BPM implementation best practices – part III

Outsourcing has become a norm and it is very common to involve an implementation partner rather than entire customer IT or BPMS vendor professional services to execute a BPM program. It is important to keep in mind that BPM implementation is not just another software application program. The approach and methodology for execution of BPM program is significantly different. It is critical to choose a vendor who will remain as your strategic partner for a long time and have demonstrated capabilities discussed in this series of blogs.

Barring a few, every implementation partner that we have come across (in previous avatar of BPMS vendor) have not shown mature enough practices. Their BPM practices had never invested enough to transform themselves from traditional application development teams.

A vendor executing a one-off project may compromise on practices that need to be adopted for long term success of the program. Incorrect approach in implementation can easily increase maintenance cost, and may fail to deliver the single most important promise of BPMS – agility.

In past I have come across a leading general insurance company that adopted a BPMS for one of its core processes related to new business acquisition. The system went live and ran well for some time. CIO of this company of course wanted to take advantage of agility of BPMS platform to change their process solution. Business Users came up with a set of change requests as they started seeing some improvement areas. The implementation partner came back with a effort that was 20% higher than original effort to implement solution! CIO engaged us in review of implementation and we found that some of the most basic practices of BPMS implementation were violated and solution heavily used customizations and not even utilized 10% of BPMS capabilities.

We have just engaged with a company, that claims that their entire budget related to BPM program is going into maintenance and as a result not able to expand use of BPMS for other important processes. It didn’t appear to be small budget. Though we have just begun our review, I am very sure the findings will not any different from above example.

These are just two examples, however, in several customers that I have met, they have similar stories and issues and they were across various platforms of BPMS. And this became our quest….we have contributed to building world class BPMS now let’s make sure it gets adopted on the principles BPMS are built on and delivers the promises!