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photo, Craig Schiff
In recent columns, we defined BPM (business performance management) and looked at the tangible benefits - quantifiable payback - it has delivered in practice. What follows is an overview of the steps you'll go through to bring performance management into your company. Take a quick look at the project life cycle diagram in Figure 1. You'll find it reassuringly familiar, with project phases you'd expect to see - starting with requirements definition. However, before you call an information technology (IT) project manager into your office and ask him or her to give you BPM, you should recognize that performance management definitely packs some differences. This will not be your typical IT initiative. It's instructive to look at what differentiates a BPM project from the software initiatives you have probably experienced in the last several years. With enterprise resource management (ERP) and customer relationship management (CRM), for example, the basic goals are well understood: you want to accurately record every transaction, customer, SKU (stock keeping unit) and shift of money. Because BPM is so young, there is no universal agreement on best practices, and simply deciding on the ideal functionality will trigger lengthy discussion. After assessing which business processes to engage with BPM, you'll then determine the number of existing systems in your company the BPM software will draw data from and what kinds of analysis will be most valuable. You'll need to choose which department(s) to address and, in each of those areas, which business processes could have the highest performance improvement. It's typical to begin with the finance department, and finance is often the principal driver of BPM within a company. Often, the CFO's first priority is to focus on a thorny process such as budgeting. As was the case with ERP, it's important to pause and determine if the process itself is okay or...