Driving BPM Success Requires the Right People

Transcription

1 Driving BPM Success Requires the Right People COLLABORATIVE WHITEPAPER SERIES

2 Business Process Management (BPM) consists of a methodology, architecture, and tools that when implemented change how businesses operate. Depending on a business s needs and objectives, BPM programs and projects vary in scope, approach and BPM sophistication; however, all are tasked with understanding and improving performance by driving operational excellence and business agility to core activities within the enterprise. At their core, all BPM projects transform the business to be more process-minded and aware of the larger enterprise processes that support and run the business. This perspective allows business leaders to measure the business and process effectiveness, continually improve the way business is performed, and effectively and rapidly respond to changing business environments. On one side of the spectrum, a company may start their BPM journey by looking at developing and analyzing process models to understand their current business processes and current performance metrics compared to industry and best practices standards to determine performance issues and to identify improvements to be made. At the other extreme, a company may be implementing a BPMS tool to run and monitor aspects of their business. Regardless of the depth of BPM, all of these projects look at existing processes to determine redundant, inefficient, unreliable, missing, and/or non-value-adding processes to improve productivity, efficiency, performance, or business results. This is accomplished by analyzing and documenting the overall process, collecting data and information from the processes, and measuring the processes against the performance metrics and measures that are aligned with the organization s business goals and objectives. The results of the BPM projects vary, but ideally it will change the way the organization does business whether it is understanding, improving, sunsetting, or designing new processes. BPM is focused on analyzing design and improving processes; in order to thrive, the projects must also focus on the human dimension a fundamental component to each BPM stage. Neglecting key roles within a project may result in unnecessary delays, quality issues, performance issues, adoption challenges, and unexpected results. It is critical to understand how these key people are involved and impact the process initiatives. In our experience: People define the strategy and business objectives. People define the process and its expected level of performance. People document, analyze, design, and monitor the process. 2

3 People assess how the organization is impacted by the process. People can be said to be at the center of all of the process initiatives. Therefore, having the right people in the right roles is vital to the success of any BPM project. I. Successful BPM must start with business strategy and objectives The success of any BPM project depends largely on the foundation upon which it is built, which is why understanding and articulating the business strategy and objectives needs to be accomplished by a senior stakeholder prior to the real process work. It is a mistake to declare that a process needs to be fixed without understanding what fixing it entails and why change is imperative. To accomplish this, the following questions should be asked at the project s inception: What are the key strategic goals and objectives of the organization over the next 3-5 years? What are the business challenges that need to be addressed in order to reach the goals and objectives? Is there consensus from all parties around the highlevel direction? What is the impact of the proposed high-level direction? What is the problem and is it clearly defined and understood? This analysis and planning activity is strategic in nature and is meant to focus on the cross-functional interactions and processes to develop a strategy that will support the company s long-range business plan. When developing the business plan, the organization needs to understand the current and future business environment and product or services offerings, operational direction, and organizational structure. This understanding helps the organization develop the key imperatives, strategic initiatives, and time frames for achieving the goals and objectives. Key work products in this activity include a business case and migration road map. The business case is business justification for the project. It articulates a clear message regarding the value and scope of the project, projected 3 costs, anticipated business and financial benefits, and the target Key Performance Indictors (KPI) goals within a defined time frame. The migration road map should specify how the change will occur based on priority of need and the pace at which the organization, processes, and technology will be able to tolerate change. This is so as time progresses the project team can: Avoid having to re-justify the project during review cycles or business planning and budgeting cycles. Proactively monitor the progress and success of the initiatives in an objective manner and react to unexpected or unplanned results. Understand when success is achieved. II. Business process owners Once the project direction has been determined and the impacted processes identified in the business plan, it is important to identify the business process owners. The business process owners champion and make decisions to enable end-to-end success. They are the subject matter experts on the cross-functional process and understand the needs of their customers and stakeholders. They continuously work to satisfy and improve the experience and/or output of processes while balancing the priority and placement of their processes in the overall business enterprise. Business process owners do not work alone, they can have components or sub-process subject matter experts working with them, but they are ultimately accountable for the design and success of the end-to-end process. The business process owners are responsible for: Establishing the process goals and project success criteria. Proving clarity on process scope and relative value of process activities. Making key business decisions that clear obstacles to team progress. Defining clear business metrics and measures to monitor the efficiency and performance of the process.

4 Understanding the impact of process changes on products and/or services. Without clear business process ownership, processes become complicated and ineffective. There are often multiple processes or even worse, function/activity owners who focus only on their needs and requirements rather than furthering the larger process and business objective. III. Business process analysts The business process analyst is one of the more challenging and most important positions to properly assign on a BPM project. The person in this role performs detail analysis and modeling activities. In order to determine if their current business analysts have the skill sets required to fill the role of business process analyst in a business process initiative, companies looking to invest in BPM project should ask themselves several questions: What type of business analysts do we have? Do they have the capabilities to analyze, design, and improve processes? Do they understand the dimensions of business process analysis? Within technology and business, the term business analyst is overused and encompasses a variety of skills sets. To illustrate this, the Business Analysis Body of Knowledge (BABOK ), defines a business analyst as any person who performs business analysis activities, no matter what their job title or organizational role may be. Business analysis practitioners include not only people with the job title of business analyst, but may also include business systems analysts, systems analysts, requirements engineers, process analysts, product managers, product owners, enterprise analysts, business architects, management consultants, or any other person who performs the tasks described in the BABOK Guide, including those who also perform related disciplines such as project management, software development, quality assurance, and interaction design. Therefore, to answer the first question companies need to understand the different classifications of business analysts. Below are several common types of business analysts. Requirements business analyst: Works with business stakeholders to define business strategies and objectives. These analysts focus on the what the business is trying to accomplish, not necessarily the how and reside within the business units of a company. Often they produce business cases and business requirement documentation. IT business analyst: Acts as a liaison between the business and IT/systems teams to analyze and translate the business strategy or business requirement into functional requirements to enable the IT/systems team to design and build a solution. These analysts interpret business rules and requirements into functional system specifications and use such tools as cases and activity models. Systems business analyst: Provides a deep understanding of the technical nature of systems and can analyze code, understand data structures, and create detailed data mappings. This role could very well be called a technical BA due to their skills set and the fact that they typically reside within the IT/systems team. Business process analyst: Focuses on analyzing, measuring and designing business processes that benefit the business within the current and future environments. This type of analyst may reside either in the business or within the IT/ systems team. Often these analysts have experience in industry or function best practices, Six Sigma or Lean improvement methodologies. In performing process analysis, the analyst uses various modeling techniques including business models, process models, data models, value stream mapping, and workflow models to document and communicate requirements. Additionally, the business process analyst must be able to: Think abstractly and conceptually about end-to-end business processes. Decompose business processes from high-level processes, to activities and tasks, to detailed use cases. 4

5 Understand the processes required to identify areas of inefficiency, best practices and improvement. Work with cross-functional teams to examine processes and tasks that could potentially be improved, make recommendations for the changes needed. Understand Business Process Management Notation (BPMN). Create and compare as-is and to-be business models. Identify impact to organization as a whole people, process, and technology. As mentioned previously, unlike many other business analysts who may only focus on aspects of systems or user requirements, the business process analyst needs to specifically understand and assess the impact of how people, process, and technology are impacted by the business solutions. This understanding includes: People: From a people perspective - does the new solution change the way business is performed? Is training required? Are roles and responsibilities changing? If the answer is yes to any of the questions, then a BPM initiative is going to require some level of training and change management. During the analysis and modeling phase the business process analyst identifies areas where people are impacted by the changing process, policies, and/or technology. This may result in an organization change management effort in conjunction with the BPM initiative. Process: The process dimension addresses how work flow, activities, and tasks are executed. The business process analyst evaluates the process to determine where there is redundancy across groups, inefficiency due to crossgroup interactions, opportunity to either improve or automate a manual process, and where best practices can be leveraged and expanded. Technology: The technology dimension is looking at the applications, data, and tools used to support the people and process. The analyst should explore questions such as: Is there unnecessary duplication of systems? Is the data quality reliable and consistent enough to support the business needs of the entire organization? Are the mechanisms for delivery of the solution meeting the needs of the business? IV. The organizational change management specialist One of the main challenges that process initiatives face is managing how new or modified processes will impact the people involved. Failure to manage this properly results in a resistance to the new or modified processes and can lead to diminished or delayed success of the initiatives. The ability to assess and manage change is a key function in a BPM project that is performed by an organizational change management specialist. To mitigate and eliminate the risk associated with the initiative, project leadership needs to implement a change management program, spearheaded by an organizational change management specialist, early in the project and maintain it through the implementation of the initiative. Assessing the organization s readiness for the process change and implementing the change in a manner that prepares the organization is essential to the overall business of the program and the organization s ability to meet the business goals and objectives. The level of complexity in the change programs is initially identified during the business-planning phase and is modified and adjusted as the process is analyzed, improved, or defined and the impacts are identified. The organizational change management specialist works closely with the business process owner and business process analysts to ensure that the impact of the solution on the people is identified, assessed, managed, communicated, and understood broadly. A simple change program may involve a communication plan that details all the key communications to everyone from senior management to employees who are directly impacted by the change. A more complex change program may also include an organization s structure and design assessment, skills assessment of current staff, and new training programs. 5

6 The key to change management is to provide information early and often to those impacted by the program. This allows the organization to address fears and uncertainties within its employees, and provides time for people to understand and adopt the change. When assessing the impact, the project team needs to look both internally and externally, understanding that a change in process or in data can impact key business relationships and requires careful consideration, communication and management. Change management will be a key component in each phase. Understanding the impact on the people involved in the process and how the organization s structure must change is critical to success. The organizational change management specialist is responsible for: Performing a detailed organizational change impact assessment across the change dimensions. Developing the organizational change management strategy and plan that is right for the project and the organization s culture. Implementing and managing organizational change management initiatives within the project. Monitoring the success of the organizational change initiatives and making adjustments as required. V. Conclusion BPM projects transform businesses to be more processminded to promote continuous improvement, business agility, and a high-level of business performance. This shift is not always easy and requires a clear strategic direction, defined business goals, detailed process analysis, and change assessment and management. It is the responsibility of the business leaders to ensure that the people dimension within the project is addressed early and often throughout the life of the project, thereby confirming that the right people are in the right roles and that the BPM projects is set-up for success. 6

7 Collaborative Consulting is a leading information technology services firm dedicated to helping our clients achieve business advantage through the use of strategy and technology. We deliver a comprehensive set of solutions across multiple industries, with a focus on business process and program management, information management, software solutions, and software performance and quality. We also have a set of offerings specific to the life sciences and financial services industries. Our unique model offers both onsite management and IT consulting as well as U.S.-based remote solution delivery. To learn more about Collaborative, please visit our website at us at sales@collaborative.com, or contact us at Copyright 2014 Collaborative Consulting, LLC. All rights reserved. This product is protected by U.S. and international copyright and intellectual property laws. WP