Securing Senior Management Support for Process Modeling

“We’ve gone through a mindset change. Previously, we encountered challenges within Eli Lilly and Company in gaining senior management buy-in for BPM,” Comerford said. “So we began with some ‘stealth’ projects. Once those were accomplished successfully, executives started to see the value.”

For example, Comerford said that one of Lilly’s European business areas was considering the possibility of outsourcing some of its work. But before the team could discuss the processes with the external service providers (ESPs), they first needed to understand those processes.

“We were able to spend some time with the group, map their processes and present those mapped processes to the ESPs to enable them to have a meaningful conversation about what would be involved in outsourcing,” he said. “As an aside, the ESPs were so impressed with ProVision as a tool when we presented the processes that they started looking to evaluate the product for their own internal use.”

All of the models and definitions Comerford’s group creates IT process point of view are stored within the Metastorm ProVision repository. He stressed the importance of obtaining executive support for business process modeling.

“I firmly believe that a process in the purest sense of the word is a common way of performing a business function-- and that it is the same across the globe. It makes sense, therefore, that if it is common and global, then setting it up for success involves having senior sponsorship at a global level. No-one is going to adopt a 'global' process if it is defined and sponsored by a middle manager, but if the same process is mandated by a vice president or CIO then it has more credibility,” Comerford said.

Pharmaceutical companies, which are heavily regulated, are required to demonstrate a consistent way of managing projects. At Eli Lilly the methodology is referred to as the Lilly Systems Engineering Framework (LSEF). This is a global framework that was defined as a way of providing common project implementation settings across the whole organization.

LSEF was developed with senior level sponsorship and was based on Project Management Best Practices (PMBok). The global framework was defined by the team, who then mandated that a local implementation, based on the common framework, had to be completed within a set time span by all areas of IT.

“For the European development group, my team took that framework and built on the processes defined within it and created the regional version. We used ProVision to help facilitate discussions around processes, to run process development sessions where affiliate folks defined how they currently perform tasks, and to manage the process differences and define a single common reference,” he said.

The resulting processes, procedures, document templates and training documents were loaded into ProVision and published on an Intranet page, thus extending valuable intellectual capital to the desktop of every individual.

“The methodology helps employees do their day to day work. The web site takes them through the whole process for any given project activity, from how a project is initiated to how a solution is retired. For example, you can click on a link for requirements gathering, and it will take you to a template with all the materials needed to execute the process,” he said.