Ep. 118 - BPM Essentials: Roger Tregear

One of the major concerns in our discipline is that in an era of instant gratification and "easy button" demands from clients, the core fundamentals are easily forgotten. Our guest today, Roger Tregear, shares this concern and wrote a book about it: *Elements*. In it, he details the 20 elements that constitute a good Business Process Management (BPM) practice, and I highly recommend downloading and reading it. Roger’s career centers on consulting, writing, and speaking about process management. He helps organizations improve performance by designing and activating "perpetual improvement machines" through active process-based management. In this episode of the podcast, we discuss: - **Engineering and Telecom Origins:** Roger shares his professional background, moving from electrical engineering and early data communications at ICL into strategic telecommunications consulting. - **The "Aha!" Moment with ARIS:** In late 2000, Professor Michael Roseman introduced the ARIS tool to Roger, providing the formal language and framework for cross-functional concepts he had been exploring for years. - **Bonsai as a Process Discipline:** Outside of BPM, Roger nurtures bonsai trees—a hobby requiring a daily, seasonal, and multi-year process framework rooted in patience and long-term planning. - **Why AI Cannot Replace Process Understanding:** AI tools and automation cannot fix broken or misunderstood workflows. Without a foundational process structure, deploying AI agents only accelerates unpredictable outcomes. - **The Primacy of Cross-Functional Processes:** While traditional organizations manage vertically via org charts, actual value, strategy execution, and customer experiences occur horizontally across functional silos. - **Management vs. Hope:** Every organization operates via processes by default. The only strategic choice is whether leadership chooses to actively manage those processes or rely on hope. - **The "M" in BPM Stands for Management:** The ultimate purpose of BPM is not modeling or documentation, but improving organizational performance in a tangible, measurable way. - **Defining Core Processes from Strategic Intent:** Rather than relying on generic templates like "Order-to-Cash," core process architectures should be built by analyzing the organization's explicit strategic promises to its customers and stakeholders. - **Overcoming Executive Resistance to "Busy Work":** To prevent leadership from dismissing BPM as an endless flowcharting exercise, teams must set clear guardrails, focus on high-impact areas, and avoid building bloated internal bottlenecks. - **Pruning the Architecture (Starting Small):** Building a working three-level process architecture takes only a few weeks. Implementation should immediately focus on piloting three manageable, high-priority processes rather than attempting to govern hundreds at once. - **Targeting Process KPIs (PKPIs):** Effective process governance requires distinguishing vertical functional metrics from horizontal Process Key Performance Indicators that measure how the overall workflow satisfies key stakeholder expectations. - **Focusing on High-Impact Processes:** Organizations should avoid modeling every process to the lowest level. Deeper analysis and governance should be applied strictly to the top 20–30 high-impact processes driving major outcomes or risks. - **Process Transformation is Social:** Successful BPM implementation depends less on tooling and technical diagrams and more on engaging operational staff, earning buy-in, managing human change, and empowering teams. You can find Roger on LinkedIn here: https://www.linkedin.com/in/rogertregear/. Please reach out to us by either sending an email to ⁠hello@whatsyourbaseline.com⁠ or signing up for our newsletter and reading articles about process and architecture on our Substack … Go and subscribe at ⁠whatsyourbaseline.substack.com⁠. And if you like to support “the little podcast that could,” become a Patron at ⁠https://www.patreon.com/c/whatsyourbaseline⁠. We appreciate you!