Here are 10 top tips for making a BPMS project successful.

“How hard can it be? We’re just exchanging one way of doing things for another!” Well, it turns out, that implementing BPMS systems can be the most challenging change any organization can undertake. It seems that we humans have a hard time with change when it affects us but are all for it when it affects someone else. When implementing BPMS, human change management should be the first design decision. Here are 10 tips for a successful BPMS implementation.

1. Optimize and implement (O>I) or implement and optimize (I>O). The debate rages over whether it is better to spend the time to do process re-engineering before implementing a BPMS or is it best to implement the current way of working and optimize later? The danger of the O>I is analysis paralysis: weeks and months of redesign and endless committees debating the finer points of the new process. Team members may feel disenfranchised and will certainly be worried about their job being eliminated. But IàO often means automating a bad process and continuing to do the wrong thing, or the inefficient thing, but now in an automated manner. On balance I>O works best for human change. When employees can see their existing process mapped to the automation the learning curve is much shallower. It is infinitely easier to optimize an automated process. The ideal approach is to ask the process users to point out the obvious inefficiencies in the process, the ones they would like to see optimized, and incorporate those into the initial design.