Sharepoint-Ing the Finger for Better Business Process Management
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SharePoint-ing the Finger for Better Business Process Management The topic of business process management (BPM) is particularly timely given the need for clarifying process structures and their improvements. Not much emphasis has been placed on the relationships among BPM methodologies and the techniques and tools used to support BPM. Business process is the skeleton of business activity. IT is a set of coordinated tasks and activities, conducted by both people and equipment that will lead to accomplishing a specific organizational goal. BPM is a systematic approach to improving those processes. The Business Process Management Initiative (BPMI), a non-profit corporation, empowers companies of all sizes, across all industries, to develop and operate business processes that span multiple applications and business partners, behind the firewall and over the Internet. To this end, the organization has developed the Business Process Modeling Language, an Extensible Markup Language (XML)-based meta-language for modeling business processes. The main motive in outsourcing a modeling business process is to allow the business to invest most of their time, financial, and human resources into core activities and focus on building effective strategies, which will fuel the growth of the company. Since the global marketplace is fast-changing and highly-competitive, organizations are concentrating on improving productivity while trimming down unnecessary costs. Non-core business processes are being outsourced since the tasks involved in these processes consumes time, essential resources, and energy. Thus, outsourcing these non-core business processes will help you achieve a cost-efficient system. One such organization to help organizations with their project management needs, offering project portfolio management, program management and business analysis solutions is Minneapolis, MN based Project Consulting Group, (PCG). More recently touted for its Project Delivery On-Demand solutions, PCG is finding that many organizations today are trying to get more value from their existing technology investments, such as optimizing Sharepoint applications, and have helped numerous companies to do just that by delivering to them a strategic framework that integrates people, process, technology and culture According to Jamie Fragola, founder and Co-Chairman of Project Consulting Group, “Organizations today need greater visibility, increased collaboration and flexible frameworks to tackle more work without killing the budget. Organizations we have been working with have made huge strides in harnessing the power of their existing Sharepoint applications for example, and building upon Sharepoint as a platform to achieve company goals faster through already made technology investments. In fact, there are many organizations that aren’t even aware they have certain capabilities they can turn on with very minimal resources.” According to Rob Koplowitz, Principal Analyst at Forrester Research, ”driven by the need to better manage unstructured information for business benefit and risk mitigation, collaboration platforms like Microsoft's SharePoint and IBM Lotus Notes are uniquely positioned to help information and knowledge management (I&KM) professionals build collaboration applications.” PCG describes knowledge management as a system that integrates people, process and technology and culture for sustainable results by increasing performance through learning. Sustained results require learning to be integrated in every activity but done so in a manner that embraces an organizations corporate culture. This is where there needs to be investment in order to create long-term intellectual capital. Although it would have been true 10 years ago that growing businesses did not have many alternatives to SharePoint, the landscape is much changed now. Modern day technologies and approaches have spurned a new breed of solutions which open incredible online collaboration possibilities even while offering a much better cost-benefit deal. Moreover, many such solutions are targeted specifically towards the hitherto neglected small to mid sized business segment. For instance, with SharePoint Server 2007 (MOSS), the costs and complexities are simply too much for most small and mid sized customers to bear. It requires expensive hardware, multiple SharePoint Server licenses, and "SharePoint experts" to install and maintain it. Costs often run into tens of thousands of dollars, and implementation runs into months. How you measure the success of any SharePoint project is open to much debate. According to Pej Javaheri, Senior Product Manager at SharePoint., “There have been some recent developments regarding SharePoint’s Business Intelligence strategy that is very exciting. Microsoft’s vision for Business Intelligence has always been about pervasive access to information. Having more people access the right information enables smarter, timelier decisions, stronger collaboration on projects, facilitates accountability throughout the organization, and propels the company forward.” In today’s economy, having the right information is more critical than ever.An organization’s typical tangible metrics center around how a particular project has performed in terms of Time, Money, Quality, and Culture. How the team collaborates is still a main area and is what most organizations focus on upon to gauge their ultimate success. This is irrespective of whether or not the true ‘measures of success’’ in deploying a SharePoint application isn’t actually felt by the business until long after the project team has completed the project and moved on to other things. But with the introduction and importantly adoption of SharePoint into many organizations growing exponentially over time, it brings with it a number of challenges to say the least. The delivery of Microsoft’s premier collaborative platform, SharePoint, will put under pressure one or more of these metrics during the project life cycle, as any novice or experienced SharePoint, traditional infrastructure or software project managers whom take on the management and delivery of these projects, will tell you. Project Consulting Group for instance, has spent the last several years leading successful bid teams to win the deployments of SharePoint into large and small businesses, spread across several industry sectors, (and in several cases to help organizations ‘recover’ failed projects). Project Consulting Group has evaluated how SharePoint projects can and do go awry. More importantly the group is creatively putting their expertise to work for its clients. PCG has significant investment into engineering a Shared Risk service delivery model which effectively mitigates investment risk to insure clients get the business outcome they expect. The process entails a clearly defined matrix on deliverables that most project management consulting groups avoid. Project Consulting Group has been brought into some sizable organizations that had experienced challenges in effectively leveraging SharePoint on various process improvement initiatives, and like any other IT project, they fall under the following headlines Project Consulting Group has well documented. • Providing a clearly defined scope • Establishing an inherent project culture within the business • Create Stakeholder Management buy-in • Institute project governance • Develop project management skills • Verify planning for the project and beyond once it has been deployed) • Ascertain proper change, risk identification and management. It is important to understand the reasons behind why SharePoint projects fail to live up to expectations and to address such issues with powerful project methodologies and proven strategies in order to increase the likelihood of success of varied complex SharePoint applications. Most importantly, organizations need to stop underestimating the scope of the project deliverables In particular for the medium to large organizations, there is an increase in companies failing to plan and budget properly for the enormity of the project deliverables. These are often in areas such as: • Operational business practices • SharePoint Governance • Project Team Resources and skills • Planning and Design (in particular around those that demand re-branding of SharePoint interface) • Infrastructure Development (to support both internal and collaborative working externally) • Application Delivery, Build and Test (In particular for deployment with bespoke elements) • Migration of content or documents from file shares, existing intranet(s) and other line of business applications, (databases, etc) • Release & Change Management • User Adoption going forward • IT Helpdesk and User support following Go-Live. Often businesses forgot to include in their planning, enhancements to the intranet that could give it the ‘wow’ factor when the business first starts to use it. The wow factor can be relatively minor to achieve in effort, but tremendously valuable when staff try to gain momentum and secure support from the wider. They are more aligned to a different way of working for the business which should be one of the strategic objectives is much more than this and are key to business adoption. Such ‘quick wins’ should be identified earlier on and planned into a release program following the launch of the initial project to ensure the deployment of SharePoint is a success not just at the beginning, but as it is further utilized and deployed within the business. With short term planning, comes long