In every review of BPM best practices you’ll ever read, you’ll see listed with extra emphasis: executive sponsorship. Actually, this criterion is listed for ERP projects, CRM projects, Security projects… It is listed for pretty much every type of IT engagement.

There is so much emphasis on this in presentations on the subject that typically speakers on the subject will take extra time to clarify that they don’t just mean an executive sponsor that signs checks, but an executive that is intimately involved with the effort and promotes the effort or mentors it.

But I believe most projects start without this higher level of true executive sponsorship.  In a sense, the team below has to earn that sponsorship.  In many cases, the executive has sprinkled a few preliminary investments along with a few well-understood big bets.  Those preliminary investments are feelers-  to see what might shake out.  They don’t have the executive’s full attention, but they have a little runway and latitude to make progress before they are accountable.  Or they’re given a specific project to tackle, a proof point to the executive that both the team and the technical stack are up to the challenge.

So, if executive sponsorship is critical… and most BPM programs don’t start out with it… are all of these projects doomed?

Dave Brakoniecki writes on his blog:

Over time, there seemed to be a bit of a pattern in the conversation. Successful initiatives were about changing or transforming the organization and tended to be driven from the top. In these cases, senior management decided the direction and the businesses had developed over time very successful human processes and technology platforms for supporting and implementing change.

And further:

There were no stories that I can recall of bottom-up change being harnessed successfully. Innovation at front line of the organization and filtered back up the hierarchy to senior management seems like a harder nut to crack. Even organizations that devolved a significant amount of decision making in their change management process struggled to let the front-line drive the strategy behind the overall program.

I believe there’s a bit of selection bias here.  Successful projects that lead to successful strategy and programs, will have executive sponsorship.  Regardless of whether they start without that executive sponsorship.  Why is that?  Because the successful teams will lobby effectively for executive support, with real data and real successes to back them up.  Executives will choose to put more money on the winning horse.  The best executives will co-opt the best ideas from the effort, find synergies with corporate objectives and strategy, and then change the emphasis of the go-forward program accordingly.

Most really interesting innovations and opportunities will bubble up from the organization – the trick for the executive team is to spot those emergent opportunities and capitalize on them.

If you don’t have your executive sponsorship lined up, think about which executive(s) are likely to sponsor your go-forward efforts.  Think about what matters to them, what their objectives are, what the company objectives are over which they have influence.  And make sure you have good arguments to support your BPM initiative along those lines. If you do it right, it will almost feel like the realization of that executive’s ideas, rather than some “not-invented-here” idea that has to be thrust upon upper management.

Gartner’s BPM Summit this year in Baltimore was a little different than previous years for a few reasons. First off, almost 850 attendees were present according to Gartner’s stats which is a  non-trivial improvement over last year! Secondly, for the first time I can remember we actually ran into a larger business audience than before. Normally these conferences are highly IT represented but this year marked a shift- quite a few business professionals were also in attendance.  This is obviously a very good thing. Lastly, there was great content all around but I caught a session focused on Change Management that really hit the nail on the head and certainly left an impression with me. We have discussed how critical change management is when it comes to BPM and yet it’s something most companies have little competency in doing on their own.

Now when I say Change Management this is not your IT notion of change management and it also isn’t this idea either!

Change Management is not just:

• Communication
• Training
• Group therapy sessions
• Cheerleading
• Etc.

The talk was presented by Phil Eastman II of ProSci and you could clearly see that this subject is a passion for him. One of the key moments came when Phil cited research performed over several years that stated in essence, “Keeping the human side of process change in the forefront buys on average a six times realization in quality of solution”.  That is a big number and as we want to de-risk these initiatives to the greatest extent possible, why would we not look at the change management with a lot more diligence? He also added, “Change management is not about training”. Sure, it is a component but it is not what is most highly correlated with success – change management is about getting results! Before I get to that, here are some points Phil cited on why change management is not done more:

1. It’s hard – it requires planning, discipline and persistence to be effective
2. Poor measurement – it’s difficult to quantify benefit other than the stat above therefore, funding for it becomes a bit more of a challenge
3. It’s expensive – change management requires real resources, time, and money to do correctly

However, without appropriate focus in Phil’s words you allow ‘Chance’ to be in the driver’s seat over ‘Change’. This definitely hit home for me as a practitioner because over many years I have seen this in action as well as other key success factors being under-capitalized on programs deemed “mission critical” by organizations.  So what is Change Management about? It’s really about taking the human aspect and getting extremely serious about ensuring the crew of your ship you just built is actually recruited. In Phil’s words, “There is no such thing as organizational change; only individual change summated is organizational change. The unit of change is without a doubt the individual”. Absolutely true!

Phil then broke the idea of Change Management into two perspectives which were ‘Individual Perspective’ and ‘Organization Perspective’. Most of the focus went into the ‘Individual Perspective’ which is appropriate considering he just stated that the individual is the ultimate unit of change. The idea is to understand what it is going to take to make any given individual adopt the change successfully based on the dynamics of the new solution presented. ProSci has a model called “ADKAR” (acronym, of course) which in turn has five major building blocks of successful change:

• Awareness – Are individuals aware of the change and do they understand why it’s occurring
• Desire – (This is the hardest according to Phil), Do the individuals actually want change
• Knowledge – Are the individuals understanding of what is being ultimately asked of them and do they know what is in it for them
• Ability – (There is a major gap between knowledge and ability), can the individual successfully participate in the new world
• Reinforcement- What is being done to reinforce the behavior of individuals post change, because people are readily capable of regressing)

The ultimate idea is to understand the mechanisms that perhaps got one individual over the change hump and be able to replicate that over and over again. Phil stated, “Processing a billion transactions a month is not hard. Processing one transaction a billion times is”. One other very insightful concept to keep in mind is that “organizations are not mechanical systems, they are living systems. You cannot change a living system, you can only disturb it”.

Great session all around and it certainly kept the attendees attention. Kudos to Gartner for locking this one up!