BUSINESS PROCESS MANAGEMENT

Practical Guidelines to Successful Implementation

 

Review by: Marcus Price, Agilier Ltd

"This is a very thorough, detailed and up-to-date book. It provides

a step-by-step guide to the baselining, improvement and

management of business processes in a methodology-neutral and

technology-agnostic way, and filled with real-world case studies.

Every serious practitioner will want to keep this book close to

hand.

Detailed review:

The book takes a holistic, organisational approach to BPM; automation via

IT projects is rightly treated as one of only several possible mechanisms

for change. The key point made is that the organisation’s business

processes have to be improved prior to automation, otherwise all that

automation will do is magnify the inefficiencies within the processes.

In discussing this topic, the book also touches on a number of other

business hot-topics, such as service-oriented architecture; process

improvement frameworks such as Six-Sigma; compliance directives such

as Sarbanes-Oxley; and outsourcing.

Framework

Jeston and Nelis provide a ten-phase framework to BPM and suggest ways

of customising these to match the primary method of commencing a BPM

project: a strategy-driven approach (top down); or an operationalinitiative

approach (lower level)."