What is Business Process Management?

Business Process Management (BPM) can best be described as the identification of routine human and system tasks and streamlining of the associated information flow through a series of processes. Put simply, it's getting business done more efficiently.

BPM is all about mapping, modelling and processing information in a coherent and standardised manner to ensure consistent business processes whilst minimising error and unnecessary duplication of effort.

A well executed BPM strategy can provide: Reduced costs Improved productivity Better governance Greater agility Increased compliance Reduced risk

A badly executed BPM strategy will provide: Employee disharmony Bureaucracy Functionally siloed and linear business processes Increased risk Lower productivity

WindowLogic understand the impact of change that a BPM program can bring to an organisation. More than any other application development project within your organisation there is a real need to have IT and the Business aligned. Assuming that you can make that happen you then have to concentrate on the end users who will be most affected by these changes. As you can see the challenges are huge! 

What can WindowLogic Provide?

WindowLogic understands the key success factors necessary for implementing a BPM Program of Work. 

There are a few things that you need to get in order before you start:

Align IT and the Business – this can’t be an IT led initiative to find a use for the new toys that they want to play with nor can it be driven solely by the business ending up in a departmental solution that is then stranded when it comes to ongoing maintenance and support or worse, counter-productive to the technical architecture of the organisation.

Baseline – understand what the costs are of the targeted processes before you start fixing them. This initiative will cost money and it is crucial that you capture all tangible costs and benefits associated with it. If the benefits don’t outweigh the costs at a tangible level then at least you understand the costs of addressing some of the intangible benefits. Agree the measurement techniques.

High Profile Stakeholder – a BPM strategy that is scoped with all critical business processes within the organisation needs a strong Executive voice from the get go.  Invariably projects get delayed because critical business process participants cannot be freed up to provide input and feedback which is absolutely fundamental to the success.  A Senior Executive will be able to make that happen.

Now that you have embarked on a BPM Program there are a few more things to consider:

Tool Selection – whilst you need to select a tool set that will achieve your functional and technical requirements also examine:

• Financial and product viability over the next five years. The ECM market has experienced significant consolidation and acquisition in the last five years and some tools have disappeared or converged.

• Local support. Based where the work is going to be performed.

• Cultural fit of the vendor organisation. Determine what the behaviour of the vendor will be “Post-Purchase Order”. Will you get access to product engineering? What are the version lifecycles?

Process Selection – it is important to select an initial process that will galvanise the organisation behind the Program. The ideal process needs to be high profile and positive (usually revenue side) that is fairly straightforward (minimal hand off points to other departments/systems or external organisations) but with almost immediate and obvious benefits.

Team Selection – WindowLogic always requires a blended team. Having an external organisation solely responsible for the delivery of this system will not give the organisation sufficient buy-in at the operational level, lead to support transition issues and risk system integrity and governance degradation when the project is finished.

Now that the Program is in full swing do the following:

Governance – this should largely be driven by the business and they should adopt an accountability framework to ensure that the changes made to the system subsequent to the initial design are made using the same level of rigour and measures.

Communication – as a key stakeholder if you think you have communicated enough then change your delivery method. People get inured by email so change it up. Nothing is more effective than face to face so get out there with the message but make sure you phrase it with WIIFM (What’s In It For Me) top of mind.

Scope Gallop– do not over reach.  It may be tempting to change the world but process change requires time for an organisation to digest, refine and manage. This is a journey not the destination. Your processes can change as you adapt to market conditions and so should your supporting systems, however, change can quickly become unstructured chaos so keep listening to the users at the coalface. Remember at the end of the day it usually comes down to them to make this work.

How Do WindowLogic Do It?

WindowLogic bring the full project team to the table.  Our project managers, business analysts, technical specialists (or a blended team with the vendor) and trainers can deliver the whole gamut. We can also support it past go-live. We are accustomed to working with multiple vendors, service providers and client staff to deliver a cohesive project team focussed on delivering to the outcomes required.