Understanding the Business Process Owner Role

Have you ever been in a business meeting where someone proposes inspiring ideas and you actually get a little caught up in the potential for meaningful change with your company—but then you look around the room at the crestfallen faces of department heads who fear increased workloads to fix a problem that ain’t broke? The difficulty of implementing good ideas and effecting needed change within an organization is a common one.

Enter the business process owner role. Despite the cumbersome name, the business process owner can play a vital part in helping a company function like a well-oiled machine. But before you jump into hiring a business process owner, you have to get a handle on what they do and the skills they’ll need to do it well.

Business Process Owner Role: What Is It?

One of the biggest impediments to capitalizing on a good, strategic idea is that changes must often be made across multiple departments, like marketing and accounting. And each of these has its own manager, budget, operations, and priorities. So, achieving a united front is no small task.

Unlike your standard department head, the business process owner oversees—you guessed it—a process. And that process usually spans at least several departments. Therefore, the process owner has to become familiar with the inner workings of multiple segments of a company and figure out how to best adjust the operations of each in order to achieve the strategic goal. A larger company could have many process owners.

Skills of an Effective Business Process Owner Role

As you can imagine, the business process owner role is less traditional than other leadership roles, and therefore requires a special skill set. Here are some strengths to look for in a candidate:

• Perspective: A good process owner learns and understands the details of the operational process while keeping their eye on the bigger strategic picture (which is ultimately geared toward customer satisfaction).
• Leadership: Effecting change requires a leader who can motivate others, negotiate appropriately, and coordinate efforts across multiple departments.
• Level-headed: Change is easier for some than others. The process owner should be able to handle pushback and resistance in a calm, measured way. But as new information comes to light, they should also be willing to recalibrate the plan if necessary.
• Driven: It is antithetical to the business process owner role to simply “go through the motions” because many of those motions are what need to change. An effective process owner must be ok with the nitty-gritty and be driven to get things done.
• Broad experience: Having a wide-ranging background often means the business process owner is familiar with multiple ways of getting things done and at various levels.

Remember those strategic ideas bandied about during that boardroom meeting? A business process owner with these competencies can help a company turn those innovative proposals into market success instead of squandered potential.

Need to Fill Your Business Process Owner Role? Monster Can Help.

The person with this exceptional skill set could be right in front of you—a current employee, ready to bring innovative ideas to fruition by getting into those nitty-gritty process problems. But it’s very likely you’ll need to search outside your organization to fill the business process owner role. When it comes to your recruitment or retention needs, Monster has solutions. Learn how you can get free access to the latest expert resources for your company, including recruiting insights, hiring tips, retention strategies, and more.