When you think about how you want your business to operate, one phrase likely springs to mind: “like clockwork.” Few things make a team leader happier than knowing things are running smoothly as the organization grows.
Efficient operations typically lead to more employee and customer satisfaction—and, of course, increased revenue.
But that can’t happen accidentally or with a laissez-faire attitude toward business processes.
Business process management (BPM) can get you to that dream-worthy end state—and a strong BPM initiative begins with people. Whether you start your program out of an IT or business function, you’ll need a dedicated BPM team or Center of Excellence (CoE).
Let’s explore how effective BPM improves your business and how building a strong team can guide your initiatives and drive positive business outcomes.
What is business process management?
Business process management is the process of identifying, understanding, and optimizing how your business delivers its products and services to customers. With these insights, you can improve processes to increase your operational efficiency and create a culture of continuous improvement.
“We always describe business process management as the pulse of any organization because it gives you a status on how to do the things you’re expected to do,” says Chris Ellis, Solution Engineer at Nintex. “But it’s also an opportunity to do them better and more efficiently and to innovate and progress.”
The BPM lifecycle comprises five cyclical stages:
- Design
- Model
- Implement
- Monitor
- Optimize
In practice, those stages dictate that you must collect data on the end-to-end process, create visual models of the current and new processes, test your new process model, track key performance indicators (KPIs) to see how it fares, and then continue to improve it.
Most mid-market orgs and enterprises rely on software to collect data on, analyze, and manage their business processes. The result is a blueprint for just about everything, from roles and responsibilities to risk identification to business continuity.
With this BPM blueprint comes several benefits. For example, it can help you to:
- Achieve total process visibility
- Avoid duplicating employee efforts and making data errors
- Gain a clear framework for decision-making
- Create a sense of process ownership, collaboration, and accountability
- Increase operational speed and efficiency
- Optimize employee onboarding
- Improve your processes for approvals, escalations, and notifications to ease auditing
- Foster an environment for continuous improvement
But to achieve these benefits, you do need to invest some time in setting up BPM the right way—and that starts with your dream team.
How to get started building your BPM dream team
Creating a BPM dream team isn’t just about drafting the best people. It’s also about setting them up for success so they can do the best possible work.
We recommend following six steps to create a successful BPM team in your organization.
Step 1: Identify cross-functional champions
Building a dream team starts with scouting—but, in this case, it’s internal scouting. You need to create a team of problem solvers, strong communicators, and (perhaps most of all) people enthusiastic and eager to drive change in your organization.
“Before any process or technology discussion, you have to identify passionate people in an organization who are willing to participate in serious change,” says Ellis. “That’s what business process improvement initiatives are: they are an upheaval, and they are a full documentation of every facet of the business, every obvious part of the business and every dark corner.”
Since business process management is an org-wide undertaking, make sure to look for cross-functional representatives beyond just your IT department. Do include IT, though—BPM often leads to identifying opportunities for automation, so you’ll want IT’s experience and insights. After all, our research with IDC found that 55% of automation programs are currently managed by IT.
One potential starting point: a citizen developer program to identify and foster current employees bought into process management and improvement. (Bonus: our research with IDC found that organizations with citizen developers are more likely to have consistently successful automation initiatives and increased budget.)
Once you find your team members, you need to convince them to join (unless they’re self-nominated). That’s all about helping them see the value of the project and the reasons you chose them to participate.
Step 2: Get leadership buy-in
Once you bring together your CoE dream team, it’s time to get buy-in from leadership. This ensures you get the resources you need and helps you align your BPM efforts with strategic business objectives. Plus, when the C-suite endorses BPM, it signals to the rest of the org that process improvement is a priority, which helps reduce resistance and increase acceptance.
Remember: buy-in means more than just approval. It’s about ensuring that your higher-ups grasp BPM’s full potential and take ownership of helping the company realize that.
“You have to have leadership buy-in, but you must have leadership vision as well. So not only a leader who says, ‘Yes, that can go under my cost code.’ But a leader who says, ‘This is the vision. This is why we’re doing it.’” –Chris Ellis, Solution Engineer at Nintex
How do you get that level of support? You have to back up your passion for the initiative with evidence and data.
Some things to keep in mind to get leadership buy-in:
- Show how BPM aligns with the organization’s strategic goals and how improved processes can contribute to achieving long-term objectives.
- Clearly articulate BPM’s benefits, like cost savings, increased efficiency, or compliance improvements, using concrete examples for potential outcomes.
- Present data and case studies from similar organizations that implemented BPM
- Quantify the return on investment (ROI) of BPM initiatives at these other companies to show that financial benefits outweigh the costs.
Once leadership is on board, they can run their own initiatives or campaigns to foster company-wide buy-in. For example: a leadership team in Singapore ran a “What’s In It for Me?” initiative to address the objections of each person BPM would impact. This galvanized everyone across the org to move in the right direction.
Step 3: Build the right level of incentives
Incentivizing your dream team encourages active participation and commitment to process improvement initiatives, increases accountability and ownership, and sustains momentum and enthusiasm for BPM long-term. In short, finding appropriate incentives isn’t a bonus—it’s essential.
The good thing is that these incentives don’t always have to be monetary. You can also aim for personal and career development motivators.
Some opportunities for incentives include:
- Recognition: Find ways to showcase the contributions of your BPM CoE members, whether through the company newsletter, on Slack channels, or during meetings. Acknowledge their efforts in improving processes and highlight specific successful results they achieved.
- Professional development: Offer training, workshops, or certifications related to BPM. This allows employees to develop skills that not only enhance their current role in the CoE but can improve their long-term career growth opportunities.
- Performance recognition: Acknowledge participation in the BPM team during an employee’s performance evaluations. Offer bonuses to individuals who have demonstrated measurable improvements to processes or business outcomes.
- Team-building opportunities: Create fun team-building activities to foster bonds between participants and achieve a positive atmosphere for collaboration.
By using these incentives, you not only motivate your team members to participate fully in their roles—you propel action over the long haul.
Step 4: Create an action plan
Once you have a motivated CoE team, they need direction to affect change. That means their first step is to collaborate to create an action plan.
To do so, they’ll need to:
- Assess the current state of existing business processes across the organization by gathering input from stakeholders
- Define objectives for the CoE, aligning these with the company’s strategic priorities
- Prioritize areas for improvements based on their impact on business outcomes
- Consider whether to adopt methodologies like Lean or Six Sigma
- Set key performance indicators (KPIs) for monitoring progress toward goals
- Identify resources needed to achieve these goals, including budget, personnel, or software
Once your team takes these initial steps, they can create detailed action plans for each prioritized process that drill down into specific tasks, timelines, and who’s responsible.
Step 5: Build in training
Companies often skimp on training for the BPM team (or skip it entirely). This can mean the difference between a successful team and one that becomes frustrated and disintegrates.
Depending on its background and makeup, your team might need training in the following areas:
- Specific BPM methodologies like Agile, Six Sigma, and Lean
- Principles of process mapping, process improvement, and optimization
- Tools and technologies, like process management software, automation tools, or data analytics platforms
- Data analysis best practices to understand how to collect and interpret process data
- Change management principles to navigate implementation challenges and drive the adoption of new processes
- Collaboration and communication to improve team building and presentation skills
Provide resources like workshops, webinars, and industry conferences to train your team in these areas. Offering 1:1 time with mentors and experts also helps with successful training and onboarding.
“The differentiating elements of success are focused on team building
and 1:1 interactions with experts.” – IDC’s The State of Process Automation in the Midmarket in 2024 White Paper
Step 6: Reward and recognition
The final step in building your business process dream team is following through on the incentive system you set up earlier. Once your team is off and running with BPM initiatives, you need to recognize their hard work early and often.
The IDC report found that “a career path for success that includes compensation and other
rewards is also critical…Programs that do not include any reward for the effort almost always fail. Some programs are successful with recognition-based awards, but the most successful programs support a promotional path that includes increased compensation.”
Depending on your budget and your team, this might be an Amazon gift card—or a one-time bonus.
Ellis says one Nintex customer, a state government transport agency in Australia, evangelized people who were “winning” in the organization. They tracked metrics like number of processes mapped and metrics and workflow tasks addressed, and then put those people on a pedestal with newsletter mentions, “legend of the month” awards, and vouchers. The result was not only a motivated team—but also other employees eager for an opportunity to upskill and improve their own performance.
Equipping your BPM team for success with technology
No matter how you look at it, starting a business process management initiative is a major endeavor. You’ve got to gather the right people, get buy-in, figure out incentives, create an action plan, provide the proper training, and follow through with recognition.
But you can make the process a lot easier by choosing the right tools. Nintex Process Manager offers drag-and-drop functionality that makes it quick to learn. Plus, it gives your team a single source of truth, helps them create accessible process maps, and offers total process visibility. Every single process has an owner and an expert—and those people get rewards and recognition even by just being so visible in the tool.
As IDC points out, “being challenged with process automation is not a permanent condition.” Download the whitepaper to discover more ways to improve your process automation outcomes.”
