Home / Resources
Resources
Discover a Wealth of BPM Knowledge and Expertise at BPMInstitute.org!
Does Size Matter in BPM?
While controversy may continue to exist on whether size matters in areas as diverse as sex, bacteria and even blue whales – there is little doubt that size matters enormously when it comes to Business Process Management (BPM).
Tackling larger, cross functional processes is at the heart of success with BPM. This applies to both process improvement and process management. The potential size of the prize increases proportionally with improvement efforts targeted at larger, cross functional processes such as inquiry to order, order to delivery, request to receipt and idea to launch as these initiatives target critical non-value added activities across department boundaries.
The Benefit of Cultivating a Process Perspective
For Six Sigma, Lean, Reengineering and other process practitioners, it is in our nature to adopt what I label a process perspective. Whether consciously or subconsciously, we think in process terms. Every activity is a series of steps and we cannot help but introduce improvements with the passage of time. This pattern of behavior often transcends our work life… and enters into our personal life – sometimes to the chagrin of our family members.
How to Improve Customer Satisfaction with Government Services
“Government managers must learn from what is working in the private sector and apply these best practices to deliver services better, faster, and at lower cost.” – Barack Obama (upon releasing Executive Order 13571–Streamlining Service Delivery and Improving Customer Service)
The Role of Conflict Resolution in Implementing Process Change
Corinne was at first very pleased to have been asked to implement a process change. She was the one who first identified a problem in operations and who suggested a few modifications to the procedure. After raising the matter several times over many months with senior executives, she finally received the go-ahead to make the necessary changes.
As Corrinne approached her colleagues with the idea of changing the process, she was at first greeted with support. Her work environment was generally professional and courteous. But the more Corrinne engaged her coworkers about the idea of changing a process, the more subtle the pushback she received. Confused, Corrinne pressed on with figuring out a way to bring the different departments together to have a conversation about changing the process.
2015 Business Process Management Salary Report
Examining the profile, skills and compensation of BPM professionals around the world.
The 2015 BPM salary survey of BPM Professionals represents the first such survey by BPMInstitute.org and as such will form the baseline for future research in this area. The objective was to examine the profile, skills, and compensation of BPM professionals around the world. This research examines factors such as age, gender, education, job satisfaction, salary and bonus, certification, background, and other characteristics.
Respondents from USA, Canada, Europe, Asia, Middle East and Mexico provide a truly global flavor to the survey. On an international basis, nearly 70% of respondents were male and 30% were female and 57% of respondents were between the ages of 26 and 45. 61% of respondents were employed in organizations with annual revenues greater than $50 million per annum.
Includes:
Collaboration is Not a Four Letter Word
Collaboration and agility have always been noted as key benefits of business rule systems – collaborate and be agile! This has typically been discussed in terms of rule management – enabling business user control over an established rule base. But this often overlooks how we first get to a baseline rule base.
Ten Steps To Design A Powerful Business Architecture Practice
Most new business architecture teams jump right into defining business architecture models and frameworks. They spend incredibly little time defining the practice itself, what they want it to be, and how they are going to drive results. Yet this is where the challenge is. I rarely see an enterprise or business architecture team that can’t produce great architecture; but I see many that can’t create a successful practice.
Here are ten steps every business architecture team should take to ensure long-term success.
Process Ownership
The late, great Yogi Berra once said, “Baseball is 90% mental and the other half is physical.” We could say something similar – “process ownership is ninety percent leadership and the other half is management.”
Process ownership was arguably first described by Dr. Geary Rummler and Mr. Alan Brache , in their book ,Improving Performance: How to Manage the White Space on the Organization Chart in 1990. They described the role of process owners as one which intended to “oversee the cross-functional performance of a process.” Note that it did not attempt to “represent a second organizational structure” – instead it was described as a role that emphasized collaboration across organizational boundaries.
The Life Cycle of BPM Centers of Excellence – Part 2
In Part 1, I discussed how one BPM Center of Excellence (COE) started as a centralized organization and then after 2 years moved some of the BPM Practitioners into specific operational units and disbanded the centralized group. Part 2 continues with the life cycle of this use case in its second stage, ‘decentralization’ and then continues to a third stage.
Building the Modern Business Architecture, Decision by Decision
How your organization makes decisions drives the rest of the business environment – processes, events, data and the org-chart. A decision-centric view of Business Architecture is an essential organizing principle to deal with the data-driven, knowledge-based economy of the times.
First, clarify the ‘modern’ view on Business Architecture
There is no generally accepted definition or common understanding of business architecture because it is essentially a set of ‘views’, ‘perspectives’ or ‘lenses’ that consider how a business operates. Some views are common, like a process-based view – and others not as much, like an event-based view. The choice of business architecture views to be created and managed is generally dependent on current business priorities or concerns. And this practical approach to business architecture is certainly appropriate and prudent.
How Do I Know This Is The Right Process?
If you have been involved in very many BPM projects you have inevitably seen some which progressed through the entire development lifecycle with no major warning signs only to fail when put into production. They fail because the delivered system does not solve the problem which the business needs solved. They typically go through a complete lifecycle with verification at each stage. The Business writes its requirements. Business Analysts turn these into a functional requirements document, approved by the business. The development team creates then implements designs and finally QA tests the system and verifies that it satisfies the documented requirements. Yet in spite of all of this, the resulting system is not usable for its intended purpose.
Eliminating the Strategy Execution Gap with Business Process Management
In today’s corporate circles, strategic planning and its execution are commonly identified as two separate endeavors – one is built in the boardroom, the other completed at the ground floor of the business. Leaders routinely express frustration about what is termed the strategic execution gap – how the strategy they created is rarely executed smoothly or as it was intended. At the ground level where the strategy is to be deployed, employees complain that the strategy is so vague as to be unactionable or else it is altogether misdirected. The result of such failures is strategic stagnation and lost opportunities to gain market share. While a host of theories have been proposed as to how to minimize the strategy execution gap, I believe the best approach is to eliminate it all together – to make strategic planning and execution a concretely connected endeavor using a Business Process Management toolset.
Organizational Alignment
For decades, the question that has been observed to be top of mind for many executives is “How should we be organized to be able to achieve our strategic objectives?”
Perhaps that explains why leaders select reorganization or restructuring as the single most frequently practiced method of change management. To test this out, simply ask yourself how often your company has modified the organization chart in the top two to three levels during the past three years? If you answered less than three times, you are probably in the minority.
Transforming Business Through Strategic Process Management
A recent Gartner poll of their client base found that 80% of public and private sector companies say they are undertaking major business transformation due to:
- desire to shift to digital business
- desire to become more customer/constituent-centric
- perennial activities to keep pace with regulatory changes
More than 70% of these initiatives fail to deliver the desired outcome.
Process management practitioners can defy these odds by applying the latest process and change management thinking, techniques and technologies.
Register for this webcast to get a sneak preview of what you’ll learn at the Gartner Business Process Management Summit.
Data without Process is Meaningless!
When you hear the terms “big data” or “analytics” what comes to mind?
Do you think of technical experts pushing exabytes of data through an algorithm? Perhaps you think of marketing experts attempting to get answers about your company’s customers.
No matter which scenario you think of, it is important to recognize that big data and analytics are most useful when their associated processes are in place and observed.
In fact, big data and analytics are useless without process.
Why? Because quite simply, Data without process is meaningless!
The Life Cycle of BPM Centers of Excellence – Part 1
The number of companies that have a BPM Center of Excellence (COE) has not grown over the last eight years (It’s stable at about 34% according to a BPTrends survey.). In trying to guesstimate why that might be happening, I have been asking these questions:
1. When do companies start a COE and why?
2. What do COE employees do?
3. How do COE’s change and what causes these changes?
This article focuses on the last question, but responds to the first two in the specific examples.
Balanced Scorecard: A Model for Improving Government Performance
Untitled Document
“People and their managers are working so hard to be sure things are done right, that they hardly have time to decide if they are doing the right things.” – Stephen Covey
If you’ve ever tried to keep scorecards for a high school baseball team, which I did for a couple of years a long time ago, you learn after a while to keep track of what’s really important, ignoring the occasional slip while making sure the captured data points can be used to improve the team’s overall performance. Since then, I’ve learned that well-managed enterprises, including some in government, use a similar approach.
Why is it Process Improvement Initiatives Never Quite Pan Out as Advertised?
Farah looked over a new operations process. At first glance it seemed to address some long-standing concerns she and other colleagues had. Farah ensured that she had entered into a meaningful dialogue with all of the departments to ensure that everyone had their say and agreed with the changes. Perhaps more importantly, Farah made sure that the changes in the process respected product requirements, safety regulations and her company’s quality standards.
For the first week the process seemed to work very well. Farah was very pleased to see quality improvements. Then after about three weeks of implementing the new process, Farah started noticing some hitches and hiccups. Every now and then she gently prodded an employee to more closely adhere to the new process and for a short time the employee would do so. But it seemed to Farah that within a day or so many of the employees would mix the new and old processes and the results of this were less than ideal.
Extending your enterprise – SOA vs. APIs
The nature of APIs
In a digital economy with open business ecosystems, channel experiences and backend systems evolve at different speeds. Nevertheless, an engaging experience must combine the two. Being able to see health statistics is useful, for example, but being able to do something with those statistics in the context of your personal health is the differentiator. Thus, truly engaging apps must leverage data and functions across backend systems of record as well as smart systems of insight.
Business Process Automation RFI
Business process management (BPM) needs can vary widely, from top-down business transformation initiatives to smart process applications to enterprise resource planning, marketing, social and more. With this breadth and depth of reach, BPM – and BPA, business process automation – are more than a couple of buzzwords, they are absolutely mission critical.
To get the most out of a BPM or BPA solution, organizations need to select platforms that are quick to deploy, agile once in service and show measurable value over time.
There are plenty of offerings on the market today, but, how do you compare them when they offer such varying capabilities?
We’ve created a resource to help you efficiently compare BPM and BPA solutions by identifying the most important considerations.
