The First 180 Days, Part 2

Ed.: In this second post in the series (see our previous coverage here), Fahad is focusing specifically on the Enterprise Plan Program. Think of this as the plan for rolling out a BPM initiative across the company in the first 180 days and beyond.

Enterprise BPM initiatives require well-defined operating procedures for selecting projects, governing delivery, staffing teams and managing infrastructure requirements. We call these procedures the Four Pillars of Enterprise BPM. The Enterprise Plan is therefore comprised of 4 corresponding sub-plans, including the:

• Strategy Plan
• Governance Plan
• Capability Plan
• Infrastructure Plan

Strategy Plan

In order to justify investment past the Startup phase, you will need a roadmap that identifies how BPM projects can contribute to key strategic objectives. Furthermore, this list should be prioritized so there is a clear understanding of the processes and opportunities that best drive improvement for each of these priorities.

The Strategy Plan document must include the following information:

• An overview of key corporate objectives and metrics
• Core processes mapped at a high level (detailed workflow diagrams are not necessary for all processes)
• A prioritized list of processes that identifies the strongest value propositions and process issues where BPM provides the greatest leverage

Governance Plan

The role of Governance in a BPM initiative is to ensure that the Strategy is executed and that projects are prioritized properly and measurably support enterprise goals and initiatives. The Governance body should also serve as a mediating group if cross-functional processes encounter conflicts with functional silos.

The Governance Plan document should contain the following information:

• An organization plan for the Governing body
• List of key project criteria for initiation and completion. This list can include things like strategic alignment, business case, committed subject matter experts, identified performance measures and completed high level process maps.
• Conflict resolution and escalation steps

Capability Plan

Taking a process-driven approach will require the development of new capabilities within your organization. Traditional business roles will expand to include the following skills:

• Process design and modeling (including the ability to decompose a business process into smaller, sub-processes and activities)
• Process and system requirement definition
• Key performance metrics design and measurement skills

Technical roles must also expand to support these BPM tasks in addition to traditional software development and delivery skills. A combination of business and technical resources will be used to form project teams. Given this mix of business and technical roles, it is crucial for the Capability Plan to cover several key topics:

• Detailed list of required roles and skills from both business and technical areas of the organization
• Cost estimates to staff and train BPM teams
• Estimated timelines to recruit, staff and train

Infrastructure Plan

Each BPMS vendor provides standard information about what software and hardware is required. However, the Infrastructure plan needs to provide much more information. The Infrastructure Plan should document the following topics:

Typical system configuration requirements for a BPM project

• Anticipated software and hardware costs for each new BPM project
• BPM’s place in the logical and physical Enterprise Architecture
• Projected on-going maintenance and operations costs
• System management strategy – co-location with other applications or dedicated infrastructure
• High-availability configuration requirements and costs
• Deployment Approach. An often overlooked area when implementing new so-called agile technologies is their impact on the traditional software development lifecycle (SDLC) employed by the organization, specifically with respect to testing. If your SDLC requires, say, a 1-2 month testing cycle (not unusual) then there’s no way any technology can react as fast as the business. You need to consider altering QA validation based on risk and amount of change in the process. This is a non-trivial task to gain this alignment, and should be part of your Pilot phase planning.

With a Plan that has the Four Pillars accounted for, you will be able to provide detailed justification for making the next round of investment in the BPM initiative.

Moving forward past the first 180 days (Phase 1), an organization should expect to have two additional project phases to fully implement the Enterprise BPM Program. During Phase 2, the team would continue to tune capabilities initiated in the project startup phase by beginning another 3-6 BPM projects, and continuing to improve and expand the first two. Phase 3 in turn helps institutionalize the BPM Program by undertaking enterprise wide BPM deployments and by empowering the entire organization to identify, scope, develop and deploy BPM projects. But we’ll leave Phase 2 and Phase 3 for another day!

Questions or follow up on the first 180 days? Leave us a comment below.