Is project management an #BPM application?

At present, the BPM community is discussing a common definition of BPM (Business Process Management).

My favourite is "Business process management is the discipline to model, automate, execute, control, measure and optimize the flows of business activities that span the systems, employees, customers and partners within and beyond the enterprise boundaries."

This definition is emphasizing that BPM is helping you to carry out all this 6 verbs EXPLICITLY and TOGETHER. It is actually your choice if you want to carry out any combination of them.

Also, my definition of business process is an explicitly-defined purposeful coordination of works.

In the LinkedIn discussion (http://www.linkedin.com/groupAnswers?viewQuestionAndAnswers=&discussionID=5812680199795388416&gid=70120), I found that that project management is an BPM application! Because the project management discipline is doing everything as BPM and a project plan is a particular form of process:

• Modelling of future work by PMO which supplies some standard (or enterprise-wide) procedures as shown below and by the project team which defines Gantt diagrams; PMO does the modelling for all projects and project team does the modelling for its project by defining many interrelated business activities. 

• Automation by PMO which supplies some standard docs for all projects
• Execution (actually, self-execution) by all team members (and services involved, e.g. procurement) of business activities assigned to them
• Control by the project manager of schedule (planned, actual,  projected), resources (planned, actual,  projected), cost (planned, actual,  projected), scope (planned, actual,  projected),  etc.
• Measurement by the PMO of all projects
• Optimisation by the PMO of standard procedures and documents, and by SMEs recommendation for particular types of projects

Of course, the project management uses a simple way to model the coordination of work within projects (i.e. Gantt diagrams) thus making simulation rather easy. 

Shall we stop talking about "project management" vs "process management"?

Shall we start talking about how to use BPM to streamline project management? 

Thanks,

AS

Relationship between EA, PMO, an SDLC methodology and ITIL

Continue of the post “Relationships between EA and PMO”.

For the moment, I don’t discuss the “local” SDLC methodology. It is considered that it translates (as a project) a request for a business solution into a set of interdependent services. Some of those services are new; some of those services are new versions of existing services. The main steps of such a translation are:

• Architect a solution as a set of services (BPM, SOA, etc. is are used for quick prototyping to understand WHY and WHAT for each service as well as the effect on the whole enterprise environment)
• Design each service (supply HOW for that service – buy, build, rent, outsource)
• Deploy each service (of course, provide the ruthless monitoring for each service before deployment)

So, it is necessary to guarantee that newly created services or versions of services will be the good ITIL citizens. For this reason, many of ITIL processes have to be “invoked” during projects as shown in figure below.

Thanks,
AS

Relationships between EA and PMO

In my current position at a chief enterprise architect I have to provide a clear guidance how EA, PMO, PMBOK, BPM, SOA, ECM, SDLC, CMMI, ITIL, etc. should work together. This post is about EA and PMO.

EA is a management tool to help the enterprise to realise its vision by provisioning guidance and practical help for the design and evolution of the Bank via the enterprise models as well as with a coherent and proven set of principles, recommendations, and practices for working with those models.

EA has the three explicit parts: model, management and governance. Model is a set of enterprise artefacts and relationships between them. The governance part is used for the strategic improvements and self-tuning of the enterprise environment. The governance defines the model for a target environment and the means (a road map presented to the business as the strategy) to implement necessary changes from the baseline model to the target model. The management part supervises those changes which are carried out in different internal projects. The latter are controlled by PMO.

Thanks,
AS