Work In Process (a bpmd podcast) – Details, episodes & analysis

In this first episode of Working Process, Liam O'Neill and Sam Lewis introduce themselves and explain how bpmd evolved from a three-person startup operating out of a Surrey attic with a single client, into a specialist transformation partner working with global organisations including Sony and the BBC.

This is a candid conversation about what it actually takes to make process and transformation work land as real business change, not just activity.

They discuss:

• How bpmd found its identity after years of muddling through general project work
• Why they moved away from preaching process toward asking better questions
• What they call the process migration trap and why moving 2,000 models into a new tool rarely adds value
• How data analysis has become central to the work, and why accessibility is no longer the bottleneck
• The reality of change fatigue in large organisations and how a multidisciplinary change maker function can fix it
• Why adoption is consistently the harder problem, not the technology
• How they helped Lego's process team go from lacking purpose to being pivotal in one of the group's biggest ever internal transformations
• Where AI fits in, and why strong process context is becoming more critical, not less

This is an honest and grounded conversation about what good transformation work actually looks like from the inside.

If you lead process, transformation, IT, enterprise architecture, data or operations and you are accountable for turning strategy into execution, this episode is for you.

Host: Liam O'Neill, Managing Director at bpmd
Host: Sam Lewis, Director at bpmd

In this episode, Liam O'Neill speaks with Aafke Post, Senior BPM Solution Manager at Philips, where she has spent 14 years building and leading enterprise process governance across complex, multi-country environments.

Aafke's background is genuinely unusual for someone in this space. She started as a sports performance coach before studying Communication and Multimedia Design, and it is that combination of systems thinking and design thinking, always anchored to the end user, that has shaped everything she has done since.

This is a thoughtful and wide-ranging conversation about what it actually takes to make process work useful rather than just correct.

They discuss:

• Why teaching people to abseil taught her more about trusting a process than any business programme
• How she discovered a formal process framework at Philips that nobody in the business knew existed, and what that moment clarified for her
• Why a technically correct process that does not serve the people who use it has already failed
• The gap between how organisations work and how they think they work, and why that gap is so persistent
• What good process ownership actually looks like and why it is rarer than most organisations realise
• Why clean, consistent, agreed-upon data is the foundation everything else depends on, and how hard it is to get there in practice
• How she built a chatbot in Copilot Studio, and what the transcripts of user conversations revealed about the real gaps in the process framework
• Where AI is heading in the process space and why organisations without a strong data foundation will struggle to benefit from it

Aafke brings a perspective that is both deeply practical and genuinely different from most people working in this field. If you lead process, transformation, IT or enterprise architecture and you are trying to build something that people will actually use, this episode is worth your time.

Host: Liam O'Neill, Managing Director at bpmd 

Guest: Aafke Post, Senior BPM Solution Manager at Philips

In this episode, Sam Lewis speaks with Hana Prooij, Business Process Management and Transformation Leader, formerly Head of Business Management Systems at Versuni, the global home appliances business behind some of the world's most recognised consumer brands.

Hana spent over four years at Versuni, leading the design and implementation of the business management system through one of the most demanding periods the organisation faced, a full carve-out from a major multinational group, combined with an end-to-end S/4HANA deployment. Before that, she built her expertise across medical devices and consumer goods at Philips, working at the intersection of quality, process and organisational change.

This is a grounded and honest conversation about what it actually takes to build a process and quality management system that the business genuinely uses.

They discuss:

• Why Hana did not set out to work in process management and how she ended up there through a consistent pull towards reducing friction between smart people who were misaligned
• What quality management actually means in a large organisation and why it should never be a separate system from the way the business works
• What it was like to build a management system from scratch during a carve-out, while simultaneously deploying a full S/4HANA stack and keeping the business running without interruption
• Why S/4HANA does not tolerate ambiguity and how that forces the process clarity most organisations have been avoiding
• How governance becomes a stabilising force rather than a bureaucracy when it is designed well and owned at the right level
• The challenge of managing global standardisation against local variation across markets that have always done things their own way
• Why process improvement initiatives lose momentum and what it takes to keep them connected to the business rather than becoming a documentation exercise
• Why AI will not replace process thinking but will expose every organisation that has not got its governance and ownership right

If you are responsible for process, quality, transformation or systems in a large organisation, this episode will resonate.

Host: Sam Lewis, Director at bpmd 

Guest: Hana Prooij, Business Process Management and Transformation Leader