Over the years the benefits of Business Process Management (BPM) projects have been lauded and berated depending on the results the organisation in question recorded for its project. While some companies achieved the goals they had planned for and found BPM met, and even exceeded, their expectations, others found that projects took longer to complete and cost more than what they were initially budgeted for. This failure to meet basic goals led to the eventual disenchantment for BPM among companies. The distinguishing factors between the implementation methods of the successful and failed projects will give us a better idea of the guidelines that should be followed to ensure a high rate of success in future BPM projects.
Process Driving Committee
An unbiased business-oriented governing body needs to be formed to overlook priorities, business agenda and establish the scope of the project. This governing body can include people from the IT department, business managers and high level executives. This body can act as a central repository for all BPM projects thereby forming a single point of reference for various lessons learnt through each project.
It helps to have executive sponsorship. The inclusion of hierarchical power into the governing body will ensure a clean path through various political obstacles that BPM implementation can face within an organization.
BPM projects not only aid business-IT alignment but also demand for it to a certain extent. Having the vision and guidance of a senior executive will help in understanding business requirements without which failure is more or less imminent. The eventual success of the project can be propagated through the entire organisation with the senior executive taking on the role of a process ambassador.
Identifying the First Step
Quick positive results will ensure increased popularity and interest levels in the BPM process. The key to achieving this lies in identifying the right projects at an initial stage where there aren’t a host of unknown factors to deal with. The project should also have a well defined business benefit that can be later used to ‘sell’ the BPM process to the rest of the organisation.
Ideally such projects would be in a nascent stage for easier integration of BPM along with the standard workflow. Since this is the company's first tryst with BPM it is advised to begin with a project with relatively lower complexity. This also helps the implementation and core teams to develop skills and expertise before working on critical projects.
Documentation of Forecasted Results
It is a good practice to develop a formal business case and document the expected results. This can be used as a guiding tool for all decisions there on. The business case will present a unified view of the requirements and goals and benefits of the new adopted approach. This document can also be used to indicate how the new approach aids the organisation and boosts important performance measures like market share, profits and Return on Investment (RoI). So the document becomes a key performance indicator (KPI).
Data pulled from enterprise systems like CRM, ERP and other transactional and legacy systems need to provide the data needed by this document to determine actual performance against plan. The key is to identify critical measurement points and not include all metrics possible so that perspective can be maintained. Otherwise, it can lead to confusion that puts the project in jeopardy.
Understanding the Role of BPM
The first challenge when it actually comes implementing BPM is to understand the role it will play in providing the benefits that have been laid out. One important part of this process is to find out from the end business user in the organization as to what she wants from such a system. Imparting a sense of ownership in the design process will ensure higher productivity as the end user gets to decide how to make her job easier. Understanding these requirements and then coupling that with the vision of the process driving committee is a substantial starting point indeed.
The best way forward is to design the process several times using complementary techniques to obtain varied perspectives and arrive at an optimised process. This prototype BPM suite will be the base for further breakthrough implementations as other advantages and exceptions are identified.
BPM may not always provide quantifiable results. For example, you will never be able to calculate customer satisfaction that results from using a BPM-enabled application. BPM is a journey to increase business performance without a definable destination. It needs to given time before employees/business end users truly understand its operation and identify new methods to improve performance and deliver on quality.