Theory of Inventive Problem Solving Applied To Business Process Management Projects (BPM-TRIZ)

Many companies look for business process management as a way to put into practice their strategic goals, thus expecting to anticipate and adequate themselves for potential environment changes. However, it is possible to find a set of innovation barriers when the process management methodology is executed, such as the existence of conflicting project goals, the inherited level of business processes variance and the specialist’s psychological inertia. Those barriers often decrease the level of efficiency and quality of projects, by the application of completely intuitive methods, and by the development of compromise solutions. It is proposed in this article that the Theory of Inventive Problem Solving (TRIZ) be applied to business process management projects, specifically to the proposal and implementation stages. The main goal is to reduce or even eliminate the innovation barrier’s effects on such projects. Inventive principles can be used as a guidance to reach the ideal final result, and inventive solutions complying with contradictory goals can be developed in a systematic way. Necessary analogies are proposed and validated, on a business process development project, to adapt the TRIZ method on a non-technical environment. Preliminary results are presented, and partial conclusions are stated.