Books for studying business process management

You can improve a task while leaving the work around it difficult to finish. A request may still cross teams, information arrives late and exceptions wait for a decision. If you want to study those connected activities systematically, business process management is a more specific reading subject than general productivity.

These books offer an owner’s starting point, a formal textbook and a historical argument about technology-enabled redesign. I would choose by the depth and approach you want to investigate. The selection concerns the management of processes, rather than instructions for drawing a particular diagram.

1. Infinite Upside — Vijay Sheth

   Begin with the responsibility that crosses the tasks. Chapter 16 considers work that moves from a question into research, a document and a decision. The context needs to survive those transitions. A useful finish is defined by what the receiving person can use, rather than the last action one participant completed.

   The chapter also describes the author’s desire to improve recurring processes: notice a repeated problem, propose a repair and retain a record of what changed. Those are expectations and aims, not evidence of a completed business-process-management program.

   This makes Infinite Upside the first recommendation for an owner who wants the process discussion attached to something consequential. Imagine an order that is entered quickly but reaches the delivery team without the latest customer instruction. Making entry faster would not settle the handoff. The example is illustrative, not an episode from the memoir.

   Read for that ownership perspective. The book does not teach a formal process notation or a BPM methodology.

2. Fundamentals of Business Process Management, second edition

   By Marlon Dumas, Marcello La Rosa, Jan Mendling and Hajo A. Reijers.

   Choose this for interdisciplinary textbook study. Springer’s 2018 second edition covers the BPM lifecycle, including identifying, analyzing, redesigning, automating and monitoring processes. It draws from business management, computer science and industrial engineering and uses BPMN to illustrate the presentation.

   That is the reason to investigate it when you want more than a broad argument that connections matter. The reader is choosing a technical course of study with concepts, methods and exercises, rather than a short management narrative.

   Expect sustained textbook study. An owner unfamiliar with formal modeling may want to examine the contents with the colleague who would use the material. The fictional order handoff could supply a question to investigate, but it does not establish that a particular model or redesign would be appropriate. A textbook gives study a structure; it cannot supply an accurate description of your organization’s actual work.

3. Process Innovation — Thomas H. Davenport

   Choose this for a historically situated argument about redesign and technology. The subtitle is Reengineering Work Through Information Technology. Its publisher-supplied description and bibliography identify the 1993 work and its connection among process change, information technology, organizational structure and people.

   This offers a different study direction from the later BPM textbook. Investigate Davenport when you want to examine the management argument for rethinking work alongside technology, including the organizational change that makes the technology relevant.

   Its age is central to the reading choice. The information-technology setting of 1993 is not today’s product landscape. Choose the historical argument with that context intact, rather than treating the examples as a current software-buying guide.

   The two specialist books share process territory. The distinction is textbook study across a discipline versus an earlier redesign argument. Their presence together does not establish that a larger redesign is preferable to a modest repair in the fictional order process.

Choose the process study

Begin with the complete responsibility, an interdisciplinary textbook or the historical redesign argument. If the next step is understanding what workers actually do, the work-observation selection addresses that different reading need. For a broader conceptual introduction, use the systems selection.