Toby Cappello, Vice President of Professional Services | August 5th, 2008
If you’ve been reading the Process People blog, you might have noticed that we talk a lot about an iterative approach to deploying BPM. What we haven’t touched on as much is that the iterative approach is an element of the overarching methodology. Looking in on the methodology from the highest level you will get a view of a three-phased approach – which ultimately results in iteration. But we want to provide a big picture of how all of the different parts of our methodology tie together, and how each point of emphasis leads into or loops back to key areas of the other two phases.
I realize that in some organizations, “phase” is a four-letter word. With BPM it is a must… it is the foundational element that leads to continuous process improvement and ultimately maximum business benefit. But don’t just take our word for it, just look at the countless customers who have used this methodology and achieve enormous success because of it.
Definition Phase
The definition phase is probably the most critical portion of the entire BPM adoption lifecycle. This is where you set the expectations for the BPM project, define metrics to measure the project and create a framework so that the focus remains on delivering business value throughout all three phases.
In this phase organizations should:
- Take the broader initiative and narrow it to a specific departmental level
- Define the business milestones and associated metrics
- Develop the business case
- Ensure that there is a common thread throughout the whole project (Business value)
- Get the business to drive this phase
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Toby Cappello, Vice President of Professional Services | July 24th, 2008
The best description of “executive level buy-in” that I know of is only 7 letters long:
F-U-N-D-I-N-G
Maybe that doesn’t help you as much as you had hoped, so I’ll provide some additional color around this one. Funding is the absolute bottom-line when we talk about executive buy-in to a BPM initiative. But funding has to reflect the iterative approach, which means that the project isn’t over when the process is deployed. The project is really just getting started.
Funding has to map back to the methodology required to do the project right. It has to reflect all three phases of a proper BPM methodology. We’ve discussed this methodology on Process People before, and if you haven’t seen some of those posts, I recommend that you read one first!
In reality, executive buy-in also means you have to have an executive who’s willing to get up on a podium and endorse the process improvement program organization-wide. It means that the executive has to be willing to commit funding in every manner necessary - money, people, time and so on.
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Driven 2008 has come to a close, and we’re really thrilled with this year’s event. Many of the conference attendees stayed for the Lombardi golf tournament yesterday, which took place on the beautiful Fazio Canyons golf course at Barton Creek Resort and Spa. The weather was perfect and the golf was great.
On that note, I thought it might be timely to provide a quick recap of a session that Toby Cappello hosted on Wednesday. The session was called: “The Monday Morning Quarterback Discusses 10 Painful Lessons Learned.” Toby started things off with a golf analogy - one which he lived up to on the course yesterday!
The analogy went something like this: “BPM is like golf - you need to build muscle memory if you want to develop consistency and achieve success.”
In all honesty, I can’t really think of any other combinations of a technology (BPMS) and a discipline (BPM) that fits so perfectly with this analogy. It cuts to the core of Lombardi’s methodology. In fact, if you break it down even further you’ll see more uncanny parallels that help to visualize what exactly you’ll need to do to achieve success with BPM.
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Ed.: This is the second post in a series of Q+A sessions focusing specifically on playback session best practices, with our in-house expert, Kris Komassa. See our previous coverage on the first playback session here.
When you run a flow during a playback session, business people can jump right in and start suggesting additions, etc. How real-time are the changes that are made, and how often do you iterate feedback on a given flow?
It’s a difficult thing, actually, and it varies by playback. The highest priority for me is to capture any and all feedback accurately, anything that anybody blurts out or cites in the playback.
Then I like to, for anything that is able to be fixed immediately, go in and change it right then and there. First, this puts the business perspective’s mind to rest to have it displayed for them, right there in real-time. And second, we don’t have to worry about that specific piece of feedback after the fact as a lingering action item.
But the trick to it is that you don’t want the real-time revisions to turn into a long discussion of what we should and should not do. If someone’s requirement is very clear, then we’ll do it immediately in the playback, but otherwise we’ll take it offline and come back to it later - you don’t want to hi-jack the entire session if there isn’t consensus or at least a clear directive in terms of what needs to be changed.
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