Introducing a process management system successfully can grow into quite a mammoth task where the goals are unclear and the rollout is communicated opaquely. In today's business landscape, process management long ago stopped being purely a topic for top-level managers, pursued only to pass the next ISO audit and then left to gather digital dust for two years; that approach often condemns process management to failure before it is even introduced. No, process management today is a holistic improvement and transparency project, and it will only work as intended if the whole workforce pulls together — and is brought along. Gone are the days when a single process manager mapped the company's idealized processes from an “ivory tower”, patted themselves on the back, and did exactly the same thing again a while later. No, that is (often) not how it goes any more.
On the subject of company culture
Many companies today simply expect more from their process management. It is meant to serve as the basis for improving how the company works. For that, the company relies on the help of those involved in the daily doing, the people who genuinely are the “experts” on the processes: the employees. And the average employee is of course interested in seeing their own processes improved. The idea that people everywhere are creatures of habit is, after all, badly overstated: who wouldn't want to work better, or faster, or more easily? A culture of steady, constant improvement is therefore very realistically achievable in any company … but the workforce has to be given the means to improve their workflows. One way to do that is precisely to set up a process management system.
That, of course, isn't the cure-all either, because the trouble with such systems is often that almost all of them were built for the “old” world of work: a few managers use the system; many employees will never see the inside of it — and even when they do, they frequently can't make sense of it, because the system is built so awkwardly.
An answer for the future
This post isn't about how usable the system is, but for the access problem we do have a suggestion. We are looking for a way to give our people access to our process management system as easily as possible.
The idea: simply integrate the system into an environment the workforce already works in — in this case the Microsoft 365 environment.
Sign-in goes through Active Directory, so straight through the M365 account used every day; it doesn't get much easier. Now make the system usable where people already work anyway — oh, I don't know, in the Teams app, say — and the package is perfect. Suddenly employees are given the means to dive into the system and get familiar with it without a detour via a process manager (or similar) first, and to get on with the improvement work they've been waiting for. Perfect, isn't it? Where do you get a package like that? We might have something.