The Process – Keep Your Eye On the Ball (Part 2 of 3)

The lynchpin for a successful BPM implementation is continued focus on the business process. Many times this simple, but key point is forgotten and results in companies taking their eye off the ball. In my first blog, I discussed the importance of understanding your current process. The current state is important as you need to know where you are today before you know where you want to go in the future. After identifying your current state you should transition to defining your future state. In this blog, I will discuss the critical aspects associated with defining your optional future state.

To significantly change and improve your company’s operations much emphasis needs to be placed on future state process definition. As future processes and change at most companies is difficult you should leverage a candidate to lead this effort who is well respected internally and someone who has the authority to make change happen. This individual should understand the current state, have strong knowledge of the big picture and future opportunities, plus be able to champion and sell this vision to all organizations involved.

Once you have your leader identified the team should leverage the results from the current state analysis to pinpoint what works well, what doesn’t, and where you want to be in the future. This analysis should allow you to build upon your competitive advantages while improving your weaknesses. In defining your optimal future state its best to utilize JAD type sessions to develop your future state over time. During these sessions you can collaborate with end users, customers, IT, executives, etc. to ensure everyone is on board and has the opportunity to provide input and gain buy-in. Obtaining feedback from all related parties you can ensure you are developing a long term solution that can be executed by the business, supported by IT, appreciated by the customer, and aligned with the higher level executive strategy. It’s also during this stage when processes should be modeled, simulated, and validated to ensure they deliver the expected results.

When defining your future state processes this should be viewed as a journey and not a quick fix. In many cases, to develop a true long term operational roadmap this should be viewed as a 2-3 year plan. This effort should be supported by executives across the enterprise as a long term solution and one that may take several months to see significant results. To help expedite delivery of visible impacts the long term roadmap should be broken down into shorter phases. Breaking down into phase plus leveraging automation technology will help deliver measurable results faster thus generating much needed momentum.

Dare to be different and think outside the box when creating the future operational vision of your company. Don’t be afraid to challenge traditional lines of thinking and the mindset of "its always be done this way". Innovative processes and the creative use of technology can lead to new competitive advantages and increased market share. Leverage new technology such as BPM to automate manual processes, integrate disparate systems, and enhance existing operational visibility and knowledge of your customer base to leapfrog your competition. Defining your processes in advance as part of a long term strategy will allow your company to be much more nimble and have the ability to quick adapt to changing market requirements.

Continued emphasis on the business process will be a tremendous asset as you develop and build your future operational vision. When implementing new ways of executing business in conjunction with new technology such as BPM it’s critical to keep you eye on the ball as the business process is the most critical component.