The Success of BPM Projects is Dependent of Avoiding 6 Main Mistakes

According to the Information Week Magazine. Released a market survey indicating the “Best Business Process” is the chief mission of the IT department. Since BPM projects are inter-organization and inter-department in nature as well as involve system properties of system integration making BPM projects more complex then previous IT project. Therefore, many BPM projects are delayed and the results of the project are not efficient or even actually failing. The following six common mistakes are analyzed from previous experience:

Mistake 1, Stuck on the as-is process research:

It should be known that the methods used by most users do not represent it is the correct method. It can very well be ineffective or problematic methods. Therefore, understanding the problem of the process, and setting improvement goals can effective manager focus of the improvements.

Mistake 2, No Support from Senior Management:

Since BPM projects includes adjustments to organizational behavior of personnel and the needs system integration. Therefore, when analyzing the needs or when the system is going online, the cooperation of personnel is needed, thus the support of Senior Management is needed to make things happen.

Mistake 3 , BPM Project is an IT Project:

All BPM experts emphasize that “BPM is not just an IT Project”.

Mistake 4, BPM is making Processes Electronic:

Making valueless processes electronic cannot really provide value. It may even cause problems. BPM projects are focused on doing what's right and not making what's wrong more effective.

Mistake 5 , Over emphasizing SOA/BPEL:

BOM and SOA/BPEL technology are complement technologies. Over emphasizing SOA or BPEL will only distort the goals of the project. This is because the focus of the project is the optimization of processes, not creating services or language of processes being executed.

Mistake 6 , Inflexible Process Execution Design

This is the most common mistake. We often neglect the reality that enterprise organization structures can be adjusted in the short term, and thus lacking flexible designs. Therefore, often before a project goes online, massive changes need to be made.

Avoiding the above six mistakes during the start and executions of the project would result in a high probability of a successful BPM project.

About the Author: Y.T. Lee

Chairman and founder of AboveE. He holds a Master's and Ph.D. from New York University . He has previously served at AT&T Bell Labs in the United States , and was responsible for the design and research on the “Provisioning Process Management System for Data Networking Services”. His area of focus is e-Business solutions and has extensive experiences in SOA, Web Services, and BPM projects.