Effort Based Performance Measurement in Business Process Management

This paper presents a holistic methodology and associated toolset for business process modelling and analysis. The importance of integrating performance measurement (PM) indicators and tools in business process management has been identified in the literature as well as contemporary approaches that attempt to give a solution to this problem. However, most of these approaches propose solutions based on theories and techniques used in other disciplines or research fields which approach the issue of performance measurement in BPR from their individualistic perspective. In the majority of cases the proposed theories and techniques prove to be inadequate to measure performance holistically and integrate, organizational, human resource management, process management and workflow management concepts. The resulting methodology and toolset is based on business analysis ratios that define and measure key performance indicators in qualitative and quantitative terms and identify the relationships between them. These ratios allow enterprises to achieve a performance evaluation tool for continuous improvement in their attempt to respond and adapt quickly to turbulent markets. The performance measurement toolset (called ADJUST) is used for (1) planning different reorganization scenarios for the achievement of desired performance, (2) for assessing real time performance and (3) reporting deviations from desired planned performance. In order to monitor and assess real time performance the ADJUST software tool provides interfaces to three kinds of management tool categories, namely: Process management tools (PMT): business models, cycle time, primitive cost, etc. Human resource management (HRM) tools: job descriptions, performance measures, etc. Workflow management (WFM) tools: transactions, business rules, workflow models, etc. The ADJUST business analysis engine is based on employee effort analysis and provides meta-analysis of data analysed in PMT and HRM tools. Data like activity sequencing, cycle times, primitive costing, etc. from PMT tools are analysed in ADJUST in order to assess the percentage of high-business and low value added activities, mission-non mission activities, concentration analysis, etc. Knowledge management elements are integrated to job descriptions and associated with performance measures and workflow elements. Similarly, job descriptions and performance measurement data that are provided by HRM tools are analysed further in terms of cost to manage, principal-agent analysis etc. In the case of WFM tools the ADJUST system provides not only meta-analysis of workflow processes, transactions and document flows but also dynamic monitoring of their performance in real time. Copyright (C) 2010 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.