What is Business Process Management (BPM)? – Nintex

The BPM lifecycle standardizes the process of implementing and managing business processes inside an organization and is made up of five cyclical stages, design, model, implement, monitor, and optimize that support continuous improvement and process excellence.

Regardless, if you are onboarding a new employee, applying for a new credit card, or responding to a customer complaint, these repeated plentiful activities completed in the same precise way are all ripe for process mapping, management, improvement, and even automation and are key to a corporation’s successful ongoing operation.

1. The design phase:

The first step in the lifecycle is “design,” in this phase you will start by capturing a thorough understanding of how the process is currently performed.  You’ll need to interview all people who perform, support, or are impacted by this process, review any pre-existing documents, get clear on unwritten business rules, and observe it in action.

Some helpful questions to ensure you have an intricate understanding of the entire end-to-end process are:

• • Do you know the starting point of the process?
  • What are all the steps and in what order do they happen?
  • What is the end result of the process?
  • Who is responsible for each task and when it transitions to a new task owner?
  • Process dependencies – does it currently integrate with other systems?
  • How long does it currently take to complete?
  • Who performs each task (a service, a system, or a person)
  • Any current documentation that supports the process (or what key data points would be included in one if one were to be developed).

2. The model phase:

The second step in the lifecycle is the “model”. Its purpose is to provide a visual representation of the process’s current phases, to improve things you must first understand how things are now (as-is) and then plan for how you want them to be in the future (to-be) once changed.  It’s recommended that the ‘to-be’ is socialized far and wide for both feedback, then approval.  This collaborative approach will flush out any discrepancies and increase buy-in of the new process and longer-term adoption.