In fact, the idea of always placing the customer of the process in the top swimlane and then diagramming every interaction between the customer and the business process is probably the more valuable insight. Many would emphasize the swimlanes that provide business people with insights into who is responsible for managing specific activities. Today we find those same concepts in the latest flowcharting notation: BPMN. In a similar way, IBM practitioners took courses from Rummler-Brache and then went on to create LOVEM, an IBM business process reengineering methodology that relied on Rummler’s diagramming concepts. To provide two examples: it was during the 1980s that Rummler worked at Motorola, revising processes and teaching the process analysis techniques that laid the groundwork for Motorola’s subsequent development of Six Sigma, which marries process and quality control techniques. In the 1980s, Geary Rummler joined with Alan Brache to form Rummler-Brache and undertook a number of consulting engagements that widely influenced how people today think of process change. Thus, although process was extremely important to Rummler, it was always just one part of a comprehensive approach to performance improvement, and it was important only because it supported the goals of the organization. He assumed that at each level organizations would define goals and measures, create designs for achieving their goals and measures, and establish management practices that would assure that the designs achieved the desired goals and measures. He imagined an organization comprised of three levels: one concerned with the organization as a whole, one concerned with the specific processes the organization used to accomplish work, and one focused on the concrete activities that people and systems performed. More than anything else, the matrix suggests the scope of Geary Rummler’s vision. When I think of Rummler’s impact, I usually think first of his performance matrix, which is pictured in Table F.1. Instead, he focused on corporate performance and on how companies could be organized and managed to produce superior performance. In reality, Geary Rummler never focused on processes as such.

Rummler brache ten core steps of phase