(A Very Short) History of Process Management

This chapter is about business process management. For those who come with a different background, we provide the basic information that one needs to know how to approach business processes. We deliver a brief overview of the history of process management, using analogies and brief stories. This is not the way process management is presented in academic textbooks, but we assume that the readers of this chapter need to capture the “essence” of process management and not all the details of its development. We show how process management has evolved from solving resource problems in primitive societies through military science to what we propose as the next step in the evolution—human-centred process management.