Ed.: While a complete enterprise BPM roll-out is a multi-year effort, this two-part series focuses on the Pilot as the crucial first step in an enterprise initiative designed to spread throughout the organization.

In this second post (our initial coverage here) I’ll give a few practical, actionable advice and detailed recommendations around picking processes for the Pilot, staffing up, and executing in a way that will ensure success beyond this initial phase.

Picking processes

Above all else, you should be careful when choosing the Pilot processes, so that they have:

• Limited Cross-function/Cross-organization scope — this proves your ability to work across groups to define end to end processes, but don’t tackle more than a little. You want to minimize the “political” battles in these early Pilots.
• Limited Cross-system/data/information scope — this proves that you can integrate with existing infrastructure and handle complex information structures. Again, pick one or two of your key 4 systems and do one or two interfaces into them. What you want is learning. Oftentimes the integrations to systems are the “longest pole” in the deployment tent. Keep this to a minimum so that you focus on the new BPM issues, and don’t get bogged down in IT integration issues.
• Known business performance metrics — this will help focus your development efforts on driving measurable, demonstrable business benefits. It is imperative that specific and significant thought be given to how you want to manage the process, not simply how you want to execute the process.This will likely be the most wow-inspiring aspect of the implementation to the business.

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Last week, I wrote about the importance of understanding user roles and how a successful UI allows each user to focus on what s/he does best, especially with regards cross-functional process teams (Rule #1).

It’s crucial to get these groups aligned from the very outset of a project, to get them walking lock-step with each other as soon as possible. This is Rule #2.

But how is this accomplished through the UI?

The most important thing we’ve learned about aligning cross-functional interests from a UI perspective has to do with the early discovery and documentation phases of the project. This is the first (and potentially only) opportunity to get everyone’s interests on the same page, and is exactly why we created Lombardi Blueprint.

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Process People will be conducting a series of periodic interview sessions with Lombardi customers to provide useful insight into the BPM issues that they faced at their company, guidance for how to overcome obstacles, and to share the lessons learned during their process improvement journey. These real-world interviews will be posted regularly, so be sure and check back frequently. . .

In this Process People interview, we welcome Jeremy Kraybill, CIO for Boundless Network.

Process People: Describe in as much detail as possible the problem or need on a project level that first made you consider BPM and/or Lombardi as a viable solution.

Jeremy Kraybill: At Boundless Network, we were undergoing a business process re-engineering project at our business. We initially set out to document and analyze manual process changes that would reduce our company’s cash cycle and help us scale our back office. After the first couple weeks of the project, we realized that there were a whole set of business processes held in individuals’ heads that we could benefit from automating. Nobody at the company had previous BPM experience, but after looking at the first BPM vendor’s demo we knew that a BPM solution had great potential for our business pains. After a 3-month evaluation process we selected a BPM solution and have been very happy with the decision and how the implementations went.

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