Completing the loops

Total quality management (TQM) and business process reengineering (BPR) have emerged as important practices but not yet as a discipline. A methodology for mapping, measuring, tracking, and managing commitments in business processes is necessary to make a discipline from TQM and BPR. An organization’s network of commitments can be depicted as a map of interconnected work-flow loops. That map can be used as a guide to design work processes and their supporting information technologies, manage commitments to completion with customer satisfaction, and measure productivity. A study of a complex process, course scheduling, at George Mason University shows how the mapping notation and the method work.