Process management (project management)

In civil engineering and project management, process management is the management of "systematic series of activities directed towards causing an end result such that one or more inputs will be acted upon to create one or more outputs". Process management offers project organizations a means of applying the same quality improvement and defect reduction techniques used in business and manufacturing processes by taking a process view of project activity; modeling discrete activities and high-level processes. The term process management usually refers to the management of engineering processes and project management processes where a process is a collection of related, structured tasks that produce a specific service or product to address a certain goal for a particular actor or set of actors. Processes can be executed with procedures. They can be described as a sequence of steps that can execute a process and their value lies in that they are an accepted method of accomplishing a consistent performance or results. Process management provides engineering and project managers with a means of systemically thinking of project organizations, semantics concepts and logical frameworks that allow project activities to be planned, executed, analyzed and facilitate learning. In order for process management as defined to deliver consistent performance, it requires definition, elimination of non-value-added activities, continuous improvement, project stakeholder focus and team based approach. Mitchell (2016) notes that managing processes across divisional and organizational boundaries requires a more flexible management strategy as well as close cooperation among managers in diverse functional and operational units to ensure that the process flow is not interrupted by conflicts over lines of authority. Process management originated as part of the manufacturing-based application of statistical quality control movement in the late 1920s and early 1930s.