One thing leads to another

Everywhere you look you'll find a different BPM methodology or framework competing for your attention. Every single one has an impressive name, flashy diagrams with arrows zooming left and right, pretty colors, and promises to solve all your BPM problems. How do you pick one to use in your organization? Glad you asked.

Simply put, you can use any methodology where each step is the natural consequence of the previous step, all culminating in your objective.

These are the basic requirements. If a methodology fulfills them and feels right for you, by all means use it. It'll get the job done. Here's why.

You should always have a reason - an objective - for starting a BPM project. You don't just wake up one fine morning feeling that it would be nice to "do some BPM". Every business initiative must have an objective, a reason to exist. If a methodology achieves the objective, then it works for you; if it does not achieve your objective, then it's useless. No big news here.

If one step leads naturally to the next one, you never have to wonder how to start a task. What you do next is a natural consequence of what you have just done. Work flows naturally. Here's a simple example: if you map the information that flows from one area of your organization to another, you'll wind up with a description of the value added by each step of a process; put all activities performed by one area together and you have job descriptions; check the job descriptions against the current capabilities of each team and you'll find capability gaps; and so on and so forth. The requirement that one step be the natural consequence of the previous one is not new either: it's the cornerstone of Descartes's Method.

If the steps are naturally chained, no effort is wasted. You don't produce work that looks nice but has no use. The output from one step is the input to the next step, and therefore necessary.

That's it. In a nutshell: you know you'll reach your objective, you won't get lost along the way, and you won't waste any effort. As a bonus, if you ever need to justify your choices, you already have your case laid out.

Of course, we haven't covered "details" like project management and stakeholder management. But if you need a framework to tell you about them, boy, are you in a lot of trouble.