Planning Your Project Roadmap

Krista: Thanks, Andrew, for joining us today. Today, we're talking about project planning. Specifically, I want to talk about the first project and getting started. Can you tell us, what does it take to really get started with our first project?

Andrew: What you really want to do is make sure you're concentrating on a process that shows true business value to your company. If you focus on something that is tangential to what you do as a company, it could be hard to justify the larger ODM, BPM program that you want to put together in order to really unlock your business value. It's important to pick something that is doable of well-defined extent, meaning that it's not ephemeral, you know what success might look like, and that will allow you to articulate a return on investment to the executive sponsors of the project.

Krista: When people talk about going from project to program, what's the best practice around that?

Andrew: Well, picking the right first project is, of course, important, but also then understanding as you start to see success within that first project, you want to create your pipeline for what are the next steps in your overall program. What are the processes that when your executive sponsor gets excited how you're BPM, ODM solution delivered them what you promised it would, that while that iron is hot, you start presenting the other things that they could be doing, that here are areas within your enterprise that you see have great potential for these sorts of solutions.

Krista: I think people talk a lot about analytics and creating analytics in your first project so that you can demonstrate the ROI. Do you have suggestions on how someone could do that and then really translate that into program suggestions?

Andrew: Well, there's the traditional approach to analytics, which involves knowing beforehand where you think you're going to get your most information, the best information, to instruct you as to what the next things you are going to do. However, we at BP3 really don't like that answer, so we've invested a lot in tooling, such that we can come in after your process or ODM solution is in production and uncover that data and expose it in a way that it yields to an analysis as opposed to you knowing ahead of time how your process is going to behave or what's going to be important to you once you're in production.

Krista: Really, with your approach, we're able to go from project to program with the data to demonstrate the right ROI?

Andrew: That's right. What we want to do is encourage you. We know that you've invested a lot of time, money, and passion in delivering your solution, and we want to make sure that you have the right tools in place to be able to reflect that back into your organization and have them understand why you think this is such a unique opportunity.

Krista: Thanks, Andrew, for joining us and, hopefully, we'll be taking a lot more projects to program soon.

Andrew: You're welcome.