In the kick-off event of the APMG series on the USM Revolution, we got a question that we still needed to answer:
What's the difference between process and routines?
The short answer is 'A process is one of the three possible types of routines'. If you use look-inside to check 100 books on process management in Amazon, you'll find at least 98 that define a process as "a logical series of activities that leads to a predefined goal" on page 1. Unfortunately, they then all abuse their own definition on pages 2-396, talking about practices, functions, and - nowadays - capabilities.
The longer answer would be 'USM applies a powerful architecture to the management of services, and routines are key building blocks for this architecture". As the USM management system has only three essential components (people, process, technology), Systems Thinking teaches us that any performance improvement requires the integrated approach of all three essential components. This is how USM differentiates between the three meaningful combinations of the essential components:
- only activities => processes
- activities + people => procedures
- activities + people + technology => work instructions
These three types of routines provide you with the templates for all routines you'll ever have to use in your service management activities. At least, if you have an architecture to develop these three from. To simplify this as much as possible (and not beyond that), USM supports this with a unique process architecture, with only five non-redundant and integrated processes that cover all your service management activities. Because of that unique non-redundancy, these five enable only eight workflow patterns for any routine in your service management system. These eight workflow templates can reproduce any customer journey, any value stream, or whatever name you want to use for customer-provider interactions.
Which caries us back to the short answer: a process is just one of the three types of routines in any service organization - and USM makes it very simple to apply these with only eight templates 🙂
Please join the next sessions on USM. On August 20, we'll discuss the concept of a service, a hugely misunderstood 'thing'. Details are here.
On September 17, we'll discuss Service Management Architecture & System. Details are here.