Chapter 2. Understanding the target process

The last chapter has given us a bit of background to business process management and it is now time for us to dive right in and get our project up and running. The project outline described in this book is intended to deliver a BPM system that is fully functional and usable in the live environment, although there will be many opportunities left for further development of the end product. The point of our project is to prove that the BPM concept can deliver value to our organization, so that management will agree to further investment and proper development of the system.

Given that our objective is of a limited nature, it makes sense for our project to deliver as quickly as possible. Nevertheless, in our haste we should not sacrifice proper project documentation and methodology, for without an audit trail, the concept will remain unproven. While this book isn't about project management methodology, we will at least describe how to initiate the...