BPM Best Practice « Business Process Management (BPM)

How to ‘SCRUM’ – Approaches to Itterative BPM Agility July 12, 2009

Posted by Ian Louw in BPM Best Practice, Resources, Tutorial.
Tags: Agile, BPM Best Practice, BPM Development, BPM Resources, BPM ROI, How To, RUP, SCRUM, XP
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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):

How Business Leaders can Help IT Deliver ‘Real Value’ to the Business September 27, 2008

Posted by Ian Louw in Analysis & Research, BPM, BPM Articles, Business Process Management, Business Strategy, IT Strategy, Workflow.
Tags: BPM Best Practice, Operational Cost Reduction, BPM, Process Automation, Workflow, BPMS, Business Performance Management
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Foreword: I have written various posts in the past that discuss the typical problems that can be solved for the business by using a BPMS and process automation. I thought it was about time to consider the challenges IT have to manage when not using a process centric approach.

Organisations need to change their focus from being functionally driven to being process driven to be really successful in their adoption of BPM. This is not always as hard as it first sounds.

Most of the organisational and technical building blocks almost surely already exist within the organisation in some form or other. The challenge is to align them together in a consistent and continuous way i.e. using business processes, a BPMS and ensuring that cultural and human behavioural changes are well managed.

Paraphrasing Gartner, the typical characteristics of functional driven organisations include the following:

Organisational roles and responsibilities are functionaly aligned
Managers have visibility that is limited to their functional areas
Business is very dependant on IT to schedule application changes
Functional tasks and process hand offs are implied causing fragmentation
Costs are managed by functional area
Risk management is done using gut feel and relies greatly on experience with limited numeric evidenece due to lack of integrated and trusted reporting information

The organisational characteristics for a process centric organisation typically include:

Roles and responsibilities are aligned to process acitivities
Management visibility is based on an end to end business process understanding
Business is less dependant on IT for small changes to business rules and process tasks
Functional tasks and process hand offs are explicit, therefore reducing the occuraence if inefficient and broken processes
Risk management is done using operational metrics and simulation ensusing a proactive approach rather than reactive

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Making the Complex Simple – How best to streamline and automate business processes September 1, 2008

Posted by Ian Louw in BPM Articles, BPM Best Practice, Business Process Management, Business Strategy, IT Strategy.
Tags: BI, BPM Best Practice, Collaboration, Dynamic Process Management, IT Governance, Process Automation, Process Collaboration
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I work with various organisations and in my experience, they are typically in various states of maturity in terms of their understanding and adoption of BPM. The one thing I do tend to find is that they all seem to share common problems.

In this post I have listed some of the ones that I come across and also explain an approach that can be adopted to help move them from a reactive business to one that is more proactive and dynamic in making better decisions.

Organisations are inherently composite and complex ecosystems in which business processes are pervasive. This complexity generally manifests itself in various ways and can include the following:

Management and employees have difficulty in making correct decisions due to not having accurate and timely information.
Information is of devoid of business context (not seen in as part of a business process) and therefore may lead inconsistent decisions.
Planning is often difficult due to ‘broken’ processes, poor working practices and inconsistent information.
IT systems that support the various business processes act as inhibiters rather than enablers as they are typically designed deployed and managed as information islands or stove pipes.
Enforcing business rules, policies and procedures is an arduous task due to poor process visibility, accurate real time information and no integrated or consistent auditing.

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