First steps towards implementing a business process management
Building or redesigning or improving business processes is an exciting but challenging task in any organization. For this reason, it is important to check the feasibility of Business Process Management BPM and how to implement it. You could realize, for example, that you must run a pilot project instead of a complete reengineering program. Or even more critical: maybe it is not the right time to implement BPM yet!
For this purpose you may go through a “feasibility phase” that will support on analyzing the current situation and measuring the resources needed for running BPM. We can identify four main steps towards this:
Run a strategic workshop: a business process oriented organization will be run based on its strategy. In this task you may analyze the company’s vision/mission, strategy and goals, business units, customer needs, competitors, core competencies, etc. The main goal is to make sure that you have the necessary information about your company’s strategy (or actually build the strategic plan, if needed!).
Analyze the current situation: now you start analyzing the strategic plan based on the information provided. You may assess the organization, as well as run a benchmarking (compare your business units with best case practices in the market) and analyze your stakeholders.
Contextualize the BPM project: now you take the important decision of accept or reject the implementation of a BPM project. If positive, you will define specific goals and how would you plan to achieve them (in other words: you plan the BPM project). A goal portfolio as in the image below can help you define the project’s goals:
Source: Graphic made by the author
Training workshop: congratulations! The management accepted the project and informed the employees about its roll-out. As a next measure, you may organize a workshop to the employees in order to provide them with basic useful information about BPM and how could they support this project. In this workshop you may also define a timeline for stablishing the main tasks during the implementation phase. Now the feasibility phase is over and you can start implementing the BPM life cycle (http://pieroponce.com/2014/05/25/process-management-life-cycle).
Recommendation
Just a last recommendation: the implementation of BPM will lead to many structural and cultural changes in your organization. Thus, it is important to involve the management since the very beginning in supporting the feasibility and stablishing goals for ensuring a successful BPM roll-out.
* Based on the book from Schmelzer/Sesselmann “Business process management in the praxis”, year 2013, pages 551-556, in German
