All About Requirements

Change Management for Business Processes

Allright, we've build a new system which fulfils the business requirements (thanks to our Business Process Analysis outputs: AS-IS processes and TO-BE processes and structured requirements capturing).

Everything is in place and all there is left to do is implement the system and train the users.

Really? one important part is missing: Change Management!

Although I think training is an important part of change management it seems to be far from enough, keep in mind that Business processes are about people. If people don't change the change management process will be unsuccessful.

A key element to a successfull change management process is to consider all the stakeholders as individuals that need to be informed, managed, trained and involved so that each one of them become ambassadeurs for the project.

If not, the overall project will face difficulties. Often, after implementing a new system and a new process, if change management has been unsuccessful, the users will avoid the new ways of doing things, invent workarounds and keep doing as they've always done.

 

Never underestimate the users ability to avoid using your brand new system.

An effective way to seeing change management is to consider the stakeholders as a group of individuals that need to go from the scepticism platform to the ambassador platform. Make a plan on how to do that. For example inform, train, and involve stakeholders. And most important communicate why changes are needed.

 

 

 

A strategy to successful change management could be:

1. Identify the stakeholders
2. Group the stakeholders by their interest in the project
3. Plan how to transfer individuals from the scepticism platform to the ambassador platform.
4. Keep track on the statistics. Measure if it's working - are more people transferring from the scepticism platform?

 

Prosci have developed a great change management model called ADKAR Model:

 

Awareness - Recognise the need for change.

Desire - Who needs to participate (stakeholders)

Knowledge - Who can guide the change management process?

Ability - Who will implement change behaviors?

Reinforcement - Who will lay the foundation for change now and in the future

Trends In Business Process Management - What Will We See In The Future?

In this post I will try to lift the curtains for what I believe will happen in the future in regards of business process management.

The outlooks are very interesting business process management will probably get a key role in the future businesses.

 

Everything will be social

In the future everything will be social is predicted by Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg and a lot of things indicated that this will will be correct. Social Business Process management has become a buzz word in the BPM industry.

Social Business Process Management is about to integrating the processes your customers and employees perform in the social networks like Facebook and Twitter etc. into your company process landscape.

For example imagine your helpdesk using Facebook as part of the helpdesk process. But it goes even further. In the future your company will probably monitor the social medias and react proactively on events even before the customer has approached you. In the future I might make a tweet on Twitter telling that my ##%&* internet connection is yet again not working. My internet supplier catches the tweet and contacts me with a proposed solution. Sounds unlikely to happen? the majority of business process management companies don't think so.

Why is this prediction important to you? It is bacause your customers use of social medias will increase and they will expect to see you around.

What does this mean to you? First, it means that you need to think Social business processes into your business processes and you need to start thinking about how to start doing so. Second, it means that you need to consider your business processes as both seen from the inside-out and from the outside-in.

In the future business process consultants will need to ask them selves: What will our customers think of the processes they meet when interacting with us?

 

The main driver for business processes will be agility

Toady's businesses are facing more and more complex business environments and more and more unstable business environments. In other words the needs for changing your business processes will increase significantly in the future, Therefore, in the future, you will need processes that are easy to adapt to changes and you will need technology enabling you to adapt to rapidly changing changes.

Furthermore, the changes to business processes will be made by the business instead of IT. The business will be able to model new business changes and implement those without help from IT. To do this you will need BPMS like technology and business analysis skills among the business employees.

When I started in IT the business employees needed help when having to format a floppy disk or change printer cartridges - today, business employees are making simple databases, websites etc. in the future they will be analysing, designing and implementing business process changes themselves.

To do this you will need to implement IT systems that are enabling easy changes to business processes and business rules. Prepare for these kinds of demands!!

 

More Complex Business Processes

In the future the increase of complex processes will continue. According to a Mckinsey survey in average 41% of the business processes are complex interactions, 44% are routine actions and
only 15% are sequential interactions. Furthermore, in a business with increased business complexity more and more work will be performed by knowledge workers solving unstructured complex activities.

BAM - Business Activity Monitoring

Business Process Monitoring is about monitoring business events and let these events trigger other business processes in other IT systems and other parts of your organisation. It is like automating
the monitoring of the business. For example when we are busy in department A we know department B will be busy in a moment - you should monitor this event and act upon it. Or, if you monitor that your customers demand changes you can shift business processes to react on that knowledge.

I think BAM as a concept will be a hot buzz word.

 

To summarise; in the future social medias will interact with your business processes. You competitive edge will depend on how easy you can adapt to changes. In the future you will need fewer business process consultants to analyse your current business processes and more business process consultants to help your organisation getting more Business Process Mature and being able to monitor and change business processes themselves.

 

 

New to UML - Check These Links to Get Started

Are you new to UML? if yes, then you might find these links usefull to get an idea what is inside the UML framework:

UML - the official OMG webpage about UML

IBM Ratonal - UML page

UML Tutorial from SparxSystems

 

 

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