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Want to benchmark your BPM capability and get planning insight… free?
Monday, December 12, 2011 by Neil Ward-Dutton
Over the past few days a very timely discussion has been sloshing to and fro on ebizQ, based around the question: “Is it a mistake to think a BPMS will improve your processes?”
Our experience is that driving success with BPM techniques and technologies requires a holistic approach to capability improvement – you have to work on skills, culture, management orientation and a host of other things, as well as being prepared to invest in technology.
It’s easy to say this, of course – but it can be hard to do. Building momentum to make wide-ranging changes to an organisation can be difficult: the “silver bullet” approach to technology procurement (or the ‘Field of Dreams Fallacy‘, as David Brakoniecki puts it) is very seductive. In other words: it’s much easier to concentrate on buying a cool tool than it is to get down and wrestle with some of the wider issues.
So – to help organisations with interest in BPM understand their maturity or readiness and help them build the case for more substantive change, we’ve developed what we think is a pretty damn cool online BPM Capability Benchmark and Planning tool. You can start using it, now, for free, by visiting our tools pages.
Here’s a quick run-down of how it works.
- Go to the online BPM Capability Benchmark and Planning tool. (You’ll need to have a free Guest Pass account to use the tool. It only takes a minute to sign up and verify your account.)
- Complete the online self-assessment survey. It’s split into five dimensions: lifecycle, organisation, architecture and technology.
- Save your work at any time and come back to it whenever you like to add more responses or make changes (the assessment is pretty thorough, so you might want to consult with colleagues/get more information/have a think about it and then return to complete it when you’re ready.)
- At the end of the assessment, select to calculate your competence levels – and get your high level results immediately.Your results are saved so you can return to the tool at any time; this makes it easy to re-run the calculation as you make progress and as more benchmark data is added.
For more detailed benchmarking information (providing a breakdown for your geography, industry and company size) and a personalised action plan that highlights ‘next steps’ you should think about taking to improve your capability, you can elect to generate a really nice, professional-looking personalised BPM Action Plan report (this costs just £49). Once you’ve purchased the report, it’s available to you indefinitely: each time you run the report from our site, it’ll be re-generated to take account of any updates you’ve made to your assessment and also to update your benchmarks against your peer group.
One of our testers, Sebastiaan Van den Wingaert – BPM Manager within a large shipping company actively involved in a major BPM programme – gave us a great quote:
“This is a really easy-to-use tool that gets straight to the point. The assessment confirmed that we’re heading in the right direction, but also prompted me to put additional management focus in some areas. The recommendations in our report are actually a great representation of what we have to focus on next, and are written in a way that all our stakeholders can understand.”
This is the first release in what will grow to be a bigger set of online tools over the next few months, and we’re really excited about this development. We’ve tried to ensure that anyone involved in a BPM project or programme will find the tool useful as a way to orient themselves and identify priorities for development.
So – have at it! And please do let us know of any feedback you might have.