User:Aanonsona/Business Leader

Business Leader: Within Business Process Improvement, there are four roles within a business management system: Business Leader, Process Owner, Operational Manager, and Process Operator. The responsibilities of the Business Leader should not be confused with the responsibilities of the Process Owner, Operational Manager, or the Process Operator. Some employees in an organization may perform as many as all four of these roles over the course of a day, week, month, or year.

Business Leaders are responsible to create the business plans (including strategic plans) and associated resourcing plans necessary to cause the organization to be successful.

Senior leaders (Corporate) are responsible to define the customer and business objectives the organization needs to achieve in order to be successful. This process includes overseeing the development of the organization’s mission, vision, and values.

Lower leader levels (Business Unit and Functional) are responsible for translating senior leaders' business objectives into business objectives that make sense for their level and that support the accomplishment of the senior leaders' business objectives.

The responsibilities of the Business Leaders follow the Plan, Do, Check, and Act PDCA Cycle.

Plan: The Business Leaders create and own the business performance objectives of the organization. Senior leaders need to first understand the requirements of their customers, stockholders, workforce, suppliers, and communities. They need to understand their competition. They need to understand the environmental, economic, technological, social, legal, and political environments that they do business within. Senior leaders need to consider all of these elements as they design a Business model and business Strategy map that will meet the customer and business requirements. Business Leaders then translate these requirements and business environment issues into business performance objectives. Business Leaders then create business plans and associated resourcing plans that will cause the organization to achieve these business objectives. The Business Leaders establish business performance metrics to measure the business’s capability to meet these business objectives. Many organizations create a Balanced scorecard to organize and communicate business performance metrics.

Do: The Business Leaders are responsible to communicate to the organization their business plans. As the organization conducts business, the Business Leaders are responsible to build bridges and remove barriers that will allow the business performance objectives to be met. The business performance metric data is produced and collected as business is performed by the organization.

Check: The business performance data is periodically analyzed by the Business Leaders and is used to visualize the business’s capability to meet business objectives over time (performance trends), compare actual performance against performance targets, and identify performance issues.

Act: The Business Leaders are responsible to create improvement actions to address the performance issues that are identified during their analysis of the business performance data. These improvement actions are created to ensure the organization is able to achieve their business plans.