Developing and tailoring business process management methods using the situational method engineering approach

Abstract

Effective business process management is one of the key tasks of every organization if it wants to compete successfully on the market and satisfy the needs of its customers. Although there are many established best practices, techniques, and more or less complex methods in business process management, no approach can fulfill a typical organization’s needs and wants. The key to success lies in developing new or adapting existing approaches for business process management to suit the unique characteristics of individual organizations and projects. This demands a solid methodological framework and a clearly defined work process. The aim of the paper is to apply situational method engineering concepts within the realm of business process management, thereby tackling the challenge mentioned above. As a result, a situational method engineering framework is defined to construct and customize business process management methods. The study proposes the conceptual foundations of the framework and a set of processes for constructing holistic and tailored methods that cover various aspects of business process management (analysis, modeling, management, etc.). The basis of the framework is represented by general method components at a higher level of abstraction, which are assembled into holistic methods via interfaces and are transformed into versions adapted to specific situations using tailoring rules. The practical applicability of the proposed framework is validated through its implementation in a project at a large manufacturing company, where it is used to develop both a general and customized business process management method.