Why is it so difficult for many managers to understand business processes?
The ‘traditional’ way to define how a business operates is to define a set of ‘procedures’, narrative descriptions of related sequences of events within a department or work area (for example, in Stores or Purchasing). And the existing management structure often reflects and reinforces this. Often, a company will generate one set of procedures for its quality system, another for how it deals with environmental matters, and another for how it addresses health and safety issues. It can be difficult for those who are steeped in narrative procedures suddenly to change their thinking sufficiently radically to allow them to “see” their processes. Often they think of what their department does as a series of disjointed tasks, rather than identifying what initiates an action and how it is followed through to completion.
