Business Process Management (BPM)

While the benefits of an effective Business Process Management solution are clear, a truly successful, on-time implementation can prove elusive. As a Business Analyst, you may be held responsible for project timelines. So when the schedule starts slipping, your credibility can slip away with it. This article discusses how agile technology and processes can slash implementation times from months or years to a few weeks or evendays, reducing time to value and ensuring successful, on-time, on-budget implementations.

The purpose of this article is to show an example of using Business Process Model and Notation (BPMN) to document the home medical process of peritoneal dialysis plus using 5S principles in the treatment workspace.

Business process management (BPM) is evolving rapidly in the face of ongoing advancements in technology, an increasingly multigenerational workforce, and an evolving and complex regulatory landscape. Underpinning every BPM initiative is a focus on creating and sharing professional process diagrams.

There are capabilities necessary to implement Smart Systems, where business people manage business logic in a business-like and agile fashion, with highest integrity, and deployable to any and many targets. These are the requirements satisfied by a BDMS, not by a BRMS 

At some time or another, most companies will likely experience a point in their development when business process management (BPM) will need to be adjusted in order to support growth, mitigate a challenge or respond to market trends. Exploring how multinational corporations such as Apple and Hewlett-Packard have handled such challenges can offer insight for managers looking to apply best practices to the unique situations facing their own organizations.

There is an exciting paradigm shift happening within the information systems (IS) field. This means a new breed of information systems is emerging as are new approaches for developing them. The good news is that business analysts may be more critical to the new paradigm than to past ones. 

Business process models are intuitive. That’s why people like them. They provide management blueprints for coordinating repetitive work. But are they sufficient for creating an optimal business solution for a business challenge? No. This discussion brings into focus some of their blind spots and what you can do to address them successfully.
 

If you’re looking to manage business activities on a business-process basis, stability is key. But business rules aren’t stable. In fact, many change quite rapidly. What should you do? Separate the business rules from the business process model, so the business process model can do its job.

There are considerable benefits from extending business process management capabilities outside the boundaries of the company, and clearly measurable value is much easier to quantify when stakeholders are outside the traditional walls of the business.

A swimlane diagram is a type of process flow diagram (also sometimes called a cross-functional diagram) that features divisions or "lanes." Each lane is assigned an actor (which may be an individual, department, division, group, machine, entity, and so on), or even a phase or stage in a process, that is responsible for the activity or work described in the lane.

More and more organizations are taking advantage of business process management (BPM) solutions. And yet, it is often the case that, after an initial success or two, the growth of BPM within a company stalls.

An enterprise exists for a purpose, stated in its high-level goals and business model. It also has everyday operations which may or may not serve this purpose. We need a link between the two and this is what Enterprise Architecture is about – the establishment of a link between an organization’s ultimate goals and its day-to-day operations.

The ownership of business processes is often a bone of contention – with various parties feeling that they should be considered the owner of certain processes and not of other processes. Inability to agree on ownership can lead to turf-wars when there are perceived overlaps, as well as impactful inaction when no clear owner has been identified.

This article analyses the source of ownership conflict, and makes suggestions regarding resolutions to the problem. It considers the issue of ownership, as well as the issue of custodianship.

In this article, I explain a project completed in the financial services industry. A client asked me to lead a project to redesign a failed sub-process that had resulted in billions of dollars of backed up financial transactions. This particular financial process had a history of failed and abandoned process improvement projects. The pressure was on and, I must confess, I was not entirely sure that The Decision Model would be a good fit.

I know many of you are still trying to get to grips with Service Oriented Architecture (SOA), so apologies in advance for the potential mental exertion and confusion of introducing Business Oriented Architecture (BOA).