Read, understand and comply with processes

A process that is not followed is almost as bad as having no process at all.

Yet, many companies struggle with process compliance. When an employee does not understand a rule – or fails to follow one – your whole company can suffer.

What if you could make sure that every stakeholder reads, understands and follows your processes? Confirmation management is the missing link. It bridges the gap between “this is how you should go about our business” and “I hereby confirm that I have read and understood how I should go about our business.” You can think of it as policy management, where process models are understood prescriptively in the context of the business or IT situation.

Confirmation management

In other words, confirmation management notifies stakeholders when processes change and adds value by getting their acknowledgment of changes. This is where ARIS Confirmation Management comes in.

Simply put, it’s a lightweight business workflow that asks model stakeholders to confirm they have read and understood (and will follow) the content of their models residing on ARIS. It is most typically, but not exclusively, applicable to process models because they represent organizational ways of working.

The business value of this new feature is that organizations communicate their ways of working (i.e. through business process models). Organizational stakeholders are requested to provide electronic signatures confirming that they have in fact read and understood a models’ content, plus that they will adhere to those ways of working.

Most dramatically, it elevates the value of graphical models from oftentimes being completely ignored (“Does this affect my job?”) to becoming relevant to employees’ daily work performance – and thereby essential to achieving operational excellence.

ARIS Confirmation Management workflow can be used in combination with ARIS process governance workflows. Process governance takes care of manager approval for newly defined or updated models, whereas confirmation management notifies stakeholders and requests confirmation of adherence.

Why ARIS Confirmation Management

“Say what you do and do what you say” are the twin poles of consistency and performance.

Say what you do: Refers to defining/documenting/designing the what and how of work. This is essentially business process modeling. It is complemented by ARIS’ collaboration feature, where employees can (rather than should) contribute to improving processes they participate in by giving feedback and sharing best practices.

Do what you say: Refers to holding employees accountable to following their best-practice ways of working. This is more than top-down militarily imposed “my way or the highway,” but rather helps employees hold themselves accountable to the way they should be doing their best work – and that they’re consistently doing it in an excellent and repeatable fashion.

In other words, “say what you do” refers to modeling the process and “do what you say” refers to following the process, empowering employees to hold themselves accountable to their own high standards of work performance.

See what ARIS Confirmation Management can do for you by clicking below.