What should change

After you determine the root cause of the issue, you need to determine what should change to resolve the process issue.

Generally, there are three things that can change to affect a business:

As a process owner or stakeholder, when you discover that your process is not helping you meet project/program goals, and you know the root cause, you need to ask yourself what should change.

Is it people, process, or the business that needs to change?

If it is your business that needs to change

If it is a resource issue

The great thing about IBM Business Process Manager is the ability to run the numbers through the Optimizer and actually determine how manipulating your process resources would impact your process. The other powerful benefit of the Optimizer is that you can take this solid data to your management team to support your request for a change in resources. This benefit cannot be overstated. It is one thing to go to senior management and say that adding two resources to this process would help a great deal. It is a different matter, and far more palatable to senior management, to take the hard numbers that the Optimizer calculates and tell management exactly what would happen if the company increases the resources for this process.

What should change in the process?

Any of the common indicators for change that we described earlier could be reasons for changing the process. Your root cause analysis helps determine what is wrong, and guide you to what needs to change in the business process. It could be as simple as the business rule change that we described in the previous paragraph, or as complex as redesigning a subprocess.