The Pilot Is Just the Beginning, Part 2

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.

Staffing the Pilot

You will need to put together two separate Pilot BPM project teams. Each team should be made of at least 3 full-time people. Their profiles are:

• An experienced BPM process leader. This person is probably provided by Lombardi or a certified partner.
• An IT person who is business-savvy. This person does not need to be a Java or C# developer, but needs to have familiarity with software development tasks and methods.
• A tech-savvy business person. This person is probably not a subject matter expert (SME), although familiarity with a given process can be a benefit.

Notes on Execution

The Pilot teams are often led by BPM vendor consultants or experienced system integration partners. Your company resources will typically be the executors, gaining valuable project experience while building their BPM knowledge.

But when it comes to execution, it is critical that key stakeholders throughout the organization are included in reviews, regardless of whether they are involved in the Pilot on a day-to-day basis. For example, these individuals should attend the Pilot “playbacks” that happen every two weeks. We cannot emphasize the importance of this enough.

Why?

Because on the execution front, close interaction with the Pilot teams is essential for the overall enterprise team It is the best way for them to validate their planning assumptions and incorporate key lessons learned from the Pilot teams. When the Pilot processes have been completed, a project summary can be prepared and presented to the BPM initiative sponsors or Governance body, if one has been formed.

Additional resources:

How to justify your BPM project

Getting started with BPM