Process Improvement Roadmapping - How to Max Out Your Process

Process improvement is the most value-adding activity in the BPM lifecycle. Despite the mature body of knowledge related to process improvement, there is a lack of prescriptive knowledge that takes a single-process/multi-project perspective, covers a broad range of improvement opportunities, and accounts for the characteristics of the process in focus. Against this background, we propose a decision model that helps determine an optimal process improvement roadmap in line with the principles of project portfolio selection and value-based management. A process improvement roadmap is a set of improvement projects scheduled to multiple planning periods, each of which enhances the performance of the process in focus. The decision model particularly considers process characteristics that reflect how work is performed and organized. These characteristics are inspired by established industrialization strategies, i.e., automation, sourcing, flexibility, and standardization. As for evaluation, we report on feature comparison, an expert interview, prototype construction, and a demonstration example.