Note: This blog post originally appeared at BPM-Shared Experiences and Learnings

Many of our client meetings and in flight project reviews have been focused on issues around governance. The topic of BPM governance is becoming every BPM program managers’ key need. Mostly, BPM governance is being discussed in various forums but seldom have we seen a tangible action plan or investments in BPM governance. Many clients are expressing their pains without being able to articulate the relevance to governance. In most scenarios, the problems surface after the first project has been rolled into production and we start spawning multiple BPM initiatives in parallel. The excitement of rolling the first project into production soon leads to frustration as we are unable to repeat what we did in the first project as well as scale the different constituents around SDLC, infrastructure, support, QA and staffing. (more…)

One of the key constituents of Business Process Management (BPM) initiative is Process Analysis. The exercise usually commences during pre-inception or inception phase of a project (considering RUP). The participants comprise of process analysts (some call them process engineers) working with subject matter experts (SMEs) and senior management executives. The goal (vastly simplified) is to discover and map the AS IS process and then based on certain criteria, design the TO BE process(es).

An advantage of being a process analyst is the concession to pose certain types of questions to the senior management of large organizations – on subjects that few will otherwise discuss.  Allow me to defend my case for asking these seemingly naive questions, by drawing parallel from some common fallacies discussed in economic theory. Through these questions, a process analyst avoids the errors an economist or scientist does, when trying to arrive at conclusions of an experiment. (more…)

Part One of this post discussed key steps taken in the inception phase of gathering requirements for a COTS package. Part two will discuss key steps taken in the second phase of the process; the implementation phase.

Implementation Phase

Requirement Strategy: As the name suggests, this phase will involve implementing the WCM package that we have already selected based on our inception phase effort. This particular phase can be broadly categorized into following activities. (more…)