I just sat in on the Lean BPM trends breakout session presented by Clay Richardson, senior analyst with Forrester Research. Given the state of the economy and the number of organizations reevaluating their IT dollars, it was not surprising that Richardson’s session was completely full!

Richardson prefaced his session with an article he recently read that stated the CFO is the new “king” in organizations. Essentially, any decision regardless of the nature of the project, now needs buy in from the CFO before it can ever come to fruition.

A number of CFOs – 64% according to recent research from Forrester – expect major cutbacks in capital spending. And though this same research indicated that demand for BPM is not slowing down, project budgets continue to be cut.

When it comes to proposing a BPM project, Richardson said IT managers need to adopt lean strategies. He says IT managers need to learn how to think like a CFO and follow three key strategies to keep their BPM initiative off the chopping block:

Break consensus log jams

BPM projects become ‘bloated’ when too many people are trying to agree on a single version of a process. Richardson says it is imperative to appoint a process analyst who knows how to bridge the divide between business and IT and:

Match Skills

The process analyst must make sure an IT employee’s skills are matched to their role within the organization.

Avoid a ‘waterfall mindset’

An IT department needs to move to an agile mindset and focus on working software, customer collaboration and responding to change. In other words, the department should prioritize value above anything else – determine what the customer truly wants and know how to measure the value derived from process features.

And, how can an organization implement these lean priorities?

Richardson offered advice for both the short and long term:

In the next 90 days:

Audit BPM roles to ensure proper alignment
Time-box process discovery to focus on what matters
Integrate some agile approaches into BPM delivery

Long term:

Promote BPM leaders that have a passion for process
Measure value derived from process features
Completely adopt the agile mindset

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