In the last session of day 1 at Gartner BPM 2013, I sat in on a case study by the Argentina-based Banco Supervielle, who won a Gartner excellence award for best business outcomes driven by BPM. They were experiencing poor quality of service, and having to deal with changing regulations and a complex systems integration environment. They had no process models for what they did, and were too focused on products rather than customers.
They laid out goals for their process-centric transformation: improve customer service through quality-oriented processes, including organizational changes and linking of process models to corporate strategy. They wanted to bring in innovative technologies to support this process-centric view, and strive for continuous improvement. they looked at different ways to do this: bottom-up, through more of an iterative process improvement methodology; and top-down, through complete process redesign with the processes linked to corporate strategy. Daunting as it might seem, they went with the top-down approach, similar to that described by Elise Olding earlier today from a program versus project standpoint, but also with some of the same goal-linking between processes and strategy as Betsy Burton discussed this morning. They used a combination of internal and external methodologies to help guide the program, and implemented using IBM BlueworksLive and IBM BPM.
They experienced a number of challenges:
- Change management, from the board of directors through the project team to the end users, to have them take on a process-centric view
- Anxiety control (an excellent descriptive term!) through the same levels, with the particular admonishment to not let your board of directors have lunch with the vendor sales reps since all the BoD will remember is that the vendor said “new process = 2 months” 🙂
- Sponsorship, and the necessity to get as senior a sponsor as possible in order to provide the best level of air cover
- Denial and negative influencers, often due to people not wanting to change
They had a number of results: some that they were expecting, some that they were not expecting, and some that just didn’t happen the way that they wanted. In the “expected” category were the usual items of flexibility, cost/time savings and automation, but I always find that the interesting benefits are those that were not expected. In their case, that including moving their business architecture team from a documentation role to a high-value provider; faster adoption with remote than central office users; and a single process to sell all products to all clients through all channels (a dream of all of my financial services clients). What didn’t happen on schedule was mostly the change management and adoption. It’s necessary to constantly communicate throughout the project in order to sell the ideas and the organizational change that’s required, and do everything possible to change the mind of the negative influencers or get them off the project.