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Process improvement has been part of the business landscape for many decades. For the vast majority of that time, improvement techniques were focused on processes which took big investments to get started or to change: manufacturing processes were at the heart of the picture. Not surprisingly, the people driving the process improvements took a very deliberate, scientific approach to recommending and making changes. Such an approach is essential in situations where there's a lot at stake, and in physical processes like those found in manufacturing, the costs and risks associated with suboptimal processes can be huge. The Six Sigma and Lean movements were both spawned from this environment.

Over the past couple of years, though, process management thinking and tools have now well and truly broken out of the domain of physical, capital-intensive processes to be applied to the worlds of knowledge work and service improvement. Here, the challenge associated with improvement and change is different.

If you're looking to improve a customer service process, the cost and risk of a suboptimal change is much lower than if you're changing a manufacturing plant layout - for one thing, you can probably make further changes to tweak things relatively straightforwardly. What's more, many customer service processes are so poorly understood that even a suboptimal improvement - a kind of "good enough for now" change - can yield massive results. In these kinds of processes, business agility tends to be much more of a key consideration than the cost or risk of making suboptimal changes.

So - do these methods and tools work as well in the ‘new world' of process management?

The challenge with scientific process improvement and management methods is that they tend to create "cathedrals" [1] - closed environments where access to the tools of change is closely controlled. Now students of Lean techniques will say that lean thinking relies on empowering workers to drive continuous process improvement - but my contention is that in practice, in a great many organisations which consider themselves Lean thinkers, access to the tools of change is closely controlled by a select group.

This is precisely what you want where the cost or risk of cocking up is considerable - but as I've already outlined, in looking at improving knowledge work this might not necessarily the case.

Where business agility is the number one concern, it pays to look at how to drive change without relying on a cathedral to house your priests. The ‘bazaar' model (to once again refer to Eric Raymond) - which explicitly aims to throw open access to tools and information to a broad audience of interested parties and contributors - is very interesting here, because (with the right nurturing) it can create an environment where acceptance of process change is a natural by-product of the process improvement work.

Every good project manager knows that if you can involve people in a business change project right from the very start, and demonstrate that you're taking their ideas and concerns into account, you stand a good chance of the changes you're making being accepted by those who are impacted. If you send some business analysts out to gather requirements and then have a project team lock themselves away for six months while they implement a new system, getting ‘user acceptance' can be a real bitch.

Where so many change project managers have struggled in the past is that the tools to really support the ‘bazaar philosophy' of open involvement in system or business process change haven't existed in a form that makes information really accessible to disparate groups of people with varying skill and experience levels. Now, though, with today's BPM technologies, we're finally getting there.