Best Practices to Ensure BPM Success
There are a great number of steps you can take to maximise the potential of your Business Process Management systems. This is a compiled list of some of the best practices to ensure successful implementation.
Keep Pushing Forward
The implementation of any new system can be difficult and cause barriers to form, but in a BPM it is imperative to keep pushing the project forward. Allowing it to be diverted, put on the back burner, or derailed completely, is a costly mistake. If the value of the project is not visible to stakeholders, it will not get the financial priority it requires, and until the project is fully up and running the great financial returns it has the potential to produce will not be seen.
There are many ways to ensure the project keeps its forward momentum. One good way is to educate stakeholders and sponsors. By helping them to understand the potential benefits and the value which other companies are achieving from their BPM, you can rally support.
This is fairly simple to accomplish, by encouraging team members to attend conferences or meetings and hear testimonies of the benefits other companies have enjoyed. Alternatively, you can have BPM experts or consultants brief supporters on their experiences.
The possibility to have an audit or assessment of needs performed. This will highlight where the existing systems are failing, and produce supporting data. Survey data can also validate this, showing how BPM is allowing the majority of companies to make significant progress.
Encourage Interdepartmental Cooperation
Getting the IT and finance departments working together should be the first step to implementing a BPM. Allowing IT full control of the project will often create an underutilised process which fails to meet the full needs of the business user, and may prove difficult to use. When the finance team take the lead, it will usually purchase a cost efficient package that may meet the majority of the company’s needs, but may have difficulty with performance and integration, and struggle with day to day accessing of data.
Therefore it is obvious that the cooperation between these two departments will ensure the best possible results. A team project incentivised towards the ultimate successful implementation could yield the best performance.
Utilise the Skills and Experiences of Experts
Trial and error when building a BPM system can be short sighted and can end up costing far more than getting expert help in the initial stages of the process. BPM is very complex and critical for strategic decisions. It is highly visible within the company and needs to be right the first time. You need to make sure that your requirements are realistic and select the product which is best suited, and is designed and implemented to the optimum.
The use of experienced BPM experts can be invaluable to keep the project on track and ensure success. Whether you have staff on site, or make use of a contractor or consultant, it is the skills and experiences which will increase the possibilities of successful integration.
