Business Process Management Platform

While working at a mid-sized insurance company we discovered that we had a work in-take problem. We had tools to manage our incoming defects and project managers to oversee project work. But our customers could pick up the phone and call a developer to request work and we had no visibility into what our customer might need us to do in the future. We had to get our arms around what work needed to be done, by when and by whom. Without a business process or even a tool to manage the work in-take, we were completely reactive and utterly lost.

We ultimately (and instinctively) decided to use an existing instance of SharePoint as a business process management (BPM) platform to iteratively build out a solution. Eventually, this platform would enable us to create a high-value, low-code demand management solution customized for our needs. This didn’t happen overnight and was full of challenges (some of which we didn’t discover until we were in the middle of solutioning). These are the lessons we learned from that BPM effort with recommendations for what to do differently if you find yourself in the same position.