Business process management (BPM) is an important area of organizational design and an acknowledged source of corporate performance. Over the last decades, many approaches, methods, and tools have been proposed to discover, design, analyze, enact, and improve individual processes. At the same time, BPM research has been and still is paying ever more attention to BPM itself and the development of organizations’ BPM capability. Little, however, is known about how to develop an organization’s BPM capability and improve individual processes in an integrated manner. To address this research gap, we developed a planning model. This planning model intends to assist organizations in determining which BPM- and process-level projects they should implement in which sequence to maximize their firm value, catering for the projects’ effects on process performance and for interactions among projects. We adopt the design science research (DSR) paradigm and draw from project portfolio selection as well as value-based management as justificatory knowledge. For this reason, we refer to our approach as value-based process project portfolio management. To evaluate the planning model, we validated its design specification by discussing it against theory-backed design objectives and with BPM experts from different organizations. We also compared the planning model with competing artifacts. Having instantiated the planning model as a software prototype, we validated its applicability and usefulness by conducting a case based on real-world data and by challenging the planning model against accepted evaluation criteria from the DSR literature

Purpose Despite an obvious connection, business process improvement and business process management (BPM) capability development have been studied intensely, but in isolation. The authors thus aim to make the case for the research located at the intersection of both streams. The authors thereby focus on the integrated planning of business process improvement and BPM capability development as this is where, in the authors’ opinion, both streams have the closest interaction. The authors refer to the research field located at the intersection of business process improvement and BPM capability development as process project portfolio management. The paper aims to discuss these issues. Design/methodology/approach The authors structure the field of process project portfolio management drawing from extant knowledge related to BPM, project portfolio management, and performance management. The authors also propose a research agenda in terms of exemplary research questions and research methods. Findings The proposed structure shows which business objects and interactions should be considered when engaging in process project portfolio management. The research agenda contains exemplary questions structured along the intersections of BPM, project portfolio management, and performance management. Research limitations/implications This paper’s main limitation is that it reflects the authors’ individual viewpoints based on experiences of several industry projects and prior research. Originality/value This paper addresses a neglected research field, opens up new avenues for interdisciplinary BPM research, and contributes a novel perspective to the ongoing discussion about the future of BPM.

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Deciding which business processes to improve is a challenge for all organizations. The literature on business process management (BPM) offers several approaches that support process prioritization. As many approaches share the individual process as unit of analysis, they determine the processes' need for improvement mostly based on performance indicators, but neglect how processes are interconnected. So far, the interconnections of processes are only captured for descriptive purposes in process model repositories or business process architectures (BPAs). Prioritizing processes without catering for their interconnectedness, however, biases prioritization decisions and causes a misallocation of corporate funds. What is missing are process prioritization approaches that consider the processes' individual need for improvement and their interconnectedness. To address this research problem, the authors propose the ProcessPageRank (PPR) as their main contribution. The PPR prioritizes processes of a given BPA by ranking them according to their network-adjusted need for improvement. The PPR builds on knowledge from process performance management, BPAs, and network analysis -particularly the Google PageRank. As for evaluation, the authors validated the PPR's design specification against empirically validated and theory-backed design propositions. They also instantiated the PPR's design specification as a software prototype and applied the prototype to a real-world BPA.

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