Why would an organization undertake a Business Process Management (BPM) initiative?  One reason could be to improve the business, while another might be to make improvements to the financials; however, if care is not given, things can go wrong. Avoid the risk of a BPM deployment that has recurring expenses where there is no measurable performance gain at the enterprise level.

The book, Guide to the Business Process Management Common Body of Knowledge, lists and discusses the following aspects of BPM:

• Process modeling
• Process analysis
• Process design
• Process performance management
• Process transformation

The book also includes a discussion about Enterprise Process Management (EPM) and Business Process Management Technologies.

What is needed is an approach that collectively integrates all the above BPM-deployment components, while at the same time avoiding the risk of wasting resources; however, often BPM deployments fall short of achieving this objective.

In order to ensure success, a BPM deployment needs to:

• Involve a top down business view.
• Contain a strategic alignment.
• Address enterprise business-process constraints.
• Utilize performance measures and analytics to understand where focus should be given so that the enterprise as a whole benefits.
• Defer using BPM Suite software until processes that can gain much from automation have been identified and redesigned, when appropriate, for an effective implementation.

These issues should be addressed up front before beginning a BPM deployment.

Consider also how in a BPM deployment, we might like to:

• Simplify and standardize the execution of business workflows, which are managed by people.
• Manage processes and make adjustments, when appropriate, to keep the processes optimized.
• Monitor performance with automatic updates from databases.
• Integrate structurally with an organization’s EPM performance measurement system.

If these objectives are not collectively achieved, then the BPM deployment may have difficulties.

In an upcoming webinar “BPM Looks Great: What Could Go Wrong?“, we will be elaborate more on these BPM program issues and initiate discussion about a system that overcomes the typical short comings of many BPM deployments.

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