BPM Politicians

An honest politician is one who, when he is bought, will stay bought. – Simon Cameron

Just before the last elections, a couple of local candidates from one of the political parties knocked on my door.

They were going door-to-door, canvassing the area, trying to convince, listening to people’s gripes, promising promises…
I’m not fond of politicians. Stuck up in their ivory tower making bad decisions that affect the rest of us. What do they know?

But strangely enough I found myself chatting about the neighbourhood, listening to their plans, offering some ideas.

I was impressed that they had left the comfort of their ivory tower for a day to interact with the ‘locals’.
Their purpose was, of course, to market themselves, but they probably learnt more in one day about their constitutes, the real issues and pains, the things that are important, the best way forward.

BPM is no different.
You only get a real feeling of the pains and issues when you get your hands dirty.

The BPM websphere is dominated by marketing gurus, six sigma gurus, and modelling experts. Nothing wrong with that.

But if you haven’t actually built a workflow, created a business process – you’re missing out on an important part of BPM – implementation.
It’s not hard. There are enough free BPM software solutions out there for you to choose. Go and have a try.
Without experiencing the BPM execution part of BPM cycle, you slowly lose contact with the real BPM world, you can talk the talk, but not walk the walk… you slowly turn into a BPM politician.

Are you a BPM politician?
Are you an BPM practitioner that has modelled and designed, but never implemented?
Are you a BPM expert that always sees the process from 33,000 feet, but never from ground level?
Are you a BPM historian? Was the last time you built a real working process before “workflow” was called “business process”?
Are you a BPM consultant that can scrutinise, deduct and write clever reports based on observations and common sense, but not from your own real field experience.
Are you a BPM sales or marketing guru, that likes to tell customers that BPM can be implemented by business users, but haven’t ever built a workflow by yourself?

Go on.. Get out of your comfort zone.
Go and build yourself a workflow, a real business process, not for a customer, for yourself.
Don’t spend ages designing it… jump in and build. The end result might not be what you would expect, but you’ll learn plenty on the way.
You’ll find it an eye opening experience…