Subsequent to key recommendations arising from the First Principles Review, Synergy Group has been engaged with the Directorate of Enterprise Business Process Management in CIOG to provide thought leadership, methodologies and intellectual property to foster a consistent, evidence-based and enterprise-wide approach to business process management (BPM) and performance improvement supporting multiple Groups and Services in Defence. Synergy Group has advised Defence in developing an effective ‘hub and spoke’ model for deploying BPM, with a centre of excellence (CoE) that establishes governance and standards, offers whole of organisation services, and also supports each Group and Service to develop local expertise in BPM to progress their own process improvement initiatives.
Through our work, Synergy Group has advised the Capability Acquisition & Sustainment Group (CASG) to develop an integrated Business Management System (BMS) to provide a single source of truth for policy, process and procedure for capability acquisition and sustainment. This BMS has allowed CASG to standardise and then improve processes into a single source of truth for the organisation, stored in an enterprise BPM tool (the Holocentric platform) which is managed by the CoE.
The Synergy Group team is working in partnership with software provider Holocentric to advise and develop the BPM capability across Defence in support of the FPR and the Defence Transformation Strategy, promoting adoption of Enterprise platforms and services, and aligning Groups and Services to support One Defence.
Using our methods and experience our team has worked with CASG, Army, Air Force, the Vice Chief of Defence Force and the Estate and Infrastructure Group to build BMS instances in support of their business requirements and service delivery reform. This work creates a single searchable source of truth for policy, process, and procedures across Defence with information owners able to manage their respective areas easily. The work is underpinned by an information model that highlights the connectivity and interdependency of the different business areas across Defence, from capability to services to policies to processes to roles and organisational structure, to applications and templates used. This effectively provides a ‘digital twin’ of the organisation and is a basis for improving or transforming business process to deliver on service delivery reform.
This work is also transforming the way the business areas capture and provide access to its business information, and guidance - replacing paper documents with digital, enriched and integrated content.
The design of enterprise and business area BMS strategies that articulate the value that a BMS will provide to the business, and how it will provide that value and improve service delivery improvement. This also aligns core business area strategy, policy, and governance, with the vision and direction of the individual BMS instances.
Creating a Defence-wide business and process architecture to standardise how the business areas approach, define, build, and connect processes, and then also improve them through use of process analytics and automation to undertake service delivery transformation. This work secured core senior stakeholder agreement and understanding of the purpose, direction, and type of content to be included, as well as the associated approach.
Extending the Defence information meta model and developing dynamic views of information to increase business value and usability of the information being captured, including use of a chat bot to interrogate the content.
Concurrently, our team of BPM qualified business analysts built enabling content within the Defence endorsed tool (Holocentric) to capture policy, process and related information. This work enabled a better understanding of the Defence business architecture, and service delivery operating model, including clarifying accountabilities, through building process content at cascading levels of detail and facilitates future integration of all areas of Defence in ‘one BMS’.
More recent work has added additional toolsets to the CoE services such as process mining and robotic process automation, as well as implementing the Defence Business Reference Architecture that unifies all capabilities in Defence in a single taxonomy, including objectives and organisational design.
Throughout our engagement we have delivered methods and approaches to improve process activities (using techniques such as Lean/Six Sigma) to achieve internal efficiencies, and leveraged the Holocentric tool risk, controls and reporting capability to increase Defence’s risk management activities.
Defence has been supported in their BPM journey by Synergy Group's BPM training delivery (600 people across the organisation), and most recently being migrated into an online learning format.
