Supporting BPM Teams

A key element for success in most BPM projects is to assemble a team for designing, building, modeling, optimizing and deploying business processes. An effective BPM team is made up of people from around the organization, each of whom plays an important role in the success of the project. It is critical that a BPM solution provides each of the members of these teams with the right set of tools to make their job as easy and productive as possible. Typical teams include:

Business Owners

The people who use the process to execute their job responsibilities efficiently and effectively. They have a direct interest in the process and care little about the tools that will be used. They simply want the process improved, and they want proof of the results. They are a key link for the BPM team to the real business requirements of the process. Business owners benefit from graphical process design tools that make it easy for them to develop an initial, high-level process map or work closely with an analyst using the graphical tool. After deployment, owners will review reports about the process and make suggestions for process refinement. In short, business owners own the process, care about results, and don’t want to have to worry about the technology involved in making things happen.

Business Process Analysts

A key member of the team, the business analyst is the expert at process design. This member of the team is generally not a software developer, and so the tools must be intuitive and require little or no programming expertise. Analysts need an integrated environment to:

• Diagram or map process flow
• Define special conditions and exceptions that must be handled by the automated process
• Model process flow to test assumptions and identify potential issues early in the cycle
• Understand organizational structures and reporting relationships
• Document all aspects of the process for team members, users, and new employees
• Analyze results after the process has been put into use
• Make continuous improvements to the process.

IT Designers

They work closely with the process analysts to build the automated process. IT designers typically have a good understanding of the functional infrastructure of the IT environment, but are not programmers. They need the ability to:

• Have easy access to the process flows created by process analysts (even better, let them share them directly) and the documentation of the process
• Design forms, or use existing electronic forms, and define data elements of those forms, without having to be experts in database design
• Develop rules for workflow routing and exception handling, without having to write code
• Integrate with directories, other applications, Web Services, and databases
• Test and simulate processes before they are placed into production

To maximize productivity and agility, the goal of any BPM solution should be to enable IT designers and process analysts to do as much of the work as possible, without having to involve developers.

Software Developers

They may play an important role on the BPM team, but they should not be required unless there are complex integration or other issues that can only be addressed through coding. When required, developers need tools that let them:

• Use the development tools they know and love, while having a view into the process context
• Develop scripts and modules that can be easily called from forms or process steps using XML, Web Services or other standard methods
• Easily set up data exchange between the BPM application and back office systems for ERP, CRM and other functions.

Once again, the key point to remember is that software developers should be contributors to your BPM efforts, but not the focal point of the effort. The only possible exception to this is if the entire process is Enterprise Application Integration (EAI)-driven, with little or no human involvement and lots of integration complexity.

IT Administrators

They will play a key role in maintaining the BPM system once it is running. They need tools that work with their other management console environments to:

• Monitor the performance of the system
• Set up the server environment
• Manage disk space and database utilization
• Delegate as much process administration responsibility to business users
• Analyze log files
• Produce reports on system usage and user activity

Summary

Clearly, considerations for your BPM team must be taken into account when choosing a BPM system and implementing it. By combining a team capability focus with an identification of the elements of a complete BPM system, you will be able to deploy a solution that meets the needs of all your users, delivers consistent ROI, and provides other intangible benefits to your organization.

For a full copy of this white paper and related articles, visit Ultimus.

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Ultimus was founded in 1994 with a clear goal: make it easy for customers to automate business or organizational processes without requiring lots of programming or assistance from IT.

Today, Ultimus is recognized as a leading provider of Business Process Management (BPM) and workflow automation software and services. Drawing on Ultimus’ experience and philosophy, customers are using Ultimus as a platform for automating many business processes throughout their organization and across other organizations. For more information visit Ultimus