The Leonardo Blog

Many presentations and publications explain how to run SAP projects in a process-centric manner; the mechanics of doing so are quite well known, even if not always followed. The critical element often missing is a clear and shared understanding of why you should run an SAP implementation project in a process-centric manner.

It’s Time For most organizations, the time has passed when improving performance can be achieved by ‘simply’ reducing budgets and assuming those affected will adjust to the change. After years of budget cuts and efficiency dividends, the easy changes are done, contingency resources are extinct, and further change is deep, structural, and difficult. The need to ‘do more with less’ seems both inevitable and impossible.

For many organizations, and their teams and people, there is a significant disconnect between strategy and process, between the mission-vision-values statements or their equivalents and the business process pathways that operationalize the strategy. Strategy development is inherently a top-down activity. Business process management and improvement is often conducted in a bottom-up or middle-out fashion. With the strategic view ‘coming down’ and the process view ‘going up’ there is a real chance that both fade to gray before they meet. In the resulting ‘gray zone’ the strategy loses its clarity and purpose and process activity fails to coalesce into holistic management practice. Too many organizations end up with two seemingly unrelated conceptual views of the enterprise: the strategy, perhaps with strategy themes and a strategy map, and the process view shaped as value chains, process hierarchies and detailed models. Nice PowerPoint, love the artwork — but no practical support for improvement aspirations. Developing a more coherent view of the inter-relationships between strategy and process makes it much more likely that the strategy will be executed and the processes will be effectively managed. Win-win. Let’s see how that might work.

We model to discover the secrets of the complex organisations in which we operate. The repository based modelling tools like ARIS provide various notations that can be mixed and matched to corner and tame that complexity. Our modelling tools contain reporting functionality that is often underutilised, misunderstood and in some cases even feared. However with some time and effort this functionality can unlock those hidden gems of information we promise ourselves, our colleagues and our customers.

What do you mean by “the question of who should manage it”? Isn’t it by default for the Office of BPM to manage it, as they own the tool? NO! The tool administration is highly technical and IT related and to be managed by the IT team, who already handle the server management system. How about outsourcing the complex administration work to the experts? Insights on who should manage the administration in BPM software tools are provided in the following section, which focuses on various models using business or IT to manage tool administration and their advantages and disadvantages.