BPM Stakeholders – The Sponsor

In a perfect world, BPM initiatives would start tops-down. The senior management would decide the organisation needs to embrace BPM. Management would call in BPM consulting companies to help them run the programme. Change Management initiatives would start running in parallel. Centres of Excellence would be formed. A tender for BPM software would be sent out. POC. Implementation…. Bliss.

Now I been in these kind of projects before, but lately most of my projects are initiated by down-up initiatives.
The organisation doesn’t want to spend a fortune on a cat in a bag, so they try a small scale BPM solution to solve a local problem. If it works, the next problem, and so on, until someone says, “hey we are spending too much on individual projects – let’s do a corporate solution” and thus the BPM initiative takes off.

Sandy Kemsley’s last post about Team Dynamics In BPM Projects included a slideshare presentation.
In one of the slides she states “A little BPM inspires more BPM” which I think is a fantastic quote (I can see marketing jumping on it…).

But back to the topic..
I was looking to write a post about BPM Stakeholders but Alexander Samarin beat me to it. I’d advise reading his last post on Who is doing #BPM? where he describes his understanding in what extend different people within an enterprise are involved in BPM.

His stakeholder table sums up the stakeholders very nicely, but I’m still missing a stakeholder.
For lack of a job title, I’ll call him/her a “sponsor”
For any BPM implementation to succeed in an organisation, you need a strong sponsor.
There isn’t a corporate role called “sponsor”, but they are the real drive behind the BPM initiative.
In some cases it’s the CFO that has decided that BPM is a must for the company. In some cases it’s the IT manager, or the Programme Director or even the VP Sales. In smaller companies sometimes it’s the CEO.
These “sponsors” are the ones that that push the initiative. Without them – the programme fails.
Their impact on the success of the BPM initiative is enormous. Budget, bypassing red tape, setting targets and deadlines, or even just putting the fear in everyone that the initiative needs to succeed “or else”…
Architects, analysts, managers and developers – all are important stakeholders.
But the most important person in a BPM initiative is the sponsor.