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Is your company ready to apply the BPM discipline?  A BPM Readiness Assessment offers a company an objective and efficient means to assess its ability to change and adapt to a process performance orientation. Understanding a company’s “process maturity profile” enables it to design a BPM adoption program that addresses six critical success factors that accelerate the adoption of BPM and specifies a program for realizing its sustainable value:

• Linkage of process performance to business strategy
• Employee understanding of process (skills and roles)
• Utilizing BPM technology• Practicing process improvement methods
• Process-related attitudes and behaviors
• Implementing Process Governance (decision-making and oversight)

VALUE OF ASSESSMENT

“To more fully realize the benefits of behavioral insights and deliver better results at a lower cost for the American people, the Federal Government should design its policies and programs to reflect our best understanding of how people engage with, participate in, use, and respond to those policies and programs.” – President Obama

10 proven approaches for transitioning from a traditional business analyst role to an Agile business analyst role (Part 2 of 2) The first 5 steps to becoming an Agile Business analyst were outlined in part 1 of this article. Now, part 2 of this article provides you with five more tips for becoming a successful Agile Business Analyst.

Step 6: Be an Expert Communicator

Everything about the Agile business analyst role depends upon effective communication with business users, development team members, management, and executives to understand their needs and to act as a liaison across all parties. You should be equally comfortable speaking with stakeholders at both a big picture level and at a very detailed level, depending on what the situation requires.

In 2006 the Babson Process Management Research Center defined Strategic Alignment as the continual tight linkage of organizational priorities and enterprise processes, enabling achievement of business goals. Phrased differently this means linking strategy goals to operational goals and linking operational goals to process goals. This equates to defining a method for improving alignment among the organization’s performance measures, strategic plans, improvement projects, and budgets. It assumes that the organization employs a method for defining its business strategy such as a Balanced Scorecard (BSC). Using the BSC as an example one must first examine it to determine how BPM can be integrated into the BSC approach. BPM specifically focuses on improving the Internal Quadrant of the BSC. The Balanced Scorecard approach does the following:

10 proven approaches for transitioning from a traditional business analyst role to an Agile business analyst role (Part 1 of 2)

Making the switch from traditional software development approaches to Agile methods can be a challenge for any IT professional but it is especially challenging for business analysts. Although there are thousands of resources available to guide Agile teams, relatively few of them are written specifically to answer the Agile business analysts’ most common questions:

• What is my role on the Agile development team?
• What is the most effective way for me to work with Product Owners?
• How do I make a smooth transition from writing detailed requirements specifications to crafting succinct and powerful user stories?

And, most important, how do I get started?

Most process design methodologies start by modeling the As-Is processes before proceeding to define the To-Be processes. In our experience, many projects spend more time than is necessary modeling the As-Is, when they should be working towards the future. Time and resources spent modeling the As-Is delay the delivery of the final project, and should only be done to the extent that they add value. In this article, we will discuss the purpose of as-is modeling, common pitfalls which lead to excessive effort and concrete guidance on how to improve results with less effort and expense. While studying, current practices can be valuable, the current process must be flawed or you wouldn’t be replacing it. The last thing you want to do is replicate the flaws of the existing solution.

Why do As-Is Modeling

A question that forever nags at thinkers and practitioners of BPM is its relationship to strategy.  In a recent book entitled Questioning BPM?*, one of 15 questions explored in the book was “Is BPM a strategic tool?”  Eleven authors agree there is, or should be, a strong relationship.  

The most common viewpoint among them is that BPM is necessary to an organization’s ability to execute its strategies.  No matter what the strategy is or how it came into being, it simply sits on a shelf gathering dust unless there are actions taken to carry it out.  And as soon as you enter the realm of action, an organization’s business processes are essential in executing the strategic intent.  To carry out a corporate-wide strategy necessitates doing so through a company’s large-scale end-to-end processes, and that in turn requires recognizing, designing and managing those processes, which is the essence of BPM. 

Process improvement efforts have historically aimed at improving the quality, increasing the throughput, reducing the cost, or improving the predictability of a major process. Today though a considerable number of process thought leaders are pushing process improvement theories and practices into new areas – most prominently strategic planning. Processes represent the unique way an enterprise creates value for consumers. It follows that by adjusting an enterprise’s processes, products can be adjusted to deliver enhanced value for a consumer. By leveraging this direct relationship, an enterprise can define its strategic intentions in terms of its plans to adjust processes. This approach forges a solid link between strategic intentions and the eventual outputs.

Tell me if this sounds familiar…

We have a mission critical project coming up and after putting together the requirements document we were told that the 2 years the project was going to take to complete is too long. But wait! I heard that Agile delivers projects in a much faster timeframe. All we have to do is change our process to something called Scrum; then we will get what we want in 6 months instead of 2 years!

Let’s do it!

Slow down…before we go invest stock in sticky notes, blue painters tape and index cards, there are a few questions we should consider to see if we are ready to embark on our Agile journey.

1) Do we have anyone internal to our organization now who has decent experience with Agile?