BPM COE at TIBCONOW 2014

Raisa Mahomed of TIBCO presented a breakout session on best practices for building a BPM center of excellence. She started with a description of different types of COEs based on Forrester’s divisions (I’m too lazy to hack the HTML to add a table in WordPress for Android, so imagine a 2×2 quadrant with one axis being centralized versus decentralized, the other tactical, i.e., focused on cost and efficiency, versus strategic, i.e., focused on revenue and growth):

  • Center of Expertise (decentralized, strategic) – empowers business stakeholders with expert assistance, provides best practice, governance, technology that is configurable and consumable by business
  • Center of Excellence (centralized, strategic) – governs all processes in organization, enforces strict guidelines and process methodology governance, owns the BPMS, engagement models foster trust and collaboration including internal evangelists
  • Community of Practice (decentralized, tactical) – small teams, departmental priorities and scope, basic workflow capabilities, little or no governance
  • Process Factory (centralized, tactical) – optimized for process automation projects, processes as application development, frameworks

Center of Expertise and Process Factory work well together and are often seen in combination.

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Best practices (these went by pretty quickly with a lot of detail on the slides, so I’ve just tried to capture some of the high points):

  • Find executive sponsorship for the COE: they must be influential across the organization, and be in the right place for the COE within your organization (e.g., COO, CIO, separate architecture group)
  • Create a governance framework – style will be based on the type(s) of COEs in use
  • Establish a methodology, which may have to accommodate different levels of BPM maturity within organization; be sure to address reusability and common components
  • Start with a core process, but relatively low complexity – this is exactly what I recommend, and I’m always frustrated by the “experts” that recommend starting with a non-core process even if the core processes are the target for implementation.
  • Encourage innovation and introduce disruptive technology.
  • Collaboration is key, via co-location and online collaboration spaces.
  • Don’t skip the metrics: remember that measuring project success is essential for future funding, as well as day-to-day operations and feeding the continuous improvement cycle.
  • Don’t let the program go stale, or become an ivory tower; rotate SMEs from the COE back into the business.
  • There’s not a single BPM skillset: you need a variety of skills spread across multiple people and roles.
  • Make a business case to provide justification for BPM projects.
  • Empower and educate through training and change management.
  • Avoid the “build it and they will come” mentality: just because you create some cool technology, that doesn’t mean that business people will stop doing the things that they’re doing to take it up.
  • Institute formal reviews of process models and solutions.

Nothing revolutionary here, but a good introduction and review of the best practices.

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