An Introduction to Agile Business Process Management

By David Roe (@druadh20) Sep 21, 2010 Comments

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This month we have been looking at Information Agility, describing it as a way of not just managing our information, but also of managing it such a way so as to be able to respond to rapid changes taking place in the market.

Here we will look at business processes and how agility is finding its way into business process management to make them more effective and more responsiveness to those changing circumstances.

In January this year Gartner released its BPM for 2010 and beyond. Gartner does this every year and in doing so is very careful for obvious reasons to define exactly what it means as business process management.

What is Agile Business Process Management?

Business process management, the report says, is a way to automate and manage structured, repeatable business processes. Business processes are typically a set of activities, inputs and outputs that together to achieve a particular business goal.

Agility, we said, is the abiity to respond to our information quickly to a set of given circumstances.

Agile BPM, therefore, from the BPM side of the equation, provides automated and managed structures to provide repeatable business processes, while at the same time, from the agile side of the equation, provides the ability to act immediately, in real time to circumstances that are unforeseen in those processes.

So Agile BPM moves processes out of a pre-defined and predictable processes box into handling difficult cases that elude traditional formalized process management techniques.

Agile BPM and the Enterprise

In a recent Fujitsu sponsored webinar Keith Swenson, VP of Research and Development at Fujitsu America, and Sandy Kemsley, an independent analyst with a special expertise in BPM, outlined how Agile BPM is increasingly becoming the norm in enterprises rather than the exception.

Agile BPM, they argued, applies to businesses where:

Unpredictable is common
Where business processes cannot change quickly enough for business practices
Where knowledge workers need to focus on achieving goals rather than repetitive tasks

Agile BPM Drivers

From this two different trends have been identified for the adoption of Agile BPM and can be described in cause and effect terms:

Cause: Routine work is being replaced by knowledge work where knowledge workers are working on more complex problems. Effect: BPM systems are responding to this need by becoming more agile so that business process can be modified on the fly.
Cause: The value of collaboration in business is being recognized as a way to get most input on how business processes should change. Effect: BPM systems are providing functionality to enable users more easily collaborate

Characteristics of Agile BPM

To respond to the rigidity of traditional BPM, Agile BPM must display the following characteristics:

Users can change processes on the fly responding to current conditions but without changing the model
An ability to deal with unstructured work
Knowledge of the conditions those process are operating in provided by predictive analytics

This can be summed up as:

BPM v Agile BPM differences summary 2.jpg
BPM v Agile BPM. From Dancing With Elephants: Webinar on Agile and Social Processes, by Sandy Kemsley