One of the issues for Business Process Management (BPM) projects is that 100% of all actions must be present. You can not have a missing action or hole in the middle of a business process and expect users to be able to complete a process. In most cases, holes are the “unwritten” business rules usually in the form of exceptions and almost impossible to capture during a normal requirements process. A significant benefit of BPM applications is that adding these unwritten rules to the process models can be done in hours or in a few days. With classic applications, even small changes might take weeks or months, to rework the source code.
This ability to easily change an application can lead to an overabundance of analysis, never allowing a process design to finish. This was the subject of a recently published Gartner Group article on Business Process Management (subscription required). Gartner’s conjecture on why a process design is never finished is that knowledge comes in cycles and the first implementation is not going to be the best. This is easy to understand, feedback on something that users can touch and feel, is easier to obtain then from a requirements document. Even the ones I deliver J
The question is when do you stop the feedback and change requests and deliver a product? Gartner’s article concludes that organizations need to create post-implementation teams and to train staff to think in process flow terms. They understand that the “go-live” implementation will not be the final model and further tweaks will be needed. Gartner recommendations are great for companies that manage the process in-house. What happens when companies are hiring external consultants or the BPM package provider is implementing the application? Change requests are tightly defined in the contracting phase, which means the result of the contract is a final product that will not be the best implementation or the project may run into cost overruns.
So, how does one align the contract terms to the capabilities of the BPM applications to deliver an implementation that provides the best solution?
More to come…