Are you a consultant at an SAP Partner heading to SAP TechEd to get ramped-up on SAP’s newest products for Business Process Management (BPM)? Then you are headed to the right event. Some of SAP’s brightest technical stars will be presenting and leading detailed hands-on sessions that will bring you up to date with the latest BPM capabilities, architectures, tools and techniques. You’ll be left salivating for your next project where you can employ new skills in an explosion of process orchestration productivity and agilely-composed process dashboards - that is if your consulting comapny can win that next project.
See, here’s the rub: the tooling and development techniques are only about 25% of the story for BPM. There are other questions that your company needs to be able to answer for your clients to truly bring BPM-solutions and a BPM consulting practice to market: For example:
- What is the client’s business goals and priorities?
- How do they measure these goals and with which performance indicators?
- How does their company benchmark against its peers according to these performance indicators?
- How do they know what an end-to-end process is? How do they know if an end-to-end process should be a best practice, or if a company’s end-to-end process should be unique?
You won’t find any menu item that answers those questions in any SAP tool – they’re pure management consulting issues. But they’re also an extremely important part of developing a BPM program and project plan.
So how do you start positioning BPM in project proposals? Selling BPM is kind of like selling Java – its an empty technique that can be used for nearly anything. I will wash your car with BPM! And, if you just sell the technique, you won’t get very far. Imagine walking into a CIO’s office in this economy and uttering the words “Business Process Transformation Initiative.” Most likely you and your BPMN models will get tossed out onto the street!
The good news is, if you focus on answering the questions above, you can get really specific about how your proposal will impact a line of business in a clear measurable way. And, there are certain business problems and business processes that seem especially well suited to being solved through a BPM solution.
Here are six can’t-miss expert sessions at SAP TechEd Phoenix that will help you answer some of the questions I raised:
What BPM is good for?
- BPM Use Cases with Ann Rosenberg, Tuesday, 5:30PM – 6:00PM, Lounge 5
- BPM Use Cases with Ann Rosenberg, Wednesday, 5:30PM – 6:00PM, Lounge 5
- BPM Use Cases with Ann Rosenberg, Thursday, 5:30PM – 6:00PM, Lounge 2
How should Partners Position BPM Projects?
See you soon at TechEd Phoenix!
