Implementing Business Process Management in Your Organisation

Gaining business value from implementing business process management in the organisation becomes more and more relevant for businesses trying to sharpen their competitive edge.

However, it is often a lot harder than it sounds. I have seen a lot of companies succeed and a lot of companies fail or - at least - not benefiting as much as intended.

One of the difficulties is to determine where to start.

I have tried to outline a short roadmap for, seen from my experience, succeeding with implementing business process management.

 

The overall roadmap to follow is:

• Determine your level
• Commence with a project to get you to the next maturity level

  

Determine your level:

 
1) Beginner

• Create a projectplan. Your effort should be captured in a projectplan otherwise you have no backup to your project. Remember to plan your initiatives so that it fits to your organisation. From my experience a sure path to failures is to commence with more tasks and changes than the organisation can absorb.
• Define what BPMN notation and method to use
• Determine BPM objectives. Always specify what to achieve and how to measure it.
• Develop an implementation roadmap. Start with one department or business unit. Define KPIs and get started. Remember after project closure to gather lessens learned and implement these lessons learned when approaching the next business unit - only by doing this you tailor the implementation to fit your organisation

 Tips:

• Get top management support (here your project plan comes in handy)
• Build a Business Process competence center. The Business Process Competence Center needs trained superusers who can support the organisation in BPM questions and guide the direction in new projects incorporation BPM.
• Establish a Business Process Repository. Soon after your business units uses BPM a lot of processes and process designs will be created. Be sure to have a place to store and keep track on the processes.
• Make sure that the BPM initiative is NOT just a great idea within the IT department
• Make it easy to start using BPM. Try to determine the minimum effort to do inorder to still think we are doing BPM
•  Training - the more the better

 Main benefit at this stage:

• Guide projects in using BPM
• Improved isolated processes (isolated to one business unit)
• Better requirement specifications can be produced

 

2) Intermediate

 Tips:

• At this stage you should establish a business process governance  model. You need to manage process changes otherwise your process analysis becomes outdated and useless.  
• At this stage you need to establish a method for continuously process improvements.

 Main benefit at this stage:

 

• Improved cross-units business processes
• Competitive advantage can be designed from process design
• Programs can be defined to capitalise on BPM initiatives

  

3) Advanced

 Tips:

•  At this stage you should be able to center business development around business processes. Being true process oriented
• All your processes should be able to identify process owners who are responsible for monitoring and suggest process enhancements

 

 Main benefit at this stage:

 

• Business Processes can be used to make strategic decisions

 

Comments

[Alisa Addison]

Thanks for sharing the post. Business process management provide benefits to organizations in many different ways. Business process management helps organizations to reduce process time, improve regulatory compliance, improve efficiencies across organizational boundaries such as departments, branches and trading partners (including both supply chain and outsourcing) etc.