Rummler-Brache Framework Description

The following is from Paul Harmon's book, "Business Process Change"

In 1990 Rummler and a colleague, Alan Brache, published Improving Performance: How to Manage the White Space on the Organization Chart. Unlike the other popular business process theorists, Rummler didn’t emphasize IT, but focused instead on the specifics of how to analyst processes, how to redesign and then improve processes, how to design jobs, and how to manage processes once they were in place. The emphasis on the white space on the organization chart stressed the fact that many process problems occurred when one department tried to hand off things to the next. The only way to overcome those interdepartmental problems, Rummler argued, was to conceptualize and manage processes as wholes.

One of the most important contributions made by Rummler and Brache was a framework that showed, in a single diagram, how everything related to everything else. They define three levels of performance: (1) and organizational level, (2) a process level, and (3) a job or performer level.

Rummler and Brache also introduce a matrix that they obtain by crossing their three levels with three different perspectives. The perspectives are goals and measures, design and implementation issues, and management.



The Rummler and Brache framework describes an organizations that is mature and capable of taking advantage of systematic processes. Also stresses that we must be concerned with not only the design of processes themselves, but also with measures of success and with the management of processes. In effect, the CMM diagram (NOT DESCRIBED HERE) described how organizations evolve toward process maturity, and the Rummler-Brache framework describes all of the things that a mature organization must master.

Mature organizations must align both vertically and horizontally. Activity goals must be related to process goals, which must, in turn, be derived from strategic goals of the organization. Similarly, a process must be an integrated whole, with goals and measures, a good design that is well implemented, and a management system that uses the goals and measures to assure that the process runs smoothly and, if need be, is improved.

The Rummler-Brache methodology has helped everyone involved in business process change to understand the scope of the problem, and it has provided a foundation on which all of today’s comprehensive process development methodologies are based.