Essential Skills for Business Process Management Success

One of the most effective ways for managing your business is by managing its processes. This is where business process management (BPM) can help. Through a mix of methods, policies, practices and tools, your organization’s activities and procedures will grow optimized and capable of achieving the goals set by upper management. However, to ensure the success of your efforts, your business process directors and senior IT managers should possess a set of crucial skills aside from obvious ones such as process modeling.

Gartner’s 15 Skills Critical to Success with BPM

Gartner, the world’s top IT research and advisory company, published an infographic prior to its Business Process Management Summit of 2014 to highlight the fifteen skills critical to BPM success.

These were categorized as transformational, operational and technical competencies.

Transformational Competencies

1. Building the BPM business case and vision
2. Communication
3. Knowledge of organizational structure and culture
4. Organizational change techniques
5. Project management

Operational Competencies

1. Business process discovery
2. Business process governance and process policy management
3. Business process modeling, analysis and design
4. Establishing a BPM methodology toolbox
5. Process performance management

Technical Competencies

1. Agile and model-driven application development
2. BPM technology product knowledge
3. Business process optimization and simulation
4. Solution architecture and design
5. User experience design

Essential Skills According to BPM Definition and Certification

Aside from the Transformational, Operational and Technical Competencies framework by Gartner, you should consider other perspectives while determining the skills of those in charge of your company’s business process management. One perspective is derived from the definition of BPM, i.e. a management discipline that manages business processes and helps them improve. Based on this definition, you need to be adept in the following nine practice areas to be truly successful in applying BPM.

1. Aligning processes with business strategy
2. Analyzing and setting benchmarks for processes
3. Deploying technology
4. Discovering and modeling processes
5. Establishing policies and rules
6. Facilitating the changing of a culture
7. Improving procedures
8. Making decisions based on governance regulations
9. Measuring the performance of processes

To tackle these aspects, you’ll need a wide array of skills in different areas, including systems thinking, process modeling and discovery, performance measurement, and rules and decision management. Complementing these should be your technical skills, ranging from requirements gathering to designing user experience and all the way to optimization and simulation.

Luckily, one way of obtaining these skills is by opting for BPM Certification from a leading BPM training and certification center. There are six areas of knowledge which most certifications cover and are of value for organizations:

1. Process Concepts
2. Process Improvement
3. Process Measurement
4. Process Modeling
5. Process Technologies
6. Process-Oriented Enterprise

Important Skills Required Over the BPM Project’s Life Cycle

Another perspective to select the best skills is by examining the skills necessary throughout the BPM project’s life cycle. BPM professionals should select the best candidates for the job by conducting based on the following phases:

1. Organizational Assessment
   Critical Skills: Decision management, enterprise-level process modeling and organization change management
2. Project Definition
   Critical Skills: Facilitation, performance measurement, process modeling and project management
3. Current State Analysis
   Critical Skills: Customer experience modeling and analysis, data gathering and analysis, facilitation, methodologies of BPM, process measurement and process modeling
4. Future State Design
   Critical Skills: Applying design principles, benchmarking, facilitation, implementation plan development, measures framework design and role definition
5. Implementation
   Critical Skills: Change management, project management, readiness assessment and technical skills like requirement gathering
6. Process Management
   Critical Skills: Decision management, governance and performance measurement

Through these skills, organizations can avoid numerous pitfalls that hinder the success of their process management, including starting at the workflow level, failing to achieve shared understanding, inability to prioritize, lack of leadership, failing to assess company’s readiness for change, and insufficient communication. Moreover, these skills help professionals emphasize on important aspects such as addressing facts and feelings, using visual support materials, and connecting BPM to strategic issues. Therefore, make sure to hire and train your process management and development professionals accordingly.