Business Process Management (BPM) – InSights

I have worked with various organisations to implement BPM solutions at both Enterprise and Departmental levels. A common challenge that I often come across is that both Business and IT don’t always understand how to apply itterative development approaches to support a BPM implementation.

As practitioners, I find we tend to take these types of approaches for granted but customers often need some education, especially if they have not used anything but Waterfall. The most common issue I find with Waterfall is that it instills a mind set of “Big Bang” project/solution delivery i.e. ‘know it all the build it and finally test it all’.  

With greater pressure on both Buisness and IT to show value and returns quicker and more consistently, itterative approaches have demonstrated their value with much better ROI and a lower unsuccessful implementation risk ratio, especially if an organisation is new to BPM. 

Various itterative approaches exist and the more commonly known one in my experience is SCRUM, XP, Agile and RUP. To help educate novices what its all about I thought the following resources may be useful.

Ken Schwaber co-developed the Agile process, Scrum. He is a founder of the Agile Alliance and Scrum Alliance, and signatory to the Agile Manifesto. Ken has been a software developer for over thirty years. He is an active advocate and evangelist for Agile processes.

 Further Reading (oldies but goodies):

• Iterative development requires a different perspective
• Development Methodologies Compared
• NewMethodology

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