Tell me if this sounds familiar. Organization A decides to adopt Agile methods and begin the lengthy and possibly (probably) expensive transformation process. In doing so they engage in lots of training, read books, attend conferences and listen to webinars. They engage a consulting organization to help coach the change. But, after a period of time has gone by someone brilliantly asks, “So, are we better for having done this?” Great question. Many companies have no idea whether or not these Agile methods are actually helping the bottom line and the way we deliver overall. We figure that if teams are sprinting and doing retrospectives we must be better. If teams are co-located and I see sticky notes on the wall, we must be better.

Projects create a maelstrom of documentation – charters, workplans, issues logs, process flows, requirements, solution designs, parking lots, and many more. With the deluge, invariably some of the documentation is relegated to the hard drive of death – hidden out of the view of those who might benefit from its availability.

OK, you have completed a successful pilot BPM project and your organization is now committed to a major enterprise BPM initiative.  There are many steps you need to undertake now, too many for a single article such as this, but in this article we will explore one which is often overlooked.   The BPM industry, both tool vendors and consultants, like to talk about how much simpler it is to develop solutions with BPM than with traditional programming tools.  While this is certainly true, too many organizations interpret this as license to short-cut the disciplines which they have found to be necessary in all other forms of solution development.  This article will discuss the importance of modeling standards, provide guidelines on how to develop appropriate standards and perhaps most important how to make them an integral part of your process.

Requirements gathering should be done mindfully. Then there is this world we are living in, which requires agility, right? Well, can mindfulness and agile be imagined together? Once you can imagine this your requirements will be solid and done right, and you will obtain agility. Your sign-offs will be also achieved smoothly. It won’t stop there. Development, unit testing, functional testing and UAT will be smooth as well, including your org readiness efforts, along with your usage uptake and learning experience. Does this sound like it is out of this world, or in Utopia as most of us know this is not a very easy thing to achieve?