Business process management/An engine structured for success

Summary
One particular Leadership tier sufficiently constrained the program operations such that projects would either deliver benefit or be terminated after only limited investment. How were they able to do this?


 * 1) The Executive Sponsor required that each project had a single process owner. In the model outlined in this Charter, this process owner served as the Business Owner.  They were empowered by the Leadership tier to make all decisions for the project, even though those decisions might span multiple functional areas.
 * 2) The projects had a fixed duration and a fixed team size. That meant that the scope had to be sufficiently managed across releases.  A specific release had to deliver a certain benefit back to the organization.  If it did then further investment would be considered for the remainder of the project roadmap.  If it did not then it was terminated early.  Certainly there were potential losses from failed projects, but these losses were minimized compared to multi-year projects that fail after millions of investment.
 * 3) The Demand Management method sometimes selected non-software projects. Every opportunity was weighed not only on the benefits it would bring to the organization but also by the cost of the project.  Some operational changes were aggregated into process improvement projects, delivered benefit for the business, and represented success for the program.