At a recent engagement, I encountered several departments that asked me to help write their departmental policy on a particular subject. When I inquired as to the governance process for changing existing company policy, they looked at me blankly and said no, I didn’t understand – they needed a new policy, just for their department. After a little probing into the governance of their company policy (this enterprise had a single policy covering everything), and some further discussion, we ultimately settled on writing a new procedure and developing accompanying forms and workflows. I ended up helping this department rewrite their documents into the appropriate format, and working with them to better understand the hierarchy.

This got me to reflecting on how many times in my career I’ve heard confusion about policies, standards, procedures, and guidelines. Reasonable people will differ in their definitions, but here’s how I understand them to work best.

Is your improvement project failing? Depending upon which study you reference, roughly two thirds of projects fail to produce their promised outcomes. Such failures result in a tremendous waste of resources and even more unfortunately – lost opportunities to seize advantage over competitors. Looking deeper, we often find failure is almost preordained. Projects are pushed out of the chute armed with confusing directives and inadequate resources. Once a team is assigned to address an opportunity, invariably the first task is to translate leadership intentions into a realistic deliverable. Such translations can be overly challenging to make. In the name of expediency, project teams are routinely asked to run out on the ice before strapping on their ice cleats. Without stable footing, epitomized by a well-defined mission and clear field instructions, they lack the foundational necessities to hit the ground running.

When looking at BPM there appears to be two distinct worlds Pegasystems Inc. and one that is more standards-driven that includes vendors, such as, IBM, Appian, etc.  BPM using Pegasystems’ PRPC versus BPM proscribed by this latter set of vendors represent two very different philosophies on how to implement BPM systems. However, I would say that the one thing that all vendors appear to agree with is that an enterprise-grade BPMS is a truly disruptive technology, since its tactical mission is usually to:

• Extend the functionality of existing apps, 
• Enable disintermediation between applications, 
• Tightly-integrate processing gaps among disparate applications
• Provide opportunistic business application behavior that takes advantage of new technologies and techniques in order to deliver superior functionality

There are many ways to ‘do’ business process improvement projects. It’s best if the company has a methodology from BPM, Lean, Six Sigma, Reengineering or some other methodology. Here’s the one I use, starting with selecting the project and ending with monitoring and sustaining the project; ‘doing’ the process improvement project means completing the section in the middle from Chartering and Staffing to Implementation Plan.

Companies use a number of methods to conduct the BPM project from using a Six Sigma Black Belt as an expert, to having a Business Analyst do interviews with subject matter experts and developing the as is model and to be map, to using different half day workshops for different phases of the process with the appropriate stakeholders. The one I highly recommend and have used with over 100 different processes is a team-based method.