Good Process Design Is Not Enough: Process, Regulation and Ownership with Paavo Heikkinen

Description:

In this episode, Liam O’Neill speaks with Paavo Heikkinen, Head of BPM and Change Management at Bank Frick, the Liechtenstein-based financial institution operating at the intersection of banking, fintech and crypto services.

Paavo’s career has taken him from consulting into manufacturing and now into financial services, working across organisations including BMW, Siemens and VAT Group before moving into the banking sector. That journey gives him a particularly grounded perspective on what stays consistent across organisations regardless of industry, and what fundamentally changes when regulation, risk and operational complexity become part of everyday process design.

This is a practical and thoughtful conversation about why process transformation succeeds or fails, the limitations of governance models that exist only on paper and what it actually takes to build operational ownership that people engage with rather than quietly work around.

They discuss:

• Why most large organisations behave less like a single company and more like a collection of semi-autonomous silos with their own cultures, incentives and ways of working
• Why process ownership fails when it is treated as an administrative responsibility rather than something people are genuinely empowered to shape and influence
• How lightweight workflow tools and process prototypes can make governance tangible and help teams collaborate more effectively across functions
• Why continuous improvement and BPM work best when they are tightly connected rather than operating as separate disciplines
• The challenge of balancing innovation, customer experience and operational efficiency inside a highly regulated banking environment, and why Paavo sees regulation as a “design envelope” rather than the starting point for process design
• How Bank Frick is moving away from document-centric compliance towards a process-centric operating model where processes become the primary source of truth
• Why AI will increase the importance of BPM and process governance rather than replace it, particularly in regulated industries where accountability and human oversight still matter

This episode is full of practical insight for anyone working in BPM, operational excellence, transformation, governance or enterprise change, particularly those trying to balance structure, regulation and real operational usability in complex organisations.

Host: Liam O’Neill, Managing Director at bpmd

Guest: Paavo Heikkinen, Head of BPM and Change Management at Bank Frick

Transcript

SPEAKER_02 0:01

Welcome to Work in Protest. We are Liam O'Neill and Sam Lewis. This shows the leaders who are responsible for improving how their organization actually works. If you lead protest, transformation, IT, enterprise architecture, data or operations, and you are accountable for turning strategy into execution. This podcast is for you.

SPEAKER_01 0:22

Across the organizations we work with, we see a lot of investment in teams and tools and programs, different softwares, you get dashboards built, processes modeled, programs launched, but that doesn't always translate into real business outcomes, into bottom line results, into something you can point your finger at and say, yeah, that's worked. If you are serious about building a structured, data-led and outcome-focused approach to change, we are glad you're here.

SPEAKER_02 0:51

This is work in process. If you get any value from this episode, please subscribe. You will get a brand new episode before anyone else. The views and opinions of our guests are their own and do not represent those of the company.

SPEAKER_01 1:02

Welcome to another episode of the Work in Process Podcast. Today I'm very lucky to be speaking with Pavo Haikinen. He's the head of BPM and change management at Bank Frick, having a rich experience, having come from different industries and bringing that into the financial sector. Today we'll be talking about what process change and improvement means in that context and how that might be different to some of the spaces he's been in previously.

SPEAKER_00 1:29

I'd love to be here. Thanks for the opportunity. So yeah, I'm leading a BPM and change management team at Bank Frick in Liechtenstein, a small, not so small, about 300 people bank focusing the crypto area. So quite an innovative bank. And yeah, I come from consulting and uh moved from there to high-tech industry. And then now finally the final industry is always kind of a focus with business process management and organizational development. And yeah, I'm I'm looking forward to the discussion today.

SPEAKER_01 1:56

So, firstly, that journey is really interesting. Not starting in just one industry and sticking there, but going across a few different ways of working in different environments. It's quite an unusual arc for someone in the process world. But how do you make sense of that journey when you look back on it?

SPEAKER_00 2:10

That's a great question. I think starting in consulting was a kind of a great start of seeing how organizations run what do they think they need and what kind of are the problems they are facing, and then kind of moving from there to being an internal and trying to build certain process management, change management internally. So kind of taking a consulting role into in-house consulting gave kind of the perspective more of the internal politics and all the different layers you don't see as much as a consultant. I think starting in automotive and in manufacturing and then moving to a manufacturing company, then you are of course quite industrial, you're always doing processes with some physical goods, which makes it a bit easier. And now the shift to financial institution that where processes are basically products are value streams the company is performing. It's uh you can't feel them, you can't touch them. I think that's a kind of a new complexity layer in that journey. So I I think it's uh kind of like continuous learning step by step, and I've been always challenging myself with these things, and in the end, it's always the same problem. So I think no matter where I have been, I have always seen similar issues. Of course, every single company, every single environment is different, but the foundational issues or topics around processes and organizations seem to be quite similar.

SPEAKER_01 3:22

Yeah, process is process, but the focus and what you prioritize can really shift, definitely. So when you were in consulting, you had a few really impressive names. I was seeing uh BMW, Siemens. What did those years teach you about what those companies, what these large organizations, these institutions actually need from work in process, what they need to really deliver value.

SPEAKER_00 3:44

I think being a consultant, I mean, they always came with the problem of hey, we need to document this process to know who does what and how it runs. And I think that's what they of course think what they need. I think when you go more deep into this, you will recognize that every division department is basically a company's own. They are massive, semi-autonomous departments. They have their own cultures, they have their own priorities, their own incentive structures, their own informal rules. And if you kind of see that in a big organization like BMW and Siemens, like you said, I think you recognize that often the issues are between the silos. Even within these departments' divisions, you might have some own silos. And I think when you go into that detail and look at the cross-functional things, yes, a race is great. It's great to define the responsibilities, but that doesn't help if it's just a document that they pull out and say, hey, look, it was your job to do this. It's more really about building these operations, I would call it modus operandi, like the meeting cultures, the working cultures modus, maybe even some touchable workflow tools to actually execute those processes. So I think that's kind of like what I learned the most there that if you just do a process on paper and it's great, it helps, it gives transparency. But if you really want to make it stick or make it work, you have to somehow bring it into your organization and understand the people and the structures around it and how to collaborate to actually deliver on those. Especially now we're talking about Sherman companies where you are highly standardized, and I think also the culture is standardized. So kind of bringing the human component in that environment is extremely important.

SPEAKER_01 5:11

I find a lot of the value in the work you see in processes when you start to look cross-functionally and bring those people who haven't spoken before. They know that you know upstream's causing a pain for them, but we have not actually talked to them and have the opportunity to open that line of discussion and try to fix it together. I mean, just going into a bit more detail on that, what are some of the mechanisms you actually use to start that cross-functional discussion and get it to work effectively?

SPEAKER_00 5:33

For us, I mean, I think at BMW, the nicest thing what we work with was we called it workflowing. So we used their existing SharePoints to build like simple workflows to kind of prototype processes. So having different roles and departments who are working together to deliver something. And we designed the process, and then it's possibly, yeah, now we have to process what next. Then we kind of tried it out to build a prototype on a SharePoint tool, not super sophisticated or so, but actually make something they have to click through and where people actually get the messages and so. I think that made it more plausible for them. I think it made it really something that tangible that they can touch. I think that's something I really took with me from the consulting career. Like if you can make these processes really something they can touch, I think that's really helps. I don't know if you know, I think uh Mirko Kloppenborg is a guy I think you know also in this environment. I saw a kind of like a workshop method of him where they are building in a big hole some process that you can touch. And I think that's kind of the same idea behind it. So I think that's really something that works and helps. And then you also have a kind of a blueprint. If you ever want to build a system IT behind it, you have a kind of a blueprint how it actually might look like. And that helps as well. Um maybe final add to that. On these big companies, like if you want to have an IT system, the process to get something, like to program something, to get something is so long that if you can kind of bridge it with a workflow that you can self-build, I think that's a massive, massive benefit.

SPEAKER_01 6:56

Yeah. You can set up a million and one PowerPoints that talk about meeting forums and governance. That's great. But until it's actually put into action, people can touch it, feel it, use it. It's not something practical, and having a nice workflow tool that kind of coordinates that governance layer, that coordinates that engagement really can be so helpful. Makes it feel so much more real. So you helped to build a business excellence function and continuous improvement program pretty much from the ground up. And you also went through some uh leadership training, I believe, uh, IMD leadership program. What did that combo with? Starting from scratch, building from the ground up, whilst also investing and growing yourself as a leader. What did that help you? What did that give you? What did that teach you that you still carry with you today?

SPEAKER_00 7:34

Yeah, that's another great question. I tried to reflect it a bit by preparing. And I think when you are a process people, you are thinking always about systems. We are often good at systems thinking when we come from the process side. I think it's a great strength to have, and I think it helps any organization. But the blind spot is often that you think that the system is well designed, the people will follow it. And I think we all know they won't, at least not automatically, and especially not everybody the same way. Because every individual is kind of interpreting, prioritizing, and making decisions differently, even if looking at the same process. And I think kind of the leadership program that comes more from the people side is teaching you a lot about okay, how do you react with people, how do you explain things, how do you communicate. And I think if you can combine these things, it helps a lot. And I think another topic, of course, leadership in theory is all nice and great, but if you can't put it in practice, it remains a theory and you can't really use it. So I think being in a pressure environment where you're trying to build something new when you are facing conflict because you are bringing change in, then you actually get to test those learnings from a leadership program all the way. And I think that's also pretty interesting. But yeah, to summarize quickly, I think the people perspective, kind of like not forgetting that you have individuals, people that you have to bring into the system that we are building, and you have to try to put yourself in their shoes and understand why they see the processes differently, even though the diagram is quite clear how it actually flows.

SPEAKER_01 8:56

What for you was more rewarding? Was it the development of a core team or the engagement of a broader community?

SPEAKER_00 9:03

I mean, building is always fun. Building a team that you can control is a bit easier. But I think what is really rewarding is if you get the outside organization, if you have the mass kind of to understand and follow you, I think getting everybody behind you is kind of impossible. But if you can see that people start thinking in processes, you will get improvement ideas from people you never thought you would get them. I think that was the most rewarding part, and it still is for me. If you can bring that mindset that you have as a process people to people who are working in their normal careers in their own specialities, and you're bringing them this process mindset of thinking, hey, if we can do this and we can think about it, we can also optimize it and we can make it better. And I think that was always the most rewarding part, especially in this continuous improvement program that goes kind of hand in hand. When you start receiving ideas that are worth a lot of efficient points or a lot of money even to the company, it's just because you bring in that ideology of, hey, where can we actually improve and what it means? To answer your question, yeah, I think the team is great and it's a lot of fun, but if you actually can extend that to the whole organization, then it's great.

SPEAKER_01 10:04

Difference between preaching to the choir and doing it on the podium, I guess. I've just interviewed the head of uh continuous improvement for RS group, who was very CI focused. And they were fairly new into the process world as an organization, and they were coming at it from really mature CI practice and a lower maturity process practice that was you know steadily growing, but they'd been built as two separate capabilities. They were now trying to align. Did you kind of in that role with the AT group? Was it that CI and BPM were intertwined from a get-go, or was it that you had to try and fit those two together? What was the ambition on growing those two?

SPEAKER_00 10:38

I think it kind of like just happened. So I think small team was built and we joined to build basically business process management as a preparation for ERP change. And there was some existing continuous improvement program in place locally, but it was not really Lyft. And somehow we just had those both things on the table. And uh, I think we saw the opportunity to try to combine them as much as possible. Then it's just kind of happened around it. But I think our original mandate was really to build the process management, set up the cover, and then start getting the processes in place and kind of prepare ERP. But then this continuous improvement thing came on the side and actually bloomed and boomed quite quickly to be quite an interesting tool.

SPEAKER_01 11:17

Yeah, I'm a big believer in bringing CI and BPM together. There's so much crossover between the two, and trying to understand and control how you work and try to make that better. They just go hand in hand so nicely, so neatly that aligning the two programs for me is a little bit of a must.

SPEAKER_00 11:32

I think it is, and I think there's a bit of additional complexity, of course, on continuous improvement because it's not always touching just process topics. It could be cultural things, it could be something else. But if you can manage that and if you can somehow kind of like separate it a bit, say, okay, hey, these are the cultural focused things that are thinking about how we can make employees' life easier that are maybe not as process related, but then also kind of like picking those topics that are touching processes and then really taking them also to these process management initiatives. I think that's a really win because you have inputs from the organization coming in that you might not even see when talking with subset matter experts because everybody brings something individual. And I am 100% with you. If you can kind of bring them together, I think it's a win-win. But that's a bit of admin work, of course, to kind of manage and to bring together as well.

SPEAKER_01 12:16

Definitely. No, a cultural site can be a real black box. I remember doing a project a little while ago where it was taking a UK-US process and bringing it to Asia, specifically Japan. And it was a really automated, clean, and it was like a claim case handling process. And when it came to the Japanese market, we had a really clean process, very automated, very system driven. And we had to manually put in steps where they had to phone call the service provider, phone call the client, phone call the insurance party to thank them at every step of the process. This amazing automated process that's now driven by phone calls. As much as you can't want to look at efficiency, that cultural element can be massive as well.

SPEAKER_00 12:56

It is so massive. I mean, the VAT group was also, we had Japan offices, we had manufacturing in Malaysia, and exactly like you said, you can't blindly believe a global process works everywhere. So you kind of have to have a global, I would call it a template or a or a basics, and then you need to kind of see how do you individualize it maybe for some locations, if required. I mean, of course you try to have a global process, but sometimes you simply need these local variations.

SPEAKER_01 13:23

So you've previously described one of the central challenges in your current role as having a bit of a tension between two opposing forces. Process innovation, driving speed, efficiency on one side, but then regulation, demanding control, friction, heavy oversight on the other. How do you personally hold those two things together without one on demanding the other?

SPEAKER_00 13:44

Yeah, it's I think it's an interesting kind of a dilemma, especially in a such a regulated company like a tank, where you do get new regulations coming in quite often, you have to be compliant, but not everything is defined as clearly that you can just follow it blindly. So you have to kind of understand it and see what it means. I think I like to kind of try to phrase it a bit of saying the regulation is basically a design envelope. It kind of gives you some design principles you have to follow, but you still need to design a process. And if you flip it around and think about, hey, what is the process we need to fulfill? What do we do for our customers? How well we want to do it, what does it could look like? So, what it would be the best case process, and then you design that, and then you start thinking about okay, now we have the design principle of regulation. How do we make this process work so that we still fulfill the requirements? And I think it is not easy, but our job is more or less to find the maximum efficiency within that design envelope of regulation. And I think most organizations don't see how much room they actually have in that frame. I think classical way of kind of having a regulation, then building the process to fulfill it, and then trying to execute and maximize the value for the customer, it's not so easy. So if you can flip it around, think about what does really create look for our customers, and now what do we need to make happen that we actually can do it so that we are fulfilling there and being compliant.

SPEAKER_01 15:03

And that's a really nice way to look at it, having regulation is not the driving factor, but having it as a check that comes at a later point after a client or business-centric initial design. I think it's a really good way of framing it. In a lot of organizations, compliance is something that the process has to accommodate. In a bank, you know, errors can carry a lot more weight than some other industries. There's a lot more regulation, even liability in some cases, it's a really different constraint. How's working inside that reality change the way you personally think about what good design looks like?

SPEAKER_00 15:36

You want to be maximizing efficiency, of course. You want to be as good for the customers as possible. But I mean, you have to be compliant. And like you said, in a manufacturing company, you might do some quick billoting of a process and then you just fix the issues if we need it. I mean, a typical design cycle of a product is that you will create a prototype, you produce it, and then you recognize we can improve the production cycle and you have iterate, and you just make it better and better. But I think in a bank, if you do that, you most likely will have audit findings before you even can iterate. You have to have a clear decision framework and risk framework to understand what am I allowed to do, what not, and what are the consequences. But still, I mean, if you can flip it around and really think about the customer and what you are delivering, and then simply try and having a good team of also compliance risk legal who will tell you what is the risk and what are we doing here, I think that's really important. So the design envelope of regulation is really important. And you need to know which ones are the most important ones, of course. So, I mean, if you have criminal liability, you have personal liability on an employee level for some topics, of course, you have to build those into the processes and make sure that you are compliant. And if there is some grey zone, sometimes you need to be able to navigate it and try to make it as transparent as possible. I mean, any banking bank or any regulated environment is audited quite often by the authorities. And I think it is really important to, of course, be there safe and understand what's going on.

SPEAKER_01 16:59

You don't want a uh film starring Leonardo DiCaprio to come out about 20 years later. So one of the things you mentioned that you've been working on is replacing a fairly traditional approach to document-centric compliance. We've got regulations that sit above directives and directives above work instructions, and you want to replace that with a process-centric model with process itself as a source of truth. Was it with the old model that wasn't working as well as it could do? What is it that makes a new one better than that old way?

SPEAKER_00 17:28

I can't give you any evidence that it is better, but I believe it is better. So I think the documents drift. So you get updated documents, you will update a policy, and of course, a bank, you have to follow those policies. I mean, that's clear. It's again the same topic as earlier. So if you have a policy, it will be most likely released by the board of directors and it is binding. And it's often with uh legal consequences if you don't fulfill it. But still, really bring that policies and all these documents into the organization is quite difficult. So you often drift an updated document will be there. The people will follow it, of course, but it is not something they can really touch and you can't really see in the execution. And if you can now really flip it around again, like we discussed earlier. So if you can say, hey, these are the processes we need to fulfill, this is what we want to do, and that's what we want to be great at. And that's the basic. So the employees are thinking about what they do, they can more relate on what they are doing because a document, a policy is often written in a legal way that it's actually not so easy to understand. So I mean, we have a lot of different documents. I read them many times trying to understand them, and always thinking, well, I can't really grasp it. And uh, I help myself at some uh acknowledgement of understanding things. But yeah, you get lost on these things often. And if you can actually relate it to the process and say, hey, that's what you do on a daily basis, that's your flow. And now on this and this step, we have built in this and this directive because we have to fulfill these regulations coming from the top. And for the bottom side, you have the work instructions like, hey, okay, for this step, I don't know how you identify a contract partner, for example. Here we have actually a work instruction that is supporting you. How do you actually have to do it? So you can kind of like bring the process into the center, and then you use the process to kind of navigate the layers between what employees concretely do and why they do it. So the kind of the how becomes more central in the sense of, hey, we have to do this because of these regulations and because of the customer, that's what we do. And then you have also the supporting from below. So kind of like the triangle becomes more, I don't know, it's still a triangle, but the process in the middle is just a bit more fat and a bit more meaningful than before. And then you are also avoiding building a second layer on top of another layer. So what happens often is that you have these regulatory frameworks next to the process or other way around, and then you're making people even more confused. But if you can now merge them, I think then you make it something for people that they can actually touch and understand. And it's more meaningful for the employees to follow it.

SPEAKER_01 19:52

I like the idea of it's meaningful for the employees, but it's also reusable, right? It's supporting that compliance use case, it's supporting a documentation piece, but it's a layer that's going to be reused to support CI, it could be reused to support transformation. And you don't have to maintain three separate accounts with it. You don't need to have a quality team doing it and a CI team and X, Y, Z, just one place.

SPEAKER_00 20:14

I mean, it is a lot of work because if you have an existing framework of these regulations and policies, you will have some policies that have processes in. You will have some work instructions that are processes, you will have a bit of a mismatch of everything, and now you have to start sorting it out and see, okay, we have this policy here, and we need to take the process out of it. We have to ensure that it's modeled nicely, and then we have to change all of these documents to kind of match this new model. So it is a lot of work. I don't want to build a picture that is all grosses and beautiful uh sunny days, but I think if you can get there and if you have a few pilots and you can show how it works, it actually makes a big difference, at least in such an environment like banks. Same in manufacturing. I mean, we did something similar at VAT Group, trying to bring the whole document management system together with the processes. So I think it has some benefit no matter where you are, but especially regulated environments, it really helps.

SPEAKER_01 21:06

We did something similar with Philips Mesk appliances a few years ago. And talking about the quality, it used to take a few months to get documentation ready, chase getting the right version, Chase getting it signed off, rubber stamped, and then if you just have a central repository, regular reviewed good governance around that, instead of chasing people for three months, you extract your documentation report and it takes three seconds. Such an effort save. So long as it's building on my existing asset, it's not something done separately and with duplicates effort from your programs.

SPEAKER_00 21:36

I think I mean, how many companies do we know where you have this document management system, these policies outdated? I mean, I think we have all seen it. You go to a company and you have a document management system policies that are 10 years, 15 years old, never looked at, never updated. They might still be valid. I'm not saying that, but it's never looked at. But if you can somehow bring it into this whole process flow that is something people execute on a daily basis. The likelihood that you update them and keep them up to date is a lot higher than just having them for an ISO audit in the drawer and ready to pull out when you need it.

SPEAKER_01 22:08

You don't want to be dragging out a process model that says you gotta break out the fax machine, get that across, get your paper invoice in the mail, and uh try to crack on in the Stone Age. So I understand you're working with Ionis now for process modeling and you're using Microsoft Suite and GRF for the workflow side of things. And those tools were already in place when you got to Bank Freck. How do you navigate building that process centrics model when it's around tools that you didn't choose, you might not be as familiar with initially? And what does that require of you instead of just starting from a blank sheet?

SPEAKER_00 22:41

I think in the end the tool might make your life easier. I mean, there are some benefits for any tool. I think any BPM suite has its cons and pros. If you have the right framework and right concept and you can make it work, I think the tool in the end makes not such a big difference. So I think it's just important that you make it again relatable for the employees, that you somehow make it work, that people actually use it. I think the UI makes a big difference if it's really looking old style and it's not something you can navigate. I think then it might be a different issue. But I think today any of the players on the PPM market will already have tools that you can actually use and you can bring out to the employees. So I think you just need to be able to adjust and be able to open to try different things and maybe also kind of move away if you're used to using Signavi or used to using Aris or Symbios or Novselonis or any other tools, they all have their tricks and things, and you are familiar with that. So of course you want to stick with it. But you move to a new tool, and I think you will quickly recognize that it's always 80% the same, and everything brings something new and some opportunities, but the issues are remaining the same, and you still have to bring the people in, and the content matters a lot more than the tool itself. I think Chira, Microsoft that does more our workplace design thing, so where we actually manage tasks, how do we work on? I think it's a kind of like the same discussion we had earlier from the workflows. It's more an asset if you can actually build some workflows and tools on those in a quickly basis instead of waiting for a massive software project to implement something. So I think that's something where I see a lot of opportunity and I'm so happy to have that workplace design in my team that we can really use my own team to build workflows in Jira, for example, for something if we need to. And then we again have that blueprint if we ever want to give it to the software development guys to try to build something around it. So I think it's a really big win. I think yeah, asset. You can't make all the selections for yourself. I think that would be easy, but I think you can live with anything. So a tool just might have made it a bit easier.

SPEAKER_01 24:34

So you have built and run process governance frameworks across manufacturing and across financial services. What's the most important thing you personally have learned about design governance that people actually want to engage with rather than just quietly acknowledge and try to work around?

SPEAKER_00 24:52

I think that's the biggest issue you always face with PPM and trying to bring it in. I think for me it's about giving people something. Often governance models are just asking people to do something more. They have to get something done, they have to have ownership, they need to do something on top of their normal daily trolls. Being a process owner often is something like, yeah, you have to do it on top of your work on a Friday, 5% of your time, which doesn't work. So I think if you can give people something with governments, make it more clear, giving them some responsibility, some decision-making rights, some recognition of doing that, I think then it's not just about having to give more out of your daily work. It's actually something where you get something to yourself. So I think it's again this people side. If you can motivate them and give them something and they actually feel it, I think then they are also more likely to follow you on that journey. And that's really important.

SPEAKER_01 25:41

Yeah, I like the idea of process ownership not being something you tag on, it's something that you have to actually empower, delegate authority to let them make decisions in the area. Have you had any environments where you've had process owners maybe in an existing structure that's more the document custodian as opposed to someone who's actually given the authority to make changes? And if so, what did you have an opportunity to try to affect that and change that?

SPEAKER_00 26:04

Yeah, I have seen that. And I think that it really depends on the culture. I think often the culture has been quite led from the top down. People are used to delegating decisions upwards, even if they get the authority of being a process owner and we clearly state, hey, you can make decisions, they are not used to doing that, and there is some insecurity of doing it as well, because you are always thinking, hey, but they anyways will decide differently above my hierarchy levels. So, yes, I have seen it, and I think we do battle with it also almost daily in the current situation. And I think we just try to give them the opportunity of saying, hey, we can still design it, we can still make some changes, and I think if we frame it differently, we don't make decisions, we make recommendations, and if you still want to have a buy-in from someone above of the leadership who, anyways, have to be involved. So you kind of shift it from decision-making recommendations, making like improvements, and then having reviews around those improvements to check that they fit. Because I think in a regulated environment, like we discussed earlier, you don't want to make decisions that give you a risk or exposure to some regulations or some things you don't want to do. So I think that's also kind of like a given that process owner mightn't want to be safe before making such decisions. But if you can shift it around, like, hey, let's try to improve it, let's look at the best ways of doing things, and we can have a review with the teams, with the management, with the leads, uh, with the functional leads, whatever it is, to kind of get a buy-in for those decisions. So that's kind of like how we try to motivate them. And that gives also the people, the process owners, more room to actually bring themselves in. So they are not automatically blocked by, hey, I can't do anything anyways because somebody else decides. Then it's about framing. And for us as a PPM and chains, trying to take a bit of that moderator role of navigating that discussion between a process owner and the organization of, hey, we get an improvement here, look how much value it could bring. What do you think?

SPEAKER_01 27:50

Fantastic. Yeah. I love that concept of the process owner knows the area, they're the best person to go and bat for themselves, bat for what they want to uh put forward. It's not a BPM manager's role to come in and be an expert in every single process, either to enable them to platform and give them the tools for them to do that. So that's fantastic.

SPEAKER_00 28:07

Maybe to add to that quickly still, is we have kind of built at the moment also different roles. So we have these process owners who are really subject matter experts who are really deep in the games. And we have now tried to build a kind of like an end-to-end process owners as an up-of-layer who have a bit that more BPM role of hey, I'm responsible for the whole value stream, and I have these experts. And my job is trying to kind of combine the dots and bring these Lego pieces together of the big process. And I think that's kind of outsourcing a bit this BPM role from a central model of the business. Because in the end, these are business processes, they belong to the business. And like you said, our small team, a central team, can't know everything better than the business, it just doesn't work. Yeah, that's kind of the second layer we try to do to help that environment. That sounds like a fantastic scale share.

SPEAKER_01 28:53

And then kind of setting the layer above that, even what are some of the techniques, what are some of the approaches you found to be very effective for bringing but executive leadership on board?

SPEAKER_00 29:03

I most likely repeat what everybody says. I think in the end, knowing what are they looking for, what are they measured on, what actually gives them the most uh, let's say, interest to follow you on this journey. So I mean, is it taking reducing costs? Is it more insights on what's going on? Is it transparency? Is it micromanagement even in some cases? Whatever might be their target as a C level, I think if you can understand it and then you can start kind of building around that and giving them some examples how you can support that vision they have, I think that helps in the buying, and it most likely buys you some freedom of doing things that they don't see as important as you might see. So I think you as a PPM practitioner or building such a role or such a function, I think you are the expert on that field and you have to set up the governance and you have to do things in kind of bottom-up and top down. At least that's my vision. Maybe our management will not like it that I'm saying that sometimes I do things how I think it makes sense. But if you can kind of fit that together and understand what they want and where they want to go on, and then also fulfill deliver on that, that helps a lot. I mean, everybody in our role has a big vision how BPMs would look like. I think that's clear. You see how the organization could be process-driven, how much benefits you can bring. The management might see it as well, but I don't think they often have the patience to wait for that, and they might be willing to see some more impacts, and then you have to deliver those. And even if it's sometimes meets you have to get your hands dirty and do something you don't really believe is worth it, I think you still deliver on that, and that helps a lot to get that kind of that freedom, in my opinion, to get these bigger things also done. And also tying in, like what does this small thing, what are you doing now, deliver to the bigger vision. Somebody said that there is 99 steps between zero and hundred, and going straight to 100 isn't possible. So I think if you can kind of see that ladder slowly growing up, that helps also on the buy-in and at the sponsor level.

SPEAKER_01 30:51

I actually had this conversation with someone recently about they were taking the process function and it was moving from being IT focused and architecture focused to potentially being more quality and audit focused. And the question is, how do you get the executive on board with that? And they don't care about single source of truth. They don't care about making processes visible. They care about does it reduce my audit costs? Does it reduce my risk of any audit issues? Am I gonna essentially hit my quality goals more easily? It's nice to have.

SPEAKER_00 31:18

But I don't really care.

SPEAKER_01 31:19

Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 31:20

And I mean, what one forgets often is that I don't think companies have BPM functions for fun. I have three people uh doing just BPM, and that costs a lot of money. And I think the management does know it costs money. It's not something we are just hiding in a corner and doing something. So I think there is a buying kind of by just existing, and then it's just finding what to deliver and how to make it important enough for them to actually keep doing it.

SPEAKER_01 31:44

So you've previously described a shift that's underway at Bank Frick towards using process mining and looking at internal operations in a way that's not been done before, looking at internal KPIs for the first time, rather than just looking at the external market data. What was the conversation you had that made that case for doing that actually land internally?

SPEAKER_00 32:05

I think of course we measured some things internally as well, but it's not a standard. It's been always growing fast. I mean, and the bank grew from 50, 60 people end of 2019 to now 300 in six years. So we can grow fast and getting a lot of people. So kind of going from a small organization where you could control everything now to a kind of a bigger organization that you can't anymore manage without having some internal KPIs. And so we used to have some SLAs and some topics, but it's never been a focus in the bank. And now we try to bring a lot more data and KPIs and measurement into making decisions, not to shoot from the hip, but rather have really data-based decisions when you make optimizations and also kind of to prioritize. I mean, there's so many different processes you can work on, and uh anything you do with processes will take resources from the organization. You will need that expert, you will need that IT people in a bank, especially where any process is an IT system. So kind of having data, having volumes, having uh how much it costs to do it, having the value behind it to calculate and to decide before you actually use the bank's resources to do something. I think that's what we try to do. I think process mining, of course, in a bank is a cool topic. So we are just getting started to think how we can start mining our processes because I said earlier, if we can mine those, we are actually mining the value streams straight away. Our processes are basically what we also deliver for the customers.

SPEAKER_01 33:27

And in terms of the mining work you're doing on those value streams, what for you is the biggest gap that you've seen thus far between what people thought they were doing and what the data actually says they're doing?

SPEAKER_00 33:38

I don't have that many insights, it's to be honest with you. So I think I said we are just getting going. But I think it's often the thing people feel like they are so busy with things and their bottlenecks, what they are bringing up, are often like how something might feel like it's extremely big and it takes a lot of resources. But then if you start looking at the volumes and the information, you see it only happens like once a month. And uh it costs you maybe only one hour a month. And there are bigger fist-to-fish, and that might be the biggest difference we recognize so far that the Tata gives you kind of more argumentations why we could skip that and why could we actually focus on something else now? So often the noise what people are bringing in as a feeling, what's bothering them, is bigger than it actually is. And Tata, of course, gives you the transparency on how often things happen. It might still be annoying, not wanna chudge anyone and say that they are wrong, but the magnitude is often a lot smaller than think. And then you might have other things that you just kept doing every day for two minutes, but it happens a thousand times. And yeah, it doesn't bother them because it's every day, but it actually has a lot more potential than these smaller things.

SPEAKER_01 34:39

The most painful thing isn't necessarily what the business is really feeling the pinch on in terms of the gap though between what's mined and what people are. A thinking and feeling's happening. One of my favorite analogies on this was speaking with Kasper Jans, who is the head of the process practice at Salonis now, Family Aris. I was talking with him about one of his previous roles, where he ran an actual BPM team in a manufacturing company from process to workflow build to change delivery. And one of the big problems he always said was people kept complaining it took too long when a request came in to actually action it and get the new change live. So he ran process mining on his own BPM practice, set it up on his workflows when the request came in, when they got processed, when they went through X, Y, Z from coming in to being triage to being live. And what the data bought out was his team was turning around the process and architecture review within a day or two. It was going back out to the process owner to sign off the actual change that needs to be made. And then that's where the one, two, three, four, five week, month, year delay started to come in. So people who were complaining were the ones with the uh actions sitting in their inbox, which I'm not saying uh doing process managing your own BPM functions the most impactful, best place to go, but it's definitely one of the more interesting. So uh moving kind of from looking quite a way back to looking to the future, uh looking at AI, that's changing not just process work, but the business landscape very broadly. From your personal perspective, given you're in a very regulated environment, what is the excites you about the direction it's dragging process and the more business general business landscape?

SPEAKER_00 36:07

I think you can't get away from the AI hype anymore. I love what Telone is saying that there is no AI without process intelligence. I think that's kind of like the fundament you have. Going to my opinion, I think in our frameworks or in our environment, if you get the framework right, so if you get the processes defined around the regulation so that the design is clear, I mean the upside you can do with AI is massive because a lot of these regulatory topics are things you can semi-automate. I mean, the AI act and all these things that are coming in, of course, you will always need to keep the human in the loot, that's important. But there is so much potential to get these regulatory topics in a more smart way, a more supported way for people to actually, instead of searching for regulation, searching for information, using their experience, which is of course important but not scalable. I think AI has a massive upside. But you have to get the framework right, and I think that's what I see as the biggest thing. So I think having agents with AI taking KYC topics or taking some different things, I think there's so much opportunity. But before you have the process and the frameworks fixed, you can't do it because the risk is too big. And I think it gives us even more weapons to why to do PPM, why to get these things done, because if you get the processes right, you will have also a lot easier time with AI. And then maybe also recognizing where AI might disrupt your processes completely. I think there are some processes that might not exist anymore in five years when this AI engine gets bigger and bigger. It's a hype we work with every day, but in the end it doesn't change what we do on a daily basis. You still need to get the roles and the functions correct, you still need to think about what you get done, what the business needs. And maybe you can start identifying different roles in the process that you can fully support with AI, and maybe there are some roles that you will always need to keep as a human in the loop. And I think the framework is the AO getting that thing done. I think that's my feeling. And humans will always need to make some own decision and signs of, especially in a regular environment. I think that's gonna always stay.

SPEAKER_01 38:08

If we go back again now, look in backtrack career from consulting to manufacturing to finance. What is the thing that you most strongly know that leads to process transformations succeeding or failing that you maybe didn't understand, didn't appreciate at the start of your career?

SPEAKER_00 38:26

I think that's it earlier shortly. So I think it's not the process design that is wrong that fails this transformation. I think we will always get the process design good enough. It is really more that this ownership layer of who is owning the process. And there has to be someone to care enough about the process that it actually stays healthy when you leave. And I think that's kind of if you can make that happen, I think then you can make it also stick. You can make the change stick, you can make the transformation stick. And that might mean you have to have the data, you have to have the leadership, you might have to have the ID infrastructure, the KPIs, whatever it means, you have to have the ecosystem around it good enough. Uh that process is an internal part or a really an important part of the business. So you have to have the ownership model, you have to have the integration good enough. The design is important, but design only is not gonna save you. I mean, I think when I started my career as a young consultant, and that's been now, I think it's already 12 years ago, so it's been a while. I think we we tried to make the perfect process, perfect diacrams, and in the end, like like I said, if if that goes into the drawer and just stays there, it doesn't bring anything. That would be my take, yeah.

SPEAKER_01 39:30

Perfect. And say you're talking to someone who's earlier in their career and they want to build a career in processing leadership in a rember space. What advice would you give to them?

SPEAKER_00 39:42

A great question. I think take opportunities you get. I like to go proad before going deep, but I think you need to go deep as well. So you're kind of trying to balance these things. I think not being afraid of changing industries, seeing different things, because if you want to be in this process management space, you want to be in this organizational development space, all organizations are facing similar issues. And if you learn to be a bit of a chameleon of adjusting yourself to different environments, I think that's where consulting helped me a lot to understand different clients. Then you will also fit in many organizations and you can bring value no matter where you are. So I think if you can speak a language of processes and you can do systems thinking and translate things to people, it doesn't really matter in what environment you are in. I think it's a rather a rare combination if you can bring different industries and you understand how they fit together and how they actually differentiate from each other. I think if you can get that broadness in your career, I think it gives you just a different perspective. And uh maybe you see the problems differently and you can take them also a bit more relaxed. So I think for me the journey has been kind of opening. I think I'm taking things a bit less personally now after seeing so many different things because I said the issues are always the same and you will have to do your best thing on whatever you are, but it's not often you personally who are the reason why it's failing or why it's succeeding. So it's always kind of depends on the environment and where you are.

SPEAKER_01 41:04

Perfect. Pablo, thank you so much for your time. That was a fantastic conversation, I hope. Everyone out there who's listening finds that as interesting as I did. So thank you for your time. Hope you have a wonderful rest of your week. And to all those who've listened, good work carrying on the work in process.