When should a Business Process Change initiative begin?

With ISCG’s Project Governance Framework, you can begin your Business Process Change initiative at any time. Our methodology can be adopted at any of the phases depicted below, but you will gain the maximum benefit by starting early, when you are initially formulating your strategy or defining your requirements for a new system.

During the Strategy Phase, we help you evaluate whether your existing systems are an appropriate platform to support your objectives for the future. A gap analysis is performed, identifying the difference between your current state and desired state. The Strategy Phase is an ideal time to evaluate your current business processes and determine if opportunities exist to improve customer service, productivity, and revenue generating activities. Developing AS-IS / TO-BE workflow diagrams allow everyone involved in a particular process to contribute ideas and document a vision of the desired future state. Having a full understanding of that vision will help you make better decisions about keeping, upgrading, replacing, or improving the integration in your existing systems.

If you are already past the Strategy Phase, it is certainly not too late to begin documenting your desired future state as part of the System Selection Phase. Workflow diagrams help prospective vendors understand your expectations of the processes and integrations a new system should support. They allow the vendors to provide more accurate price quotes in their proposals, and facilitate vendor demonstrations when showing how their system can be used to address specific business processes.

Workflow diagrams are a vital part of the Implementation Phase. During vendor discovery, the diagrams facilitate discussions about how the system will be used to accomplish your desired state. During this phase, you will make decisions about whether it is best to further refine a particular business process in order to accommodate the way the baseline software works, or customize the software. The workflow diagrams are then revised to reflect any further business process changes, and are used when documenting workflow acceptance test scripts and standard operating procedures (SOPs) prior to live launch of the new system.

If you are in the Post Go-Live Phase and did not focus on Business Process Change in any of the prior phases, you missed a golden opportunity to make business process change an integral part of a new system implementation. However, it is never too late to document your desired future state if your existing processes are plagued by inefficiencies and customer service constraints. Workflow diagrams describing how existing processes work are important institutional knowledge and help train new staff. They facilitate the formulation of ideas for further process changes as your business needs evolve in the future, and help determine whether your existing system can accommodate such changes.