Succeeding in a BPM project

Successfully implementing a business process automation solution ( BPM software ) can be complex. Most often, a digital transformation project is costly in terms of time and resources, not to mention the potential human and technical obstacles that the project may encounter. To succeed in a BPM project, it is important to involve teams at all levels and to adopt different best practices from the beginning of the project. If you are looking to automate your business processes, follow our advice and methodology to achieve your objectives quickly and smoothly!

Business Process Management solutions have proven themselves in recent years, particularly in the industrial sector. Today, all sectors are seeking to accelerate their digitalization through business process automation solutions. Onboarding new employees , managing complaints, non-conformities, managing calls for tenders, suppliers and purchases, or administrative or compliance processes… so many areas of application that are destined to automate their workflows.

Often, it is the business managers who are the triggers for a BPM project. They are aware of the business issues that their employees encounter every day. And they seek to find solutions to improve the productivity and well-being of the teams. Maybe this is your case?

We regularly encounter projects where management elects an “innovation manager”, “process manager” or even “ digital transformation manager ” (regardless of the job title) in order to carry out the modernization and automation of certain processes.

Regardless of the origin of the request, one element that seems essential to us in the success of a digital transformation project is to involve the stakeholders, and this at all levels. In 98% of cases*, the success of a project depends solely on human factors. Thanks to the advice and best practices in this article, you will be able to put all the chances on your side to achieve your objectives.

*figure given completely at random but which should not be far from the truth.

What is BPM?

Business Process Management (BPM) is an approach whose goal is to optimize the operation of a company through its business processes. Business processes correspond to the activities that a company must carry out to achieve its objectives.

BPA, for Business Process Automation, allows processes to be brought to life and automated using a software solution. The goal of BPA is to automate manual tasks without added value and to facilitate exchanges between employees. BPA helps streamline workflow by improving daily efficiency.

Therefore BPA is part of BPM but a BPM project is not systematically BPA.

Why do some digital transformation projects fail?

Most of the pitfalls in a digital transformation project occur because of a poorly defined need. It is vital to identify this initial need and to formalize it well. The initial need corresponds to the backbone of the project and we tend to lose sight of it over time. But even with a project that is very well formalized from the start, it can turn into a disaster.

70% of digital transformation projects fail according to a study conducted by McKinsey among more than 3,000 executives.

There are several other reasons why a digital transformation project may fail. Let’s keep in mind that every detail counts because the accumulation of minor errors has a snowball effect.

You may have seen around you an attempt to implement a new IT tool. How successful was it? Does this new tool fulfill its mission? What was its acceptance rate among employees?

Poor structuring of the need can lead to a poor choice of technical solution, the involvement of the wrong people, poor budget calibration leading to additional costs.

Beyond the financial, human and time resources lost, the major risk is ending up with a solution that no one uses. This is a problem that happens more often than you might think.

75% of our clients are business managers without specific IT knowledge.

Our advice for a successful BPM project

Let’s get down to business, here are some tips that we believe are essential for the success of a BPM project. At Iterop, we deal with different projects every day, and yet, those who adopt the right methodology from the beginning of their thinking succeed in achieving their goals in just a few weeks.

Here are our tips:

Define project milestones

One of our first tips is to define the different stages of the project. Depending on the complexity, you will be required to build a precise schedule or, on the contrary, just have in mind the mandatory stages and milestones. Defining the timing of the project allows you to measure the scale of the actions to be carried out and think about the different resources to be allocated.

Examples of milestones:

Define the needs
Obtain feedback from a collaborator located at the heart of the problem
Assess the resources required (human, financial and technical resources)
Write a specification
Launch a call for tender
Validate a rapid proof of concept
Implement the solution
Obtain feedback and continually evolve the solution

This advice also helps you understand where you stand in the digital transformation of your business. Are my processes formalized? What tools do I already use to run my workflows (spreadsheet, email, paper form, end-of-life software, etc.)? Or are my processes already automated and digitalized (if that’s the case, you wouldn’t be asking yourself all these questions).

At Iterop, our consultants support you from the early stages of your project. We have defined a proven methodology to ensure that each process automation project is a success. This approach, represented by the diagram below, allows you to quickly understand at what stages of the project you are.

No matter the size of your project, taking the time up front to think through the different stages and milestones of the project will help speed up its future implementation. You will thus increase the acceptance rate of the project by involving the right resources.

Define the scope of the project

Framing the scope of the project allows you to identify the need and set limits. It is important to set a framework so as not to go off in all directions. This step requires a little time because it requires you to take a step back and question your own functioning.

To confirm your hypotheses, you will need to interview key people around you to understand their daily lives. You may also need to map the tools in place and evaluate their functionalities.

The goal is to have as many key elements in hand as possible and to obtain a clear vision of the project. Before digitizing business processes , it is essential to understand them well and ask yourself the right questions. Do I have a single process? Ten processes? How many actors are at the heart of the workflow? How much software is involved? Does the process involve external people? Is my process a cross-functional, multi-service process?

To succeed in a digital transformation project for your company , we recommend starting small. It would be risky to want to digitalize everything at once, it would be a much too huge project that would generate multiple problems (technical, software, time, change management, etc.).

Framing the project scope is about asking the right questions and having a clear vision of what the process should do. Start with a pebble-in-the-shoe process, a key, functional process with a clear objective and where the benefits will be felt quickly.

Set a clear goal

Setting a clear goal is the key to success. A process with a clear goal to achieve should make it clear what the process is for.

Examples of process objectives:

Reduce processing times
Reduce the number of exchanges
Reduce the rate of non-compliance
…

Improving customer satisfaction, for example, is not a good objective. It is rather the result of an action as is to reduce the response time which results in improved satisfaction. A good process objective must be measurable with key performance indicators (KPIs).

Also, with a clearly defined process objective, you will no longer be tempted to want to answer all the issues at the risk of being overwhelmed by countless details. It is not uncommon, at the beginning of a project, for all the players in the process to invite themselves with their list of grievances. If this is the case, try not to lose track among all the ideas and take up the priorities in order to meet the objective.

Start by defining the ideal process path, what is its nominal operation? Then add details and usages. For us, this is the very definition of agility to quickly achieve results and value.

The idea is to start by validating a functional concept and to make it evolve quickly instead of embarking on a huge project with months of development planned. This is the case of certain digital transformation projects carried out internally or by ESNs that no longer correspond to the initial objective after months of work. These projects inevitably find themselves at an impasse after having wasted enormous resources. We are sure that you have already come across some…

If your goal is to get from point A to point B, start with a skateboard instead of trying to build a Ferrari. This will validate the concept and nominal operation. Soon you will be able to add value and improvements by evolving it.

Make sure you never forget the goal of the process.

Identify the resources to be mobilized

In order to obtain everyone’s buy-in, it is important to quickly identify the different resources to be mobilized. By resources, we are talking about identifying all the stakeholders who will enable the success of the BPM project . These are people who will need to be quickly involved in the discussions in order to address their concerns and obtain their buy-in.

Examples of stakeholders in a digital transformation project:

Collaborators involved in the process
Decision-makers (managers, business managers, etc.)
The IT Department

Often projects fail or are slowed down in their progress because one or more people were not consulted early enough. They may realize the technical non-feasibility, raise risks of decommissioning or make a political decision…

The finance and budget allocated to the project are also part of the resources to be identified. It will be easier to achieve your objectives by having a precise budget envelope. Unlike ESNs and the development of business solutions, a BPM SaaS solution allows you to avoid hidden costs.

When analyzing resources, you can also ask yourself which resources formulate the specifications, which implement the solution and which retain the technical skills and know-how after implementation?

Succeeding in convincing and obtaining the approval of the right resources helps to limit risks and create positive dynamics around the BPM project.

Find the solution to use

Finding the right software solution to use is often the recurring question in the pre-project phase. This question sometimes comes up much too early and we even tend to orient the project around the solution and its technical characteristics. For us, this is clearly a mistake.

If you followed our previous advice, you should have a fairly well-defined specification where the business needs are correctly identified. If this is the case, you can now think about the technical solution that perfectly meets your needs.

We too often have requests where the project consists of tweaking the features of our BPM software . In this case, we prefer to review the specifications and check the initial need. Recently we had the case of a client who wanted to validate and store a document in Iterop. Iterop is made to manage the entire validation part but not to store the document. It is then advisable to connect to your EDM (document management) to automate the archiving part.

Despite the breadth of possibilities offered by a BPM solution, there are technical and functional limitations. The question is worth asking: do I really need a BPM solution to meet my needs?

Discover our guide to the BPM approach to understand its challenges and how our BPM solution works.

Keep in mind that it is the need that determines the choice of the final solution to adopt and not the other way around.

Have one or more internal sponsors

As we have seen previously, the success of a BPM project depends on the teams’ buy-in to the project. We recommend going beyond buy-in and finding one or two collaborators located at the heart of the project who will be sponsors/leaders/ambassadors/referents of the solution.

This person or people must be involved in the project, they must understand and know the business issues. They will be the first people to test the solution and provide feedback.

What should the sponsor’s profile be? Ideally, the sponsor should have clearly understood the objective of the project, should be able to give feedback and should be able to communicate easily with the teams. This person does not necessarily have to be technical, and it is not necessary for them to know how to configure processes. For us, the sponsor is a relay to disseminate and pass on information.

Without a sponsor, located at the heart of the project, the implementation of the solution can be compromised as well as its daily use by the teams. All the efforts devoted to the project would then be useless.

A good business process is a living process, which is not fixed and which evolves over time. Who else but the ambassador would be best placed to be able to propose these improvements and bring the process to life? The sponsor is a key element of the BPM project throughout its life cycle.

The adoption of a BPM solution by teams requires the establishment of a sponsor dedicated to the project. It is imperative to find a new sponsor if the first one were to leave the company.

Involve the teams

In the resource mobilization section, we talk a lot about human resources to convince. Here, we want to take the time to repeat and emphasize a central point: knowing how to involve teams from start to finish.

All collaborators and future project stakeholders have their role to play, even if only in the adoption and use of the solution. We too often encounter projects where change management has been botched. Users are faced with a new system that has been imposed on them overnight without understanding the issues involved. The results? General frustration. Users are dragging their feet and not getting involved in the solution. Project leaders blame the teams’ unwillingness. The project is stagnating, no one seems to want to budge and find solutions. We will have to redouble our efforts to reverse the trend and get everyone moving in the same direction.

As you might expect, no one wants such an outcome. That is why, from the early stages of the project, it is necessary to find solutions and techniques to get the various stakeholders involved. Change management is a mandatory step for any digital transformation project.

Moreover, even if you have done everything possible to do well, you will certainly encounter some resistance.

It is important to anticipate all the stages of change, especially the difficult phases of denial, anger, rejection, etc.

It is your role, with the support of management, managers and ambassadors, to reverse the trend so that the fall is as smooth as possible. It is necessary to ensure that the first part of the curve is as smooth as possible and to reach the acceptance and experimentation phase quickly.

Having identified and clearly defined the need allows all stakeholders to better understand the issues. It is necessary to surround yourself and obtain the support of all to successfully implement a BPM solution.

Our secret to accelerating change management?

One of the big secrets to facilitating change management is to get results quickly in order to convince your employees that you made the right choice. And to do this, you will need to have a solution that is flexible and easy to use enough to achieve this goal.

With ITEROP, 93% of our customers have set up a first project in less than 1 month.

Example of methodology: 5 days to automate a business process

Day 1: Identifying a key process

To ensure the success of a first BPM project, it is important to start by identifying a key and functional process. Indeed, it will be easier to quickly identify the benefits brought after the implementation of the solution.

You should not hesitate to note, on a document, upstream of the project the current issues and statistics. For example, if you already had indicators in place, you could easily compare the before/after the implementation of Iterop, in particular thanks to our KPI creation tool.

After identifying this key process, set yourself a goal to achieve (reduce processing time, secure data, reduce non-conformities, speed up production, etc.).

At one of our clients, specializing in wealth management, one in two files contained errors or omitted documents. Following the implementation of a formalized process by Iterop, all applications are now complete and the company’s turnover has increased. The objective set by management before the implementation was achieved with a project processing time reduced by 40%.

Day 2: Discussions with process stakeholders

The stakeholders and users of the future process are the key to the success of the BPM project. It is therefore necessary to involve them from the reflection phase. For you, who are in charge of implementing the project, it is important to understand how it works and to identify with the stakeholders what measures or changes would help improve the process.

The purpose of these exchanges is also to support change management. It is not the operation itself that is changing for your teams but rather the management of information between the stakeholders. It is therefore necessary to reassure them and support them throughout the project. Do not hesitate to highlight the various benefits brought by this evolution.

For the project to be a success and to ensure everyone’s buy-in, a leader who is supportive of the project will be essential. Their goal is to ensure that the implementation runs smoothly and to answer employees’ questions. They will also be able to promote the results to the teams.

The after-sales service of one of our customers had difficulty effectively monitoring the status of customer complaints and negative customer reviews tended to accumulate. Management therefore decided to implement Iterop and appointed a process pilot. The audit phase lasted two days, the steps were formalized with the entire after-sales service team and everyone was able to integrate the various changes as the meetings progressed. Today, employees can track an entire file in real time with just a few clicks. Processing times have been divided by three, leading to a clear improvement in customer satisfaction.

Day 3: Digitalization of the first version of the process

With the drawing tool available in Iterop, you can create a process in just a few clicks (discover examples of BPM processes ). Using the elements of the BPMN 2.0 standard, you model a first process using boxes and arrows. The idea is to formalize a first version that will then be improved. The goal here is not to draw hundreds of steps. You have to try to have a synthetic vision of the process. In Iterop Design, you can then create users, define their rights and assign them tasks. Once configured, you will only have to deploy your process to your teams and test it.

Secondly, you have the possibility to define automatic tasks (sending emails, reminders, data recovery, etc.) and to connect to your tools ( ERP + BPM , CRM, database, etc.).

Toulouse Métropole used Iterop and its speed of deployment to dematerialize its entire purchasing process. In 5 days the process was deployed and the first requests were taken into account. Iterop was chosen to overcome the difficulty of implementing a solution purely dedicated to purchasing, but longer and more complex to integrate. Today, the teams model and improve their processes in complete autonomy.

On average with Iterop, our customers deploy a first configured and automated process in less than 5 days.

Day 4: Implementation and monitoring

Once your process is implemented with the teams, you will monitor in real time the different activities, the time spent per task, which steps are blocking the progress of the process, etc.

With the statistics and indicator tools, you create dynamic dashboards into which your monitoring graphs are integrated.

In addition, it is also very important to take into account user feedback. At Iterop, processes are not fixed and we advocate the continuous improvement of each process.

In large organizations, managers define dashboards by teams and share all the necessary KPIs with employees. This way, everyone knows at all times where the production implementation is at, for example.

Day 5: Process improvement and analysis

As you use it, you will be able to modify your processes without interrupting ongoing activities. Your collaborators will not be disturbed in any way. You can thus modify the path of a branch, reassign a task, change the delay of a timer, the new version of your process will be instantly accessible. One of the great advantages of Iterop is that you do not need to call on specific development and take five days to modify a process.

One of our clients manages its ISO 9001 certification only with Iterop. During internal audits and various process reviews, the quality manager can directly integrate in a few clicks the improvements suggested by employees to improve the system.