Ten tips for a successful BPM Implementation
Business Process Management Systems (BPMS) helps in providing an effective management of the enterprise’s business processes. Business Process Management (BPM) helps to streamline end-to-end processes to achieve cost savings, productivity gains and digital transformations to deliver exceptional customer services.
A BPM platform turns the enterprise business processes into tasks and workflows that can be automated to ease the flow of work. A good BPM platform should ease the collaboration of business and IT; support process optimisations and changes as and when the business demands; should by easy to use by its intended end users.
Implementing BPM projects can be quite challenging, however by following the right methodologies we can overcome most of the common challenges Enterprises face while implementing.
Below are ten tips for a successful BPM implementation. These are applicable irrespective of the size of the enterprises and the complexity of the processes.
1.Enterprise should create a BPM Core Group lead by a BPM champion and a group of business experts and IT experts. The BPM champion should possess good project management skills, having knowledge and clear understanding of both the business and the IT aspects; so he/she is able to articulate requirements in a way understandable to both sides.
2.A thorough and complete project discovery should be carried out. The team should clearly define the purpose of the BPM system, its objectives, the problems it is going to solve need to be clear on what it is. This should be translated into scopes and metrics, well-documented use case scenarios for use in development, Q&A, and troubleshooting.
3.Pick a project or process that has less impact or can be implemented in a short duration as a Pilot Project. Engage an Expert Consultants/Professional Services company for this Pilot Project to gain knowledge. Ensure proper knowledge transfer happens between the expert professionals and the Core Group. Once the first process is implemented, the enterprise can start to reduce/cut down the dependency of these experts and use them as and when needed, for some critical phases or challenges that arises in the future.
4.The BPM project should be supported with sound resources like technology, budget and time. Having adequate resources will ensure smooth implementation of the project.
5.Technical documentation should be of high quality and very specific to the steps taken for implementation. Implementation team should follow Good Documentation Practices. Every aspect of the project should be document, managed and controlled. Before starting the project, Team members should review, understand and sign off all the aspects of the project. Adequate budget should be allocated for documentation time.
6.Legacy system integrations should be handled with utmost care. It has to be investigated thoroughly time. The project should allocate investigation time and resources in the budget.
7.As with all projects, changes could arise during the implementation time. So a clear and well defined change management process should be implemented to handle modification to the original scope of the project. The process should include Cost/Benefit Analysis of the proposed changes. Changes to the time and resource allocations should be communicated clearly in the change plan so that the team is aware of the time and cost implications of the changes.
8.A well-defined Testing and Quality Assurance Plan should be incorporated, and proper time and resources should be included in the budget. The forms and workflows should be tested on every step before full roll out and integration happens.
9.The project’s requirements tend to increase over a project lifecycle, so the team should be vigilant to avoid “scope creep” by sticking on to the agreed scope while implementing. Any new requirements should be taken as new implementations to avoid clogging the agreed upon scope.
10.The teams involved in the implementation and the users should be given proper training to ensure all steps are followed. Short changing of training may have a disastrous effect so adequate budget should be allocated for training.