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Four tips to get the most from your BPM investment

By Marilyn de Villiers
Johannesburg, 27 Sept 2017

Most of the costs associated with a BPM project lie in the acquisition and implementation of BPM software. Right?

Wrong.

According to the co-authors of "Maximizing Return on your BPM investment", Bruce Silver of BPM training and certification provider, BPMessentials, and Katharina Clauberg of Signavio, a developer of Web-based collaborative BPM software, in most BPM projects, the real cost is not the tools and technology, but time.

They point out that in any BPM project, hours are spent documenting the As-Is process, analysing it for improvement, redesigning an improved To-Be process, and generating business requirements for IT. Add to that the time spent on the interviews and workshops, analysis, and communication to management, and the time spent on even a relatively straight-forward BPM project can run into hundreds of man-hours.

Businesses that believe they can save costs by using paper-based flowcharts are fooling themselves. The authors also maintain that using a proprietary diagramming notation to capture and maintain the process logic will also drive up costs.

Business Process Model and Notation (BPMN) is the standard graphical language representation for specifying business processes in a business process model widely regarded as a basic requirement for any BPM undertaking. However, if it is used incorrectly, it will not help to keep costs in check.

Even those that use BPMN correctly, but whose process logic is not clear from the printed diagram, will also drive up the amount of time and money required to complete the BPM project.

"For your BPM efforts to succeed, it is vital to retain the value of all that work in a form that communicates clearly to the whole project team. In fact, your goal should be modelling artefacts that can be referenced and reused by other project teams as well, both now and in the future," the authors say.

However, they warn against just buying a modelling tool and a process automation suite and assuming "it all happens by magic". For BPM to succeed, you need the right tools and a well-prepared project team. It all starts with proper training and clear understand of the BPMN "language".

This should include:

  1. Training of the whole BPM team together, ensuring that all team members adopt the same approach, methods, and conventions. This is as valuable as having them all use the same tools.
  2. Team members being well-training in BPMN, with every member of the team able to understand the meaning of BPMN diagrams.
  3. The ability of all team members that need to create process models to do so in diagrams that are not only correct according to the spec but that communicate the process logic clearly.
  4. Choosing the right tools. Both the BPMN modelling language and the BPM project methodology are tool-independent, but choosing the right BPM tool can make a huge difference in the effectiveness of BPM's efforts. Here is what to look for in a BPM tool:

* Professional BPM software;
* A collaborative team workspace;
* Designed with business users in mind;
* Easy to set up and use;
* Extensive model validation built-in; and
* Model interchange support.

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