Process Modeling Kills Agility - Resolving Misunderstandings and Make BPM Agile

Due to globalisation, companies have to adapt to constant change and quickly adjust
to their environment in order to meet customers’ requirements. In addition, competition
is forcing companies to adapt their products and processes more quickly.
Business Process Management (BPM) has established itself as a top discipline
that helps companies improve their performance. However, in recent studies, researchers
have expressed their dissatisfaction with BPM. Managing processes in
a classical way seems to be quite rigid, and researchers suggest countering the
inflexibility of BPM with a more agile approach that also focuses on the value of innovation.
Agility is one of the key success factors in modern industries. It supports
organisations cope with a changing environment, leading to rapid adaptation. Agile
companies are more flexible and sustainable. For this reason, many agile BPM
frameworks and methodologies have been proposed, but few of them have been
tested in practice, in particular, there is no framework that combines BPM, agility
and innovation in a single framework.
A preliminary framework presented in this thesis has its focus on agility and BPM,
based on a previously conducted literature review, and considers how innovation influences
the framework. Afterwards, it is reviewed by experts in the field of BPM and
agility. As a result, 13 experts challenge this framework and comment on its practicality.
Based on the interviews, the preliminary framework is revised and transformed
into the final agile BPM framework.
In summary, BPM and agility have more in common than it seems. One important
aspect is that BPM has often not been executed agile enough, as it could have been.
Therefore, our framework highlights the agile characteristics of BPM, but also brings
new agile practices into BPM and shows an interdependency with innovation.