Pain-Free BPM

6. Sometimes it's OK to 'pave the cowpath.' International has automated 23 processes, yet there has never been talk of "reengineering" the company.

"We ended up paving the cowpath in a lot of places," Bauermeister says. "We took some of the key processes that are executed in high volumes [in some cases thousands of instances a year], streamlined them and stripped away the clutter."

International still reaped time and cost savings without having to make employees dramatically change their work habits. For example, the company's 1,000 or so engineers used to spend a lot of their time tracking projects and negotiating with people in process. Now they can see instantly where a project is and who's working on it, cutting process times by up to 40 percent and placing the emphasis on solving problems.

7. Give new processes a consistent look and feel. To keep training time and costs to a minimum and breed familiarity, use consistent process design approaches, interfaces and terminology. Once you've rolled out three or four similar processes, adjusting to new workflows becomes routine for employees. At International, the drop-down lists, colors and help menus are identical across all processes.

"If they've seen it before, they'll say, 'Oh yeah, this is just another workflow,'" Thompson says.

8. Take advantage of vendor training. BPM systems are complicated, typically consisting of a programming component, a modeling component, repositories, metadata and integration features that all need to be understood. Vendors usually offer training on their development environments and design tools, but organizations seldom take advantage.

"One thing we learned is that we could have done more better and sooner had we made better use of vendor training," says Vernon Stinebaker, a vice president at iUniverse. The e-book publisher didn't have the budget to fly a trainer to China, where its development team is based, and Stinebaker is convinced that slowed the project down. "I would recommend to anyone investing in a system to take vendor training so they're more effective with the tool more quickly," he says.

9. Appoint a process owner. The process owner is the person who defines a process, owns it once it's implemented, handles related questions and requests, and coordinates training. The process owner also mediates when different groups want the process handled in divergent ways.

"People will try to latch on to a process and have it do things it wasn't intended to do simply because they can," says Bauermeister of International. "The process owner has to fend these activities off and keep the process clean."

Process owners should be low enough in the trenches to understand a process, yet at a high enough level to be responsible for most of the participants in a process. If there's no process owner, the developer, by default, becomes the process owner.

10. Don't give up — keep automating new processes. The companies that fail at BPM are typically those that buy the software, attempt to create one application and then give up because the first project is difficult or time-consuming.

"In the beginning, you don't know what you can do," says Melanie Gross, IT principal associate at International. "It took us almost eight months to develop our first process. If we had given up, we wouldn't have the 23 new processes we have today. There's a learning curve, not only in getting used to the software but in getting people into a process-oriented mindset."

These lessons should help you plan for an effective BPM deployment, focused on the right priorities and prepared for realistic outcomes. Take heart: you can get the gain without the pain.