Business Process Management. Process is the Enterprise.

Chapter 5: Business Process Deployment

Preface Table of Contents Chapter 1 Chapter 2 Chapter 3 Chapter 4 Chapter 5 Chapter 6 Chapter 7 Chapter 8 Chapter 9 Chapter 10 Chapter 11 Appendix-BPM Product greatest needs

Process deployment phase is a critical success factor in a successful BPM implementation. Designed business processes are validated and deployed to production. At this stage most organizations forget about the people aspect of BPM and tend to concentrate on technology implementation. BPM projects even with well designed business processes are stopped on their tracks, because the people who will be using the BPM system are not on the same page. The visible backlogs of overflowing in-trays are gone, only to be replaced by overflowing digitized inboxes and overflowing digital queues. The end result is significant culture resistance and reluctance to cooperate with further iterations.
BPM server acts as the central command center for orchestrating the end-to-end process after it has been deployed. Process participants can now initiate the deployed business processes. Most vendors, analysts, books and white papers talk about deploying business processes to the BPM system as easy as one click publish and can be done by the business people. That might be possible for very simple business processes with no automated activities. For complex processes that is wishful thinking. I have implemented enterprise strength BPM systems and my experience has been that process deployment requires deep BPM knowledge, planning and a deployment strategy. I have yet to see a business process which can be deployed that easily by making a change and clicking the deploy button.

Enterprise wide success for BPM projects depends on people as much as on technology and this applies to the deployment phase as well. BPM teams should not forget about the people dimension of BPM. Moving from paper trail based manual or functionally semi-automated process to a digitized process managed process using BPMS involves unlearning old ways of working and learning to work in an event driven enterprise.

From my experience first time process users must be given the time and training to learn how BPM is going to effect them. They need to be part of some kind of testing or pilot project which is done prior to deployment. Organizations can plan for a BPM pilot to get the people accustomed to the BPM terminologies and BPM way of working. Once the business users are comfortable with the BPM style of working, successive pilot projects will not be needed. Pilot projects will help the users become BPM savvy, have a process mindset and become comfortable with BPM style of working. Trust me BPM style of working is pretty different than the way business users work with IT applications today. In the BPM style work comes to you, work is monitored, work is reassigned in real-time, work is returned, work is forwarded and exceptions are handled on the fly.

Buy the Book at

Buy PDF version