There is no doubt that the process owner is a key role within business process management. But what are the exact responsibilities of the process owner? A recent study by Danilova (2019) addressed this topic by conducting a systematic literature review including 100 academic papers and 10 books on business process management.
As a result, the paper divides the process owner’s responsibilities into five categories: planning and organizing, process performance management, process improvement and innovation, team leadership, and stakeholder management and advocacy.
Planning and organizing:
- Design the process
- Define subprocesses and process boundaries (process map)
- Ensure standardization and documentation of processes
- Advocate compliance with the process
- Approve variations when necessary
- Provide guidance as to handling exceptions and errors
- Coordinate activities
- Ensure alignment with strategy and execute strategies
- Influence resource allocation
- Ensure process compliance with external obligations
Process performance management:
- Define objectives
- Define performance indicators
- Monitor and manage process performance
Process improvement and innovation:
- Follow the competitive environment, technological progress and changing customer requirements
- Detect and evaluate needs and opportunities for incremental process improvement and innovation
- Receive change suggestions from the organization
- Check for possible suboptimization
- Initiate process change
- Coordinate and lead change project
- Promote the process design
Team leadership:
- Lead a process team
Stakeholder management and advocacy:
- Create process awareness
- Represent and promote the process
- Communicate with stakeholders
- Maintain and promote a strong customer focus
- Collaborate with other process owners
- Collaborate with functional managers
- Maintain contact with suppliers
- Promote and facilitate teamwork in the organization
- Secure feeling of ownership among process employees
The full paper can be found here: Danilova, K.B. (2019), “Process owners in business process management: a systematic literature review”, Business Process Management Journal, Vol. 25 No. 6, pp. 1377-1412. https://www.emerald.com/insight/content/doi/10.1108/BPMJ-05-2017-0123/full/html
Further interesting articles on the role of the process owner are found here: