Sunday, February 04, 2007

BPM Series: New Year Resolutions of a BPM Project Manager - Resolution #4

Resolution #4: I will have performance benchamrking done before every BPM roll-out

A typical BPM implementation such as the one I was involved in recently, for automation of New Business process involves integration and interaction with multiple back-office systems. In a number of cases, BPM implementations also have imaging or content management system as one of the components. And if such BPM implementations are carried out to automate mission critical processes, response time and speed of the system becomes extremely critical. Just imagine, user clicks on a work item in the worklist and it takes 15 or 20 seconds for the system to open the work item and document image for the user. A system that has un acceptable response time can cause huge amount of resistance amongst user community to accept and use the system. In such cases, infrastructure sizing and tuning ahead of the implementation becomes extremely critical.

So, for a successful BPM implementation, talk to users and agree upon the acceptable performance standards. Assess the load during the peak business period and make sure that your production infrastructure and software are tuned to take the peak load through a performance benchmarking exercise involving load testing, and soak testing. Such tests record system performances for the target load. The test results provide enough inputs to de-bottleneck production environment by ensuring adequate infrastructure is deployed and software applications are appropriately configured.

Resoultion #3

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