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The Hard Part: Determining Your KPIs
No matter where BPM enters your company, a common misstep is assuming that the software will produce the right performance reports and numbers. Once the decision has been made to implement a BPM system, the hard work begins -- well before the software is installed.
The big challenge is working out which KPIs will accurately gauge performance; too many can lead to chaos. When it started to use the software, Elevations Credit Union, cut the number of KPIs from 10 to two. Senior execs took their time to decide which views of deposits and lending they wanted.
"For CPM to be successful, you have to spend a lot of time from the outset thinking, 'Have we got the right measurements?' as opposed to plunking something down and churning out loads of numbers that you don't know what to do with when you have got them," Brown says. While large organizations hire consultancies to choose KPIs, midmarket companies "have to put the senior management team in a room for two days to start thinking seriously about what business they're in and what the drivers are," he says.
Once the system is installed, various departments must be trained to use it. This is especially challenging in situations where departments formerly produced performance numbers on their own. Now they must learn to use a system that might not include the criteria they used previously and that might produce numbers they don't agree with. "We're still going out and holding training sessions with different groups," says Morton Grove's Sanders. "It's a huge initiative."
Morton Grove has been working out BPM bugs for two years. Some reports, for instance, had to be formatted differently for the sales department to show what's behind the numbers. A check-in, check-out policy ensures that two people in the same department can't run the same report.
Nonetheless, says Sanders, the benefits of BPM continue to roll in. Morton Grove now uses a kind of reverse BPM: If BPM can produce accurate, consistent performance numbers, it can also check for inaccurate numbers. Every day Sanders scans the database and runs a report that looks for errors, such as fat-finger typing where someone has input "222" instead of "22."
But at the end of the day, as its name indicates, BPM is all about performance. "No one likes to have mistakes in their numbers," Sanders says.
John Sterlicchi is a freelance writer in Clearwater, Fla. Write to him at editor@ciodecisions.com.
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