Key elements of a BPM functional specification

[Former Member]

Most often BPM implementation teams are left with functional details that are either not sufficient enough to start the technical design & implementation or doesn’t fully capture what the customer of the process (end user) needs and how the process should react under various circumstances. Building a strong functional specification forms the key building block for a successful BPM project.

Defining functional specification for a BPM project is different from an application project as the key focus of BPM implementations are more process-centric while that of application projects are different.

While there are many tools out there in the market to do process documentation and capture functional requirements at various levels, not all BPM project teams have the luxury to use those tools. As a result, process documentation teams / business analysts that might not have the right experience in building BPM functional specifications might be left with the job to create one.

For those, here is a comprehensive template covering the elements to be covered in a BPM functional requirements document. In addition to that, my accelerator template (with example details) would help to specifically capture the “to-be” process section (which is most often referred to as the dirtiest part of a BPM functional specification document). Hope these templates would help the process documentation teams to jump-start the “to-be” process documentation journey.