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This article originally appeared in the members-only quarterly BPM Strategies Magazine.  Join today to receive your own copy.

Robert J. Garrity Jr., a 29-year veteran of the Federal Bureau of Investigation, is no stranger to solving intricate information infrastructure issues.

One of the core promises of BPMS is that it lets process owners on the business side model, monitor, and maintain their own process implementations. While chronically backlogged IT is hypersensitive to the charge that they take too long to respond to the changing demands of business, it still resists ceding to the business the power to maintain business process solutions themselves, much less build them from scratch. In fact, for many architects and developers the mere suggestion of business-driven implementation taints the whole BPMS concept.

Corporate adopters of a business rules approach over the past decade have often been limited to individual projects within an organization. It was not surprising to find disparate (either geographically or functionally) areas of the same company initiating independent efforts often resulting in a completely different methodology for applying business rules – and in some cases with different business rule management software. The latest generation of business rule software has, however, been created with the enterprise perspective in mind.

Whether developing and updating processes as an improvement initiative, in support of a software upgrade, as part of an automation effort or introduction of a new line business, it is important to identify the required work and to estimate the time, cost and resources required to achieve the desired goals. When the purpose of the project is to develop or improve a process, it is easy to see why a project plan to identify the tasks, milestones, resources and timelines is required.