How to cut your BPM budget

According to The Economist, 2009 will be the year of the CFO. After reading Lucy Kellaway's article in The Economist earlier this year, I can't seem to get the image of a maniacal axe-wielding CFO, lopping off departmental budgets, out of my head. À la French Revolution, the mantra would probably be "off with their heads!" Except, with a CFO, it's probably more like, "Off with their bloated budgets!"

In her article, Lucy promoted the CFO as "the new king" in the corporate world.  For CIOs and the line of business managers, this means an even greater scrutiny on the justification of the value of new and existing business solutions, coupled with an intense drive to reduce development and IT operating costs. Fortunately for CIOs with existing BPM initiatives, CFOs understand the vernacular of process improvement and can easily wrap their minds around traditional ROI metrics for BPM - efficiency, productivity, cost control, etcetera. This means your BPM initiative will probably not get the full axe from the CFO. Instead, a haircut or a little trimming might do. "Where to cut, and where not to cut. That is the question." Obviously, my Shakespeare is not what it used to be. Based on recent customer inquiries and interviews, Forrester found that many BPM projects exceeded their budgets due to:

The blind leading the blind. Mismatched roles are a common and costly budgetbuster on BPM projects. A common example: when business analysts are assigned to lead process discovery. During the first phase of a BPM project, process discovery often sets the tone and pace of the entire project. If the wrong person, or personality type, is leading discovery, the impact will be felt across all phases of the project - and most importantly on the project timeline and expense sheet. Eliminate this budget-buster by recruiting and promoting analysts that eat, sleep, and breathe process.

Consensus log jams. Remember all that advice your BPM suites sales representative gave you on smashing department silos? As it turns out, killing the silos, or zapping the whitespace (or whatever else your rep said) is pretty hard stuff. Getting those nutty people in marketing to see eye-to-eye with the bean counting accounts payables team just isn't that easy; and the time it takes to build process consensus across these disconnected teams is crushing your original project budget. Eliminate this budget-buster by ebracing revolutionary requirements and adopting tools, such as process wikis, to accelerate consensus and buy-in at all levels.

Waterfall mindset. Recently, a friend who leads government BPM projects commented that "budgets don't last forever." This revelation made me think. As a former lead on government BPM projects myself, I recall sitting through many requirements sessions waiting for the paint to dry - both literally and figuratively. As a staple on both commercial and government projects, the 'waterfall' methodology emphasizes defining all requirements upfront and locking them in throughout development. This may sound like a great idea, until you realize that only 7 percent of requested requirements are actually used "all the time" after the solution is delivered. So what about the other 93 percent of requirements, you ask? Another 13 percent are "often" used, and another 16 percent are used "sometimes", according to Craig Larman's Agile and Iterative Development: A Manager's Guide. That leaves something like "a lot" percent that's not used at all. If that's not enough to make you scratch your head, then I recommend you get ready for that axe I mentioned earlier. Eliminate this budget buster by adopting an agile and lean mindset that emphasizes delivering value over delivering requirements. So, although The Economist predicts that 2009 will be the 'Year of the CFO,' the next several years will also belong to BPM. Just ask the BPM vendors - they're all crowing about how well they're doing in the down economy. Cutting through the hype of BPM, pragmatic companies will continue to expand adoption and standardization of BPM usage throughout the enterprise. However, to keep your BPM out of the CFO crosshairs, use 2009 as a year to go lean and prove the value that BPM brings to the company. CIO