Reality Check » Process Intelligence

Do You Consider Yourself a Enterprise BPM Intellect?

Joerg Klueckmann — Sat, 03 Nov 2012 12:20:04 +0000

With years of enterprise software experience, my fellow colleagues and I traveled the world talking to customers, analysts, and thought leaders about their challenges realizing the true potential of Enterprise BPM initiatives. Through these many conversions, we learned different implementation scenarios, cultural best practices, and project pitfalls which all became helpful information when writing the ‘Intelligent Guide to Enterprise BPM’. (free online download available) The book was designed to be a summary of what we learned from customers, partners, and analysts about the potential entry points to a process-driven organization. The potential starting points include:

Business Process Analysis (BPA) – From corporate strategy to process design
Enterprise Architecture (EA) Management – From IT planning to IT landscape monitoring
Business Process Management (BPM) – From process design to automation
Process Intelligence (PI) :From automation to performance measurement
Governance, Risk & Compliance Management (GRC) –From documenting compliance controls to managing risks and compliance

We found that by sharing thoughts, experiences, questions and opinions, organizations were able to get their processes ‘out of the box’ and improve them enterprise wide. Let’s collaborate on the next chapters of the Intelligent Guide to Enterprise BPM, start by sharing your BPM best practices here.

The post Do You Consider Yourself a Enterprise BPM Intellect? appeared first on Reality Check.

The Forgotten Principles of Process Intelligence

Joerg Klueckmann — Tue, 13 Nov 2012 18:24:33 +0000

When you look at the successful technology projects and initiatives you have been involved with, can you identify the common threads? Innovations, vision, strategy, metrics, have all proven their way onto the map. But what about the people and processes involved on the road to success? So many times, these important elements are overlooked. This is why I found it important to summarize these three Process Intelligence best practices to help you down a smoother implementation path.

Identify Your Allies

I love technology and I would guess many of you do too. Technology allows us to do things faster, more conveniently and more transparently. With the hope in improving our organizational performance but technology is just one pillar for improving business performance. Let’s not forget the people and the processes.

Involving the right people early and often in your process intelligence initiative will help provide better transparency. It is true transparency can be seen as a scary thing but involving the people who have the most to gain and the most to lose will limit those fears. Don’t limit yourself to organizational domains. Involve the stakeholders to jointly define the Key Performance Indicators (KPI’s) so it’s clear what processes will be measured. Be sure to align with IT to understand where the data’s coming from, and bring both business and IT together to ensure you’re all working towards a common goal.

Know Your Course

How do you measure what you don’t know? It’s like a doctor recommending a treatment before you have a diagnosis. Start by measuring the “as-is” state, watch how your processes behave over time, identify the weaknesses and then think about a solution. (don’t go at it alone) When you’ve taken the steps and gathered process KPIs over time, you can validate your next move and make a strong case for future investment.

Commit to a Strategy

I can’t talk about the importance of KPIs enough but I think I missed one important point. It’s critical to map your KPI’s and your process performance to your corporate strategy. It shouldn’t be too difficult since operational processes, support the tactical objectives and strategic goals defined in your corporate strategy. Right?

Don’t feel bad if you can’t make the connection quite yet, what might seem easy in theory, is quite difficult in practice. Not many organizations have been successful ensuring their corporate strategy directly impacts their process performance KPI’s. Which is what makes process intelligence so important, not to mention it’s a management’s dream.

Share your steps to Process Intelligence, we’re all looking for a smoother road to success.

The post The Forgotten Principles of Process Intelligence appeared first on Reality Check.

Don’t be Part of the 24% Failure Rate

Joerg Klueckmann — Thu, 08 Nov 2012 02:34:35 +0000

Yes it’s true, everyone fails from time to time but do IT projects fail more than the average? According to the Standish Group, a technology research group and consultancy, who publishes the ‘Chaos Report’ covering IT project failure rates, reported in 2009 24% of all IT projects ‘failed’. 44% of projects were considered ‘challenged’, making only 32% of projects ‘successful’. Why is that? It’s not because the technology isn’t good enough or the people managing the projects aren’t diligent enough. It’s because every major technology initiatives has its pitfalls and knowing those pitfalls in advance can make you that much more successful. Here are a few pitfalls to avoid when implementing Process Intelligence.

Where’s the Business Value?
Identify what you’re going to measure first. Knowing what to measure is important because what you measure is what you are going to try to improve. In this case, you need to focus on the metrics that will deliver real business value. Everyone starts off with the right intentions but if you derive the wrong actions from the wrong KPIs, you might harm your organization more than help. This is one of the most common stumbling blocks I see in any Process Intelligence initiative.

Where’s the Focus?
There are tons of processes and KPIs to measure across any organization but don’t go crazy. Understand the power of measuring operational processes but don’t try to measure every KPI, or worse your favorite KPIs, or even the ones which you consider the easiest KPIs. Focus on the KPIs that will provide insight into the processes you want to improve. The purpose of Process Intelligence is to improve business performance. Find out which KPIs are essential for your business and which processes impact those KPIs. Measure those processes by picking the most important KPIs for the process. Sometimes it’s best to simply start with one process and grow over time.

Where’s the Stakeholders?
In a Process Intelligence project you measure KPIs to see how your operational processes are performing with the goal of transparency. You might love it – others might not. So to avoid conflicts later involve all key stakeholders early. And be sure to involve both business and IT people. Without the support of business, you’ll struggle to understand the business process, making it hard to identify the right KPIs. You need IT’s support to set up your Process Intelligence software and to extract the KPIs out of the different systems. Most importantly, both sides should see the Process Intelligence project as a partnership. Everyone should look forward to using the tool to improve performance and better position their requirements in the organization.

Avoid these 3 stumbling blocks and become part of the 32% not the 24%.

The post Don’t be Part of the 24% Failure Rate appeared first on Reality Check.