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APQC's process framework, and the section I wrote

We picked a global process taxonomy off the shelf, could not make our own work fit inside it, and were eventually asked to write one of its sections ourselves.

Filed under the date APQC announced Version 7.0.0. The work behind it started in 2011, on the first of my Transfield Services engagements.

I went into Transfield Services in 2011 to lead an IT strategy. What came out of it was a target architecture and a migration roadmap, and those became the business case for putting SAP across the group.

I then joined the Quality team, on the revitalisation of the Global Management System, led by Sarina Pickering. We were trying to standardise and realign enterprise business processes across the organisation to strengthen our ISO 9001 certification but also to align with the SAP implementation.

Transfield Services had grown by acquisition and by that time it was earning more than A$3 billion in revenue, and it employed more than 26,000 people across 20 industries and 11 countries. Every acquisition had arrived carrying its own words for its own work, which is no trouble at all until the group wants to compare across businesses.

APQC Process Classification Framework

It is important to anchor our business process standardisation efforts around a process architecture and framework. This requires a robust taxonomy and classification of all processes within an organisation. We did not want to invent this taxonomy.

So we tried to adopt APQC’s Process Classification Framework. APQC is a non-profit that has been doing benchmarking research since the 1970s, and the PCF had been going since 1992, when eighty-odd organisations sat down to agree a common structure. It is a numbered hierarchy of what an organisation does, written to be independent of industry, region and size. In 2011 there were twelve categories at the top and more than a thousand process elements underneath.

Adapting the PCF to Transfield Services

We could not map all of our processes onto it.

The PCF had grown up around manufacturing, and Transfield Services was a services business. Some of what we did had no home in the framework at all. Project management was missing outright, and so were several of the support functions, strategy and the engagement between IT and the rest of the business among them.

So we engaged APQC’s Jeff Varney as our adviser, to work through the issues with us. He was very helpful in resolving many of our issues and difficulties but he was also wise enough to realise there were true gaps in the current PCF that needed addressing.

Version 6.0.0

Some of our gaps made it into PCF Version 6.0.0, which came out in July 2012, on the framework’s twentieth anniversary. APQC credited it to “significant input from APQC members, including Intel, IBM, and Transfield Services”.

However, a significant gap still remained. The PCF did not recognise project management in the framework. Projects were considered transient activities; they did not belong in a framework designed for processes within the value chain of an organisation. This was a problem for us, as project management was a core competency of Transfield Services, and part of the services we offered and therefore an intrinsic part of the value chain.

Version 7.0.0

We petitioned APQC to include a section on project management in the PCF, and they asked us to provide a draft.

I wrote what became Section 13.2 (Manage Portfolio, Program, and Project) based on PMBOK, the Project Management Body of Knowledge, which is the profession’s own account of how portfolios, programmes and projects fit together. Our project managers were trained on PMBOK already. APQC accepted it, and it went into Version 7.0.0 in October 2015.

Version 7.0.0 split the old category 4.0, Deliver Products and Services, which had been treating making a thing and performing a service as one category with two names. That took the framework from twelve categories to thirteen. The suggestion to split came from IBM, but our contribution fitted very well within the new structure. The business capabilities category stopped being 12.0 and became 13.0. Jeff wrote the change up when the release came out.

Jeff Varney’s own account explained the rationale - to enable the framework to support services being delivered “through projects, continuous support functions, or discrete instances based upon a request for service or incident”, which describes a company running maintenance and operations contracts across 20 industries fairly exactly.

The end result

The exercise itself came out well. APQC wrote it up as a case study in May 2015 and reported a 30 per cent reduction in redundancy, which is a polite way of saying that a great many things the organisation thought were separate processes turned out to be the same process wearing different names.

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