This is the first article in the Six Steps to Understanding Business Process Management series. If you’d like to receive the entire series as an eBook, please register to receive a free copy and we’ll email it to you as soon as it is completed.

This week, we’ll look at a problem that faces every organization planning to implement BPM: how to pick the right process for the initial application of BPM methods and tools. Regardless of whether you are just modeling the process for manual optimization, providing some automated routing to human participants, or fully automating the process, you want to start in the right place for the optimal impact.

The common wisdom in selecting your first BPM project is “start small”. However, those who recommend “start small” often mean “start with an irrelevant process so that no one will notice if it goes wrong”. That is not the way to start a successful enterprise BPM initiative: instead, you need to start with a BPM project where you have a good chance of success, but have your eye on the strategic BPM vision.

Unless your only goal for BPM implementation within your company is for non-line-of-business administrative processes, don’t pick one of those as your first process. It’s not that these processes can’t be improved – they probably can – but you can’t expect everyone in the company to become excited about the potential of BPM by showing them how you can make their expense reports process better. Selecting a low-value process as your initial process for implementation means that few people will care if you are successful: although the implementation is low risk, you’ve put your entire future BPM program at risk because you haven’t used the first project as an opportunity to prove potential value. Furthermore, if you do get the go-ahead for that second project, you might find that there’s not a lot of reusability of either methods or processes as you move from an administrative process to a line-of-business process.

Instead, your first process should be one that is important to the business in order to prove the benefits to the organization’s bottom line: a core business process that impacts how workers do their critical daily tasks. Selecting a core business process means that you need to manage risk carefully as part of your project planning:

• Limit the first production iteration to the minimum functionality that is useful, with as little customization as possible. In many cases, you will be replacing a manual process, so any amount of improved user experience and automation can show benefit. Keeping it simple allows you to move something into production in a short timeframe – 90 to 120 days – that will expose the users to BPM and its potential. In most cases, this will mean that work is distributed and received in the BPMS, but that there is little integration with other systems.
• Wherever possible and practical, provide maximum flexibility to the users in how they execute their work. If the BPMS includes ad hoc/dynamic process management functionality, allow the users access to this in order to capture emergent processes, or identify knowledge work areas where structured processes are not best suited.
• Begin with a core group of users, possibly in a single department, then expand outward in order to reduce handoffs between the BPMS and manual processes. Plan for the eventual goal of managing the end-to-end process, and aim for breadth (more of the process) before depth (more functionality at any given step) since the functionality can shift as the process broadens.
• Decide on the functions to include in later iterations based on feedback from the users after they have started using the system for their daily work, not on a set of requirements that were written before any of them had any hands-on experience with the BPMS.
• As the users reach an acceptable level of productivity, begin to implement the more technical integration functionality, with an eye towards reusability of these functions with other processes in the future.

This approach balances risk and benefits. By working with a core business process, interest in the benefits will be high across the organization and will drive adoption in other areas. By keeping the first production iteration simple yet flexible, and following it with frequent iterations based on direct user feedback, the risk of developing something that doesn’t benefit the users is minimized.

In a later article, we’ll discuss how to build on this initial BPM project to expand your BPM initiative across the enterprise. Picking the right first process to anchor your initiative, however, is critical to the future success of that expansion.

Co-Author: Steve Russell

Steve Russell is the SVP of Research and Development and CTO for Global 360 Inc., based in Dallas Texas. He has over 25 years of experience as a technologist developing enterprise process and document management software platforms. Steve has extensive experience with large, mission critical systems development and deployment within Fortune 2000 companies.

You can reach Steve at steve.russell@global360.com.

Global 360 is an independent provider of process and document management solutions. For more than 20 years Global 360 has helped more than 2,000 customers in 70 countries reduce paper, automate processes, and empower individuals to deliver increased productivity, service levels, and business performance while reducing operational costs.

A note from Mark Miller, Founder and Editor, EndUserSharePoint

When Sandy first sent this to me, I was hesitant to publish it. Then, as I got deeper into the content, I realized this information is valuable in all realms of project management, not just BPM.  This is almost a step-by-step guide on how to have a sucessful SharePoint rollout.

I’m very excited about publishing this series. We’re going to offer the set as a downloadable eBook once it is finished. Register to receive a free copy as soon as the series is completed.. — Mark

This is the first in a series of articles on business process management.

Business process management (BPM) is all about optimizing the performance of end-to-end business processes, including both the methodologies of process improvement, and the tools used to aid those methods. For example, methodologies include the ways in which you gather information about processes, or “process discovery”, as well as process optimization methods; tools includes business process analysis (BPA) tools for process discovery, modeling and analysis, and BPM suites (BPMS) for process automation.

BPM isn’t a new concept, but it continues to evolve rapidly and deliver new benefits. In the recent past, we’ve seen the rise of social BPM, agile BPM and case management technologies; all which have dramatically changed the landscape for the uses of BPM. We’ve also seen changes in how businesses use BPM methods and tools, with greater collaboration and a higher degree of control by the business over their working environment.

The six articles to follow will range across a variety of topics, covering both business and technology areas.

1. The Goldilocks Principle: Picking the Right First Process

We’ll start with a problem that faces every organization planning to implement BPM: how to pick the right process for the initial application of BPM methods and tools. Regardless of whether you are just modeling the process for manual optimization, providing some automated routing to human participants, or fully automating the process, you want to start in the right place for the optimal impact.

In this article, we’ll cover:

• How to select a process that is neither too big to be manageable, nor too small to be relevant
• Deciding between a line of business process and a non-critical administrative process
• Expected initial benefits and return on investment (ROI) considerations

2. Gaining Business Buy-In For Project Success

Once a process is selected, it’s critical to obtain the support of the business areas that will be impacted by changes to the process. They understand the current state of the process, and likely have a lot of great ideas about how it could be improved. It’s not enough to just gather their requirements and ship them off to development; there needs to be ongoing collaboration between business and IT as the BPM project progresses.

This article will cover:

• The necessity of a good discovery methodology and approach
• Using collaborative process discovery to capture “tribal knowledge” from a wide variety of stakeholders
• How to maintain ongoing business participation in design, prototyping and implementation so that they don’t lose interest
• Putting production process configuration in the hands of the business for immediate runtime control

3. Ensuring User Adoption

The quality and relevance of the BPM solution is important to user adoption: if the solution doesn’t do what the business needs it to do, or is difficult to use, they’ll find a way of working around it. Improving user efficiency is one of the key contributors to ROI, but don’t overlook the user experience factors.

This article will cover:

• Building a user-centric, user-configurable solution that suits the users’ needs
• Integrating with other technologies to reduce manual re-entering of information and “swivel chair integration”
• Enrolling users in the design-process to ensure that the solution best meets their needs while building user buy-in

4. The Nature Of Work: Structured Versus Unstructured

As we automate more of the routine tasks in any business, the work remaining tends to be knowledge work: activities where the worker needs to use their experience and skills to determine what to do next, rather than following a pre-defined path through a process. Managing this sort of unstructured work is a challenge for traditional BPMS, which are focused on executing a fixed, pre-determined process map; instead, much of this work is done manually in an ad hoc fashion. Agile BPM and case management have emerged as technologies to help manage knowledge work, providing maximum flexibility while still maintaining integrity of the content and processes involved.

In this article, we’ll look at:

• Defining structured and unstructured work
• Mixing work styles within the same business process
• Addressing the unique challenges of unstructured work

5. Measuring Success

Once a BPM solution is in place, you must be able to show the benefits in order to justify further roll-outs of BPM within your organization. Measuring your success requires some up-front work – such as baselining your current state process for later comparison – as well as calculating the hard benefits achieved through reduced costs or increased revenues. However, it’s also necessary to look at soft and disruptive benefits: although much harder to measure or even anticipate, they can provide much greater benefits in the long run.

In this article:

• Measuring the as-is state as a baseline for process improvements
• Doing a post-implementation review
• Calculating hard ROI
• Estimating soft benefits
• Considering disruptive benefits, e.g., new ability to outsource portions of process

6. Moving To Wider Adoption Across The Organization

Getting your first BPM project up and running is a big accomplishment, but you can’t stop there: you need to look at ways to implement BPM across your organization for greater benefit. Part of this will involve generalizing what you’ve done on the first project so that it can be more easily reused, possibly through the establishment of a BPM center of excellence; however, you’ll also need the right people to spread the word.

In this last article:

• Finding the internal evangelists
• Generalizing the benefits/ROI
• Exploiting reusable assets and infrastructure

In the spirit of collaboration, we’d like to hear your ideas for what should be in this series, and we’ll adjust the topics to include those that will appeal to the wider audience.

Co-Author: Steve Russell

Steve Russell is the SVP of Research and Development and CTO for Global 360 Inc., based in Dallas Texas. He has over 25 years of experience as a technologist developing enterprise process and document management software platforms. Steve has extensive experience with large, mission critical systems development and deployment within Fortune 2000 companies.

You can reach Steve at steve.russell@global360.com.

Global 360 is an independent provider of process and document management solutions. For more than 20 years Global 360 has helped more than 2,000 customers in 70 countries reduce paper, automate processes, and empower individuals to deliver increased productivity, service levels, and business performance while reducing operational costs.