What is process design (my way) post 1(5).

This is a series of 5 posts. All posts are available. 

Process design! All ITSM professionals talk about it. It is mentioned in every project addressing ITSM, ITIL or IT processes in general in any context. But what is it? I mean in detail? How do you do it? And when you do, what are you actually doing? 

I have never written an ITIL book or published any commercial literature and I do not have any plans to do so either. What I have done though, are design, re-design and improve-design of processes for more than a decade successfully. And I will give you a peek into my world, my practitioner world, my reality, my success. 

I don't claim that I have a universal method. I don't claim that this is fully reusable in any situation. What I do claim, is more than a decade of successful design. 

Now you might think that if I have been designing processes successfully for more than a decade, what on earth have I been doing for all these years? How many processes have I designed? Well let me break it to you. It is not about quantity, it is about quality. The lifecycle of an effective process demands nurturing and care. Just like the parenting of a child. A child is not considered a failure for not being able to read or to know math at the age of three. It is considered a success for the ability to walk. It is the same with a process. In the early stages there will be results that the process cannot achieve but still be a success. It needs to evolve and mature. That takes time, effort and a lot of collaboration.

Process design is not a one time job! It is a continuous parenting based on input from a whole lot of sources, mostly human but there is a lot to pick from. Well, back to the topic. What is process design?

First of all, the most brilliant process design will still be utterly useless if it does not improve and help people to achieve the expected outcome. If this is the case, all design work is waste! So a critical factor to claim success is the ability to achieve change and to measure that output. Read more about how to improve your change ability in post 5(5)

Now there will be ITSM pundits out there that will protest and say, if the output is not consumed by a customer there is no value and still useless. I don't disagree but let's keep it simple. If we can't generate the expected output, we won't have a customer in the first place so I will address the output and then we can have the value discussion at another time. 

Next post in this series: What is process design (my way) post 2(5). The two major parts.