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Creativity-Aware Business Process Management: What We Can Learn from Film and Visual Effects Production

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Handbook on Business Process Management 2

Part of the book series: International Handbooks on Information Systems ((INFOSYS))

Abstract

Creativity is of considerable importance to many organizations and is a core competitive factor in a variety of contemporary industries. Consequently, process managers increasingly ask: How can I successfully manage an organization without crushing creativity? In this chapter, we describe an approach to creativity-aware process management that is based on the understanding that many value-creating processes comprise both well-structured, transactional parts and often highly creative parts. We explain how the creative parts (“pockets of creativity”) can be identified and described in those processes that highly rely on creativity (“creativity-intensive processes”). Our explanations are grounded in studies in film and visual effects production (VFX), but we argue that ‘conventional’ industries can learn much from their management practices. We propose a set of guidelines that can support process managers in successfully managing creativity in business processes without systematically crushing it. We use the case of a leading Australian VFX company in order to illustrate our explanations.

This chapter is mainly based on Seidel (2009, 2011) and Seidel et al. (2010).

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Notes

  1. 1.

    Human-centric processes are discussed in detail by Harrison-Broninski (2014). Approaches to support knowledge work by means of process management are presented by Davenport (2014).

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Correspondence to Stefan Seidel .

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Seidel, S., Shortland, K., Court, D., Elzinga, D. (2015). Creativity-Aware Business Process Management: What We Can Learn from Film and Visual Effects Production. In: vom Brocke, J., Rosemann, M. (eds) Handbook on Business Process Management 2. International Handbooks on Information Systems. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-45103-4_30

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