Everyone who enjoys cooking or baking will remember the early days of what it is like to follow a recipe. Does every single step have to be followed to a T or is there any wiggle room? As you grow in your skills, you learn to make adaptations on the fly and adjust for new situations (like when you are out of eggs!).
It’s a similar situation with BPM in your organization. There is a basic recipe (best practices from successful companies), but you learn to fine-tune it to your requirement through implementation and assessment.
Here are some universal BPM best practices that will help you no matter what your line of business.
Realistic over idealistic
When modeling or redesigning a process for efficiency, take into consideration how you actually work instead of how you should work. If you start process modeling from an idealistic point of view, the targets you set the team will become frustratingly impossible to achieve. On the other hand, when you begin stacking improvements to the process as is, you set realistic parameters and begin to see actual progress over time.
Break it down
When embarking on a BPM journey, it’s very common to get carried away with big picture goals and forget to deconstruct them into smaller targets. Anyone who takes seriously BPM recognizes that every essential step along the way may also be a set of other tasks. How small you want to granularize the topic is essential to finding the right BPM flow. Once you’ve decided how broken down you want the steps, prioritizing and finding areas for automation has a huge impact on your efficiency.
Establish the right KPI
When implementing a new process, the expectation is that it will demonstrate a reasonable return on investment (ROI). In order to report satisfactory ROI, it’s critical to establish the right key performance indicators (KPIs) at the very beginning. If the appropriate metrics are not monitored, presenting relevant results becomes messy and complicated.
One step after another
It’s a sound practice to work towards iterative gains rather than an all or nothing approach when it comes to boosting efficiency. Remember that BPM is a journey that comes with its own learning curve. Measure changes at reasonable intervals rather than obsessing over it.
Walk the line
Customer satisfaction and process efficiency are two very different things. In the beginning, it may seem like an efficient process alone could boost customer satisfaction, but the reality is that you’ll have to understand what factors could raise customer satisfaction and work them in at the process modeling stage.
Get the people involved
No BPM initiative is complete without a sound understanding of internal difficulties. It is a common pitfall to forget that processes involve people. Incorporating solutions to their challenges in your process design will ensure a higher likelihood of smooth sailing once the process is up and running.
Interview customers
Efficient processes can do more than reduce costs. They can also facilitate customer retention and grow your customer base. Reach out to existing customers and target audiences to understand their expectations. Insights from surveys and interviews can provide useful when redesigning existing processes.
Appoint a champion
Pick a technical team member to champion the BPM efforts with employees involved in the process. This person will take on the responsibility of helping to overcome resistance to new processes while furthering BPM implementation. This champion will work alongside the project manager to deliver the outcomes that CXOs expect. She/he will also act as a bridge to the other performers in the process.
Show, don’t tell
It’s commonly acknowledged that earning buy-ins from heads of organizations as well as teams is challenging. You can make BPM buy-in a little easier by being as demonstrative as possible with new ideas and presentations. Everything looks great on paper but to make a compelling case for implementation, you need to back your ideas with data, demos, and prototypes.
Check the suitability of BPM tool
If your BPM tool is not suited to your company’s actual requirements, it’s essentially a serious waste of resources and counterintuitive to your efforts. Take into consideration technological requirements, organizational capabilities, process requirements, and availability of financial resources before settling on an effective BPM tool.
All things considered, with BPM best practices, it’s always best to adopt a customized and nuanced approach to your organization’s needs. The initiatives taken to improve processes shouldn’t become a sinkhole of time and effort at the end of the day.
A compelling BPM tool
Kissflow can set you on the right path to process improvement from the get-go. A cloud-based, no-coding needed BPM tool, Kissflow can integrate with your existing applications with ease. With customizable notifications, you can boost productivity and accountability. Comprehensive dashboards and powerful reporting can improve the transparency of processes and provide valuable insight. Kissflow’s BPM ease of scale makes it the perfect partner for your company’s vision of growth.
Sign up for a free trial to get your BPM efforts going the right way.
