Process Governance Best Practices: Building a BPM Center of Excellence
Author: Clay Richardson
Introduction
As organizations begin to deploy enterprise-wide solutions for managing key business processes, they are encountering many obstacles and challenges associated with cross-departmental interaction and collaboration. Organizations are discovering that while intradepartmental business process initiatives typically execute with minimal issues, interdepartmental business process initiatives often become mired in cross-departmental politics, disputes, and miscommunication. For example:
A manager tasked with implementing a new contracts administration process can’t get adequate user input or participation because the users’ managers say they are swamped and can’t assign anyone to the project team. The manager proceeds as best he can, but the project ultimately fails following a user revolt over the new process.
An organization embarks on three major enterprise-wide BPM projects at once - a new recruiting and hiring system, a new accounts receivables system, and a new order management system - only to have the three project managers competing with each other for time and resources. Eventually, no one in the company wants to participate on any of the teams, each of which has its own schedule and milestones, rules, terminology, and process for completing their respective projects.
The finance and accounting department released a new budgeting process last year that now needs to interact with the organization’s enterprise resource planning (ERP) system. The vice president of finance and the CIO disagree on how the process should interact with the ERP tool. After weeks of wrangling, they decide to have the end users manually re-key data from the budgeting process into the ERP system.
So how can organizations avoid these familiar pitfalls when implementing business processes that span multiple departments? The key to success is to approach the BPM implementation itself as a process – a process that can be captured and automated within a governance framework.
Over the past five years, the term “governance” has gained prominence in information technology and business circles. In this context, the term is used to define the set of rules that dictate or govern how an organization must conduct a specific business function. Thus, process governance consists of the set of guidelines and resources that an organization uses to facilitate collaboration and communication when it undertakes enterprise process initiatives, such as implementing a new contracts administration process or a new budgeting system.
At Project Performance Corporation, where we have a dedicated practice for helping organizations implement enterprise-wide BPM solutions, we have uncovered five basic principles or steps for effective process governance:
1. Establish standards for implementing new BPM projects.
2. Prioritize BPM projects so that you work on the most achievable ones first.
3. Clearly define the roles and responsibilities of everyone involved in the BPM project.
4. Put someone in charge with authority to enforce BPM governance rules.
5. Establish a BPM Center of Excellence to ensure that steps 1-4 are followed on every initiative. These Centers of Excellence serve as internal practices that support deployment of enterprise-wide business processes.
More information is available in PDF.
References:
[1] Burlton, Roger T: Business Process Management: Profiting from Process. Indianapolis, 2001.
About the Author:
Clay Richardson has over 12 years of experience developing and deploying business process and e-business solutions for public- and private-sector clients around the globe. He currently leads the business process management practice for Project Performance Corporation (PPC), where he directs BPM and BPR implementations for customers using best-of-breed technologies and solutions. Prior to joining PPC, Mr. Richardson served as Director of Professional Services and Training with HandySoft Global Corporation, a pure-play BPM software vendor. Additionally, Mr. Richardson was Principal and Co-founder of StrictlyBizness, an e-business consultancy that specialized in developing automated web-based solutions for private and public sector clients.