Craig Stanley is an instructor for the School of Continuing Studies Certificate in Business Process Improvement and the Strategy & Process Improvement Director with the Global Continuity, Crisis, & Regulatory Support team within CIBC’s Chief Security Office.

He has designed and implemented numerous enterprise-wide security, fraud, and operational processes to bring together teams of subject matter experts to solve complex problems. Craig uses data-based approaches and clear communication to ensure alignment to support numerous business units across five continents and has been with CIBC for over ten years.

We spoke with Craig to learn more about BPI, why more organizations should adopt these practices and what new skills business professionals can develop in this six-month program.  

For those unfamiliar with Business Process Improvement (BPI), could you explain the idea and why companies undertake these initiatives?

Business process improvement is a methodology of approaching problems and getting individuals who work for the company to work on the company. It’s a way of having a series of structured conversations to identify how a company works, how it drives value, what its key performance indicators are, what its key risk indicators are, what its key result indicators are, and create easily followable process documentation.

You know your processes are at the right level of specificity if your entire team wins the lottery on Friday, and you can bring in a whole new group of reasonably qualified, informed people on Monday, and they should, largely, be able to pick up where the last team left off.

By having BPI professionals in your organization, they can build processes that generate intelligence so that way you can be aware of changes to your business, and you can respond proactively.

What kinds of roles can a professional pursue with a BPI skill set?

Take someone who’s a business analyst who runs reports. Maybe they understand automation a little bit, maybe they understand Excel a little bit, and let’s give them the skill set that then says, here’s how you do a SIPOC analysis to identify where our suppliers, our inputs, our process, our outputs and our consumers are, and a way of documenting how we do business.

With BPI, the question becomes: is the juice worth the squeeze?

I would argue that most companies, if not all companies, would benefit from having their operational experts have a background in BPI. That way they can look at their internal processes and at least get most of the juice squeezed out. By having your mid-level manager have this BPI background in a little bit of Lean Six Sigma, a little bit of Kaizen, and a little bit of a bunch of things, you can find those optimizations in a cost-effective and meaningful way.

What professional background do you need before you start this program?

A wide variety of people have taken this program. From new grads to 20-year professionals and everything in between. The program is suited for business administrators, and business analysts—those teams that support other teams.

A couple of our students who had 20 years of business experience in tech and academia wanted to update their skills to continue to be competitive in an ever-changing workplace, especially with the rate of technology and especially with the advent of artificial intelligence.

But I would strongly argue that anyone who can come into a situation, see the big picture and write the big picture down, that’s an essential management skill set in almost any field you’re in.

The nice thing about BPI is it is as expensive or as cheap as you want it to be. Maybe it’s simple automation through things like SharePoint and Excel, and it’s just a way of writing down what we do for a living so that when we train new people, we can shorten their uptime.

What are some of the learning outcomes?

The first course teaches you how to conduct interviews with your colleagues and your clients to understand what their problems are, document and clarify this conversation, and create robust process documents. The second course teaches business automation, what can be automated, and also what cannot be automated. The final course leads you through the implementation of these initiatives and applies what has been learned in previous courses.

The capstone project runs through all three courses. In the first course, you get assigned a client in the business world. We work with a vendor to help us get these clients and students will help the company document its processes. For instance, a startup trying to revolutionize the Canadian ginseng industry. It allows our students to apply their skills in real time, and many of our students who are fresh out of school, can say they have worked on a project for a software company to identify what their processes are and close gaps.

Thanks for taking the time to speak with the School, Craig. If you’re looking to improve your management and business skills, you can learn more about our Certificate in Business Process Improvement and register for our next term.