The Mission Management Process

Why a mission management process

All the work involved in determining stakeholder needs, determining the mission, the vision and strategy, the business outputs and designing the processes to deliver these outputs is clearly a separate process. It is also important that the performance of the organization is subject to continual review and improvement and this is clearly a process. But neither can exist in isolation, they are in fact a continuum and when brought together would have the same stakeholder at each end. We have a choice of names for this process. We could call it a Business Management Process but we might call the system the business management system so this could cause confusion. We could also call it a Strategic Planning Process but it goes beyond planning to close the loop and review performance against the plan. As the process determines the mission, establishes the means to achieve it  then determines if the mission is being accomplished  we could call this process the mission management process. Other names might be Vision Management Process or Goal Management Process,

Purpose

Determines the direction of the business, continually confirms that the business is proceeding in the right direction and makes course corrections to keep the business focussed on its mission. The business processes are developed within mission management as the enabling mechanism by which the mission is accomplished

Process inputs

Report of last strategic review (from key stage 4 of this process)Capable and competent Resources (from the Resource Management process

Process Key stages

Note: The process flow is kept simple  for illustrative purposes. The yellow boxes represent the key stages of the business process and the blue boxes represent the work processes.

Process outputs

• Market research
• Strategic review including PEST and SWOT Analysis
• Business plans (to all processes)
• New product/service strategy (to Demand Creation Process)
• Management system (modelled and shared with staff)
• Performance reports (hyperlink in BMS on Intranet)
• Improvement plans (to this and other processes)

Transition Support

A flexible approach to business improvement