The purist view of BPI is that it is a quantum leap rather than a step-change for businesses. Radical transformation is BPI's intent, but it often falls short of that goal. Even when they face possible corporate demise, many businesses do not really have the appetite for radical transformation, and settle for the half-way house of process re-engineering instead. But this does not have to be considered a failure...
If necessity is the mother of invention, then the customer is the father of business process improvement.
While these two buzzwords are unlikely bedfellows, they are inextricably linked...and SOA is a key enabler in propelling BPI initiatives within an organization.
Is business process improvement best done through evolution or revolution? And what are the differences?
Given IT has played a significant role in business since the 1960s, it seems almost inconceivable that CIOs are still alignment challenged. Perhaps the challenge isn’t so much getting aligned but staying aligned given the pace and nature of change companies must cope with and adapt to in today’s global economies.
Most scope management frameworks are designed around the definition of a finite scope based on limited knowledge and advocating tight controls to manage change. The challenge is how to weave change and scope recalibration rules into the fabric of the project. Here are eight strategies you might find useful in meeting the challenge.
More than ever, business process improvement/re-engineering (BPI/BPR) is gaining recognition as a critical success factor in sustaining the growth and profitability of businesses. With these gains comes a plethora of tool kits, methodologies and technologies all promising to be the end-all, be-all solution.
How did you improve today? By making BPI an integral part of your company’s culture.
Oh no! The enterprise business process improvement initiative also has a communication strategy that may not coordinate with your project. What do you do?
Now that 2008 has limped out on a broken economy, we look to 2009 for technology trends and, most importantly, priorities. Limited budgets will certainly lead to less spending in all sectors, but where will wise managers be spending those precious funds?
The trick to effectively using scorecards to monitor your success is in determining what and how to measure. Luckily, BPI gives you the perfect vehicle for driving that process forward.
Here’s our March 2010 roundup of recently published books recommended by and for project management professionals, including the latest thinking on leadership … a primer on earned scheduling performance … guides to business process improvement initiatives and preparing for PMI certifications … a business analysis glossary … and more.
The state of the CIO is stagnant, according to the latest industry surveys. We've taken a look at what they say and boiled them down to the essential message for CIOs: align or die.
With the emphasis on their ability to drive change, there is a growing requirement for CIOs also to change; they need to become Change Management Officers. So what will it take for CIOs to add organizational change management to their repertoire of expertise?
In this installment on requirements, we will walk through the methodology for identifying IPOs, the functional data model and briefly address level of effort estimating.
Requirements management can mean many things to many people. For some it is about managing scope creep, for others it is all about traceability from definition through implementation. With that in mind, let’s explore some of the issues and challenges currently confronting effective requirements management.
For many organizations, projects are a mystery because they do not follow any prescribed process that is routine and operational in nature. The outcomes are inconsistent and the dependence on specific individuals is high. So what will it take for projects to be considered a normal business function of organizations?
Aligning IT with the business doesn't mean just supporting the goals of the enterprise. IT departments also have to learn how to align culturally with the rest of the business. That means getting the techies and the suits into the same sandbox, which can be a real challege for a CIO.
This writer has realized that improvement is the wrong word. Instead, the concept should be Business Process Alignment. And IT is not alone in the quest for alignment--business goals are often misaligned with stakeholder expectations, policies rarely reflect alignment and business processes are in need of continuous recalibration.
Here's why business driven, data structured process improvement methods work best.
This article will outline how to start selling the concept of business process improvement that aligns to business stakeholders expectations.
The CIO stands on unique ground when undertaking business process improvements: right in the middle of technology, business and people.
One of the most tedious parts of a new project is creating the work plan. But what has recently occurred to this writer is that all projects basically comprise predictable and pre-definable groups of tasks. How much can be defined for project work plans to make your life easier?
The U.K. government's Computer-National Offender Management Service project ran into trouble last August when it was halted due to cost overruns. Following a review, the original scope was recently abandoned amid criticism for the way in which the government handled it. C-NOMIS is the latest in a number of high profile U.K. government IT project failures. What can you learn from it? Read on.
Packaged, vertical solutions are changing the integration landscape, providing customers with practical, affordable approaches that deliver the benefits of integration.
Packaged, vertical solutions have the potential to change the integration landscape greatly for the better.
The IT Infrastructure Library recently underwent a major revision to version 3. Here we look at five major phases--or books--that represent ITIL’s new lifecycle approach to service management.
We all recognize the need for a way to prioritize and oversee which projects get done in what order. With all the good things that flow from a strong ITPM function, why doesn’t every organization embrace the concept? What is the resistance all about?
The secret to rapidly capturing requirements lays in understanding the business processes that the application is suppose to leverage and support. And it is in the gap between how things work today and how they need to work to achieve core business objectives that the fruit of the requirements tree can be harvested.
