Business Process Management is a part of Business Performance Management. Well, it is obvious - To perform better, businesses need to tune their internal processes as well, in addition to tuning other parameters like people structure, service stacks, product lines, marketing strategies etc.

Where as, Business Performance Management deals with fine tuning of these various parameters based on key performance indicators data, Business Process Management focuses entirely on modeling, monitoring and optimization of business processes within the organization with the sole goal of being better able to better connect with customers and managing their expectations. It entails continuous improvement of internal business processes. Business Process Management usually runs under the supervision of business performance managers.

Processes changes can be brought about based on the situations or they can be altered based on the data collected across various process touch points. However, the later is a more common approach these days. Although a mix of two would be more beneficial in my opinion because situational people element can be factored in more easily by mixing the two.

A typical process management life cycle looks like below

$Process Design$

The focus here is to prepare a theoretical process design that considers all stakeholders, business functions, existing sub processes, revenue and other success targets. The idea is to have a direction settled upon before further action is taken. The desired output of this phase is a document detailing the high level process elements with actors, alerts, notifications, escalation points etc defined.

$Process Modeling$

Modeling mostly runs in parallel with design. There are various notations available to capture process designs, like, Business Process Modeling Notations (BPMN), Web Services Flow Language (WSFL), UML activity diagrams etc. Various tools in the market support these notations. The objective is to visually represent all process elements for better comprehensibility. This is followed by introduction of business variables at various process points and tweaking them to notice the effect. It forms the basis of what-if analysis of various scenarios. For e.g., in a retail business where people at the counter face customers directly, you can run what will happen to the revenue collected in a day if you change number of people at the counter. Modeling tools support what if analysis of this kind and can

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