Sidebar: BPM Success Formula

Are the wheels coming off your BPM Project? Then you need alignment. By Yash Pandhi.

Change is never easy and never ending. As pursuers and purveyors of change, we in the BPM industry should acknowledge that the success of our theories and products has not been as consistent or as profitable as we predicted. Too many projects have failed, or have failed to deliver their expected ROI. Having arrived in the aftermath of stalled projects and contributed to their turnaround and eventual success, I wanted to share a few of the lessons we've learned. BPM does deliver phenomenal results when executed strategically.

From my consulting industry's selfish perspective, I'd love to tell you that big, complex enterprise-wide BPM implementations offer the greatest chance for success. I can't. An overly ambitious project scope or implementation schedule is the most frequent problem I see in stalled projects. Certainly, some of that excess resulted from senior managers aggressively responding to competitive pressures. Others, I came to learn, grew in size to justify IT expenditure.

Companies have grown around IT capability for decades now. Viewing IT as a tactical resource to be distributed as a shared service to business owners across the enterprise is common dogma. Troubled BPM projects have mistakenly followed this paradigm and conceptualized and designed process automation as IT project assignments. We've seen consultants focused on hardware and software, not on people and processes. This tactical approach can lead to large, lengthy implementations that are invasive and disruptive. Risks are everywhere. To avoid these mistakes and risks, maintain the discipline of your project plan and align your company to its business strategy.

As always, project planning begins with information collection. We meet with senior executives to discuss the business's strategy and understand its challenges and future direction. Next, we conduct workshops with key stakeholders and business owners across the business unit to learn existing process flow and IT infrastructure. Rather than suggesting the latest "hot tech", we ask about their major points of pain, and how IT can meet their objectives and mitigate their concerns. From the information gathered, we assemble a portfolio of investment opportunities that suggest potential ROI through BPM transformation or optimization.

Be disciplined now. Analyze these opportunities carefully and conservatively. For each opportunity, we estimate the investment necessary and the anticipated ROIs using almost worst case numbers in both cases. Business benefits are assessed against the costs of IT and business change. Think through these conclusions critically and factor in any risks.