Business process management/Staging platform growth

Summary
Knowing that a typical BPM program follows three major stages makes planning for each stage easier. One organization used specific exit criteria for each stage to drive targeted behaviors in all of the people involved with the BPM program.

The Validate stage included work on identifying challenges to building a centralized, shared infrastructure. Not only did this work not immediately benefit the pilot solutions, but it actually took attention away from some of the deliverables for those projects. However, it was critical to determine how much assistance and investment would be needed to build out that part of the engine. Cost and time estimates could then be determined for the later stages.

Issues in getting IT integrations delivered for one of the pilot projects meant that particular solution had to reduce its scope. However, this allowed the program team to add a level of detail to the roadmap that allowed for financial analysis of the long-term costs as compared to anticipated benefits. Roadmapped requirements included an estimate from IT so that total costs could be forecasted for the future opportunity. This level of detail became part of the expected information for any opportunity vying for the centralized funds.

This particular scenario demonstrates the importance of recognizing that the initial solutions are not the endgame. Choosing pilot opportunities is a tricky balance between picking an insignificant problem to tackle and managing the expectations for a more complex issue. The problem that is too small will not be accepted as viable proof of BPM capabilities. A complex, meaningful solution cannot reasonably delivered in its entirety in the Validate timeframe, also leading to failure.

Each stage will have solution goals and program goals to deliver, and that mixture drives how investment should occur.