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In these lean economic times, business process professionals are watching their
budgets get slashed, while at the same time, the hunger for business process
management (BPM) and process improvement continues to accelerate across the
enterprise.
To meet these conflicting demands, business process leaders should audit BPM projects to eliminate common budget-busters that cause projects to become bloated and unmanageable. Next month in Chicago at Forrester’s Business Technology Forum, we’ll take a deep dive into lean strategies that will foster success in your organization long after this recession has ended.
Successful teams have zeroed in on lean strategies that eliminate unnecessary
waste typically encountered during process discovery -- the first phase of a
BPM project that scopes requirements for the process solution. Let's take a
look at each of the strategies:
Put the right process leaders in charge
To gain a better understanding of process discovery issues, Forrester interviewed
10 leading organizations that have adopted lean strategies that eliminate bloat
encountered during process discovery while maintaining the quality of process
knowledge and artifacts captured during discovery. We learned that neophyte
BPM teams often make the mistake of putting traditional business analysts in
charge of process discovery.
These teams quickly realize that traditional business analyst skills for capturing
functional requirements are ill-suited to the ad hoc, unstructured nature of
process discovery, particularly in a continuous improvement environment. To
maintain a lean mindset throughout discovery, leading organizations must put
process discovery in the hands of more technical and process-focused business
analysts who eat, sleep and breathe business process, embrace evolutionary requirements
and bridge the gulf between business and IT.
Adopt tools that accelerate process discovery
If you speak with any successful business process executive who has managed
large BPM engagements, they will invariably tell you that working side by side
in a collaborative and, ideally, co-located environment is critical to success.
For example, one BPM executive told us, "We collaborate every day, 12 hours
a day."
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