1. Ignite the Spark!
How to Stop Talking and Start quot;Doingquot; BPM
Today
Overview
Getting started on any project isn’t easy, especially if it’s new
to you: how many times have you procrastinated on a home
renovation project because you didn’t have the right tools, or
weren’t quite sure how to get started? Business Process
Management (BPM) projects are no different, but like that
home renovation, it’s not that hard to get started with
something simple that still has a major impact.
In this paper, we’ll look at the barriers to getting started with
BPM, and how to break through those barriers to start your
BPM project sooner. The intended audience includes:
• Business owners or analysts who are interested in
deploying a process application, but are waiting for IT
to approve the tools to get started, gather requirements
© 2007 Kemsley Design Ltd. or clear their project backlog.
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• IT professionals or strategists who already know that
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BPM technologies can do so much more than workflow
and are itching to provide organizational value but
can’t convince the business of success, gather usable
requirements, or find an owner and budget.

2. Don’t Wait for IT
A main barrier to getting started with BPM is that the
business area is waiting for the IT department to kick things
off and provide them with both the tools and the expertise.
Since BPM is such a business-focused endeavour, that’s
unlikely to happen without a strong push from the business
side.
The business knows the business processes, but more
importantly, the business lives with the pain points within
those processes every day. Who better, then, to start looking
at how BPM can address those pain points? It’s time to put
the “business” back in “BPM”, and drive the process modeling
efforts from the business side of the organization.
The key contribution that the business area can make to get
started on a BPM project is to start modeling those processes,
but it’s important to use a process modeling tool that
provides structure, helps create best practices in modeling,
enforces the use of standards such as the Business Process
Modeling Notation (BPMN), and provides process simulation
and other analysis functionality. Don’t wait for IT to provide
you with the right tool, just find a good one and start
© 2007 Kemsley Design Ltd. modeling – the benefits of early modeling will far outweigh
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www.column2.com any costs to convert to a new modeling tool later on.
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It’s important to recognize that process modeling, even when
done in the business area, still requires analysis skills and
some lightweight technology knowledge. Identifying the right

3. business people to do the job is critical to creating an
accurate model of your business.
No Budget? No Problem!
A second common barrier to getting started is the lack of
high-level commitment – and therefore lack of a budget – to
take on a BPM initiative. This often occurs when upper
management isn’t convinced of the value of BPM, or hasn’t
even heard of BPM.
It doesn’t necessarily take a lot of money to get started,
however: if you can spare the time of the business people to
do the modeling, there are a number of inexpensive
downloadable and software-as-a-service process modeling
tools that don’t require IT’s involvement to get started. For
example, Savvion’s Process Modeler can be downloaded and
installed on your desktop at no cost (visit
www.savvion.com/startnow), yet provides an easy-to-use
process modeling environment that includes process
simulation and other analysis tools.
This new generation of inexpensive process modeling tools
has a low learning curve to allow you to get started quickly
without external training or consulting, yet provide the
© 2007 Kemsley Design Ltd.
www.kemsleydesign.com structure and support that you need to create best practices
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in modeling. Furthermore, if used in conjunction with that
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vendor’s BPM suite, you will have already created the
specification for the working application that will be deployed
into production. This helps avoid any “lost in translation”
issues – like those that occur when using a standalone

4. diagramming tool like Visio – where the requirements have to
be interpreted before design time.
Keep It Simple
The third main barrier to getting started with BPM projects is
getting stuck in “analysis paralysis”, trying to figure out
which business processes to examine, and to what depth. It’s
natural to want to tackle all of your problem processes
simultaneously, but that’s not realistic, especially if you’re
trying to do this on a shoestring budget and in a short
timeframe.
The key here is to select a high-value process where you can
expect to see a positive return on investment (ROI) from BPM,
but carve out a manageable piece of it for your initial efforts.
Pick a real customer-facing process, not an internal
administrative process: success with such a process is what’s
going to capture the executive-level attention that you need to
get the budget and sponsorship for the implementation
phases of the project. These solutions can be built and
deployed rapidly, in as little as 90 days, so a quick win can
help build momentum for future BPM projects down the line.
It’s also important to control scope creep, a major cause of
© 2007 Kemsley Design Ltd.
www.kemsleydesign.com analysis paralysis: learn to say “no” when someone wants to
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add in just one more part of the overall business process to
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your first modeling project. Many people are concerned that
they’re only going to get one shot at BPM, and have to do it
all at once, but today’s agile BPM tools allow business
processes to be extended and modified easily. You don’t need

5. to do it all at once when you have the right tools for
incremental process improvement. Show that first success,
then build on it.
Remember, the key is to select a subset of your business
process where you can demonstrate business value from
BPM, not to solve everyone’s process problems in the first
implementation. That will come in time once you build a
repeatable process improvement engine.
Benefits of Process Modeling
Embarking on a process modeling project can provide a
number of benefits, even before the processes are
implemented in a BPM system:
• Introspection breeds change. The very act of examining
your business processes will inspire new thinking
about how they can be improved; you’ll almost
certainly find immediate improvements that can be
made to the manual processes, as well as modifications
that can be enabled by process automation. You
cannot hope to improve a process unless you articulate
it first and see what you’re dealing with.
© 2007 Kemsley Design Ltd.
www.kemsleydesign.com • Involvement reduces resistance to change. By driving
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the process modeling efforts from the business side,
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the business tends to take ownership of the new
processes, and more readily embrace the changes that
will occur when the processes are automated. Opening
up the early process discovery and modeling phases to

6. anyone who wants to contribute, rather than use a
small, predefined team– a social networking technique
called “crowdsourcing” – further encourages ownership
across the organization, as well as capturing knowledge
about the business processes that is buried in those
individuals’ daily routines.
• Early exposure to process modeling tools demystifies
BPM tools and techniques, making it less threatening
to the business people whose day-to-day operations will
be most affected by BPM.
We Have a Process Model – Now What?
You’ve followed the above advice, grabbed a free process
modeling tool and modeled your first business process, but
that’s not the end of the road.
First and foremost, process models are used as input to ROI
calculations in order to create a business case for a full BPM
implementation. You’ll be able to highlight improvements to
the process that will occur when the process is automated,
and also demonstrate how management will have greater
visibility into the business processes. This solves key
common business challenges: knowing where a deal is in the
© 2007 Kemsley Design Ltd.
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fulfillment process, or understanding where a critical new
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customer might be stuck in the account set-up process.
Furthermore, you’ll be able to show how a high level of
participation from the business side fosters ownership, and

7. how the new generation of process modeling tools allows for
greater process agility.
You can also use the process models to get IT onside with the
project: if the business side is taking responsibility for
creating and maintaining the process models, there’s less
work for them, better mutual understanding of requirements
due to speaking a common language, and a shorter time to
getting your first process up and running.
Getting from a process model to a working prototype will take
some work, however. First, your modeling tool must integrate
with a process execution environment if the business side is
going to maintain control over the process models on an
ongoing basis – this just doesn’t work if you have a one-time-
only export from your modeling environment to the execution
environment. Secondly, business and IT will have to work
together to attach the correct services in the organization’s
service-oriented architecture (SOA) layer at certain points in
the business process. The key to implementation success,
like modeling success, is to keep it simple: keep
customization of the system to a minimum, and concentrate
on getting something simple working within 90 days.
However, don’t forget essential tools like analytics –
© 2007 Kemsley Design Ltd. dashboards, reports and simulation – since they provide
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visibility into the process and a springboard for process
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optimization.
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8. Summary
In this paper, we’ve covered some of the main barriers to
getting started with BPM, and some ways to overcome these
barriers. The solutions range from encouraging business-
driven process modeling, to using low-cost yet fully-
functional modeling tools, to selecting a high-value yet well-
bounded process to get kicked off at process modeling.
We saw that just the act of business process modeling can
yield its own benefits, and that heavy involvement of business
people demystifies the technology and reduces resistance to
process innovation.
Lastly, we looked at some of the steps necessary to move from
process modeling to a working prototype.
Now it’s up to you: download that process modeler and get
started!
About the Author
Sandy Kemsley is an independent analyst, systems architect and
© 2007 Kemsley Design Ltd. blogger specializing in business process management. She
www.kemsleydesign.com performs engagements for both end-user organizations and BPM
www.column2.com vendors across North America, and writes the popular “Column 2”
blog at www.column2.com. She also creates and delivers BPM and
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This white paper is sponsored by Savvion www.savvion.com