as little

IT involvement as possible. This allows business analysts to seamlessly step through the iterations of the BPM cycle

and continuously improve the processes at hand. This always-active, uninterrupted effort to realize process

enhancements brings to mind an important question: What should be the scale, in size and effort, of a single

iteration of the BPM cycle? As it turns out, agile software development methodologies have something to tell us in

this regard.


BPM can be a great source of continuous improvement for an organization's business processes. Agile software

development methodologies can serve as an effective baseline for the development of a BPM methodology that enables

continuous improvement and can also lead to important synergies in the interactions of the two main teams—business

analysts and software developers— that participate in the delivery of the BPM cycle.