Showcasing Your BPM Solution, Part 1

Showcasing the success of your initial BPM project is often times requested from other departments, but it’s also required to help drive adoption across the entire organization.

If showcasing your initial BPM deployment can help gain process adoption and ignite enthusiasm in other areas of the business, then you’ll get more and more value out of your overall BPM initiative. That being said, here is the first in a two part series of posts that will help you to showcase your BPM solution within your organization.

Get ‘em excited!

Everyone has had to sit in a presentation during their lunch break that seemed like a never-ending PowerPoint slide show. Now imagine watching someone explaining a process flow diagram that has no relevance to you. Then follow that with a “live” demonstration of someone clicking through a bunch of screens acting as a participant in the process that you didn’t get. Trust me, it can be very painful.

One tool that you can use to get people excited is to talk about the metrics of the process. You might not have the biggest numbers yet, but share some of the success that you had with the initial efforts. People have a hard time understanding and connecting the dots to a process they don’t understand. But if you tell them that over the last 30 days reducing the rework of a particular activity by 15 percent resulted in a reduction of average activity wait time and overall processing throughput, heads will nod. Not just because of the process improvement numbers, but also the overall insight into the process.  It sounds so simple, but it really makes a difference.

To really succeed with this, begin thinking about metrics as the project starts and assign someone on the team ownership to this aspect of the project. You might also want to consider the common benefits of a BPM project and try to develop metrics based on the typical value proposition of doing the project in the first place.

If you take only one thing away from this, you should remember that showcasing the project requires a concerted effort from day one.  Assign ownership of project metrics and begin assembling a plan for showcasing your solution from the get-go.  Don’t skip this when you’re launching your BPM initiative, it’s only going to help you.

Ed.: We’ll continue with Part 2 of this series soon.

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