Back in the “good old days” I started looking into BPM, or more precisely the BPM notion. They way we intended to use it on that particular product was, to apply a universal way of modeling processes across department, teams and continents. Said in a different way, we wanted to make sure that everybody drew things in the same manner. Of course, this is pretty standard, however, our organization was not only a result of an acquisition, but also an organization that had a lot of sub contractors, both foreign and domestic.
The plan was a actually fairly simple; to train people in the use of BPMN 2.2 and upgrade their Visio installation and then basically make BPM diagrams a mandatory part of any specification, user story etc. True to form, these were never implemented, despite the fairly big investment in BPMN, and since nobody really had the time, mandate or ownership it seemed like the project fell between two chairs and died quietly.
Now the scene has changed, at least for me personally. In my new organization we are also working on implementing BMP, but in a much larger scale. Not only do we use the notion as a normal part of our every day work, we are actually going to implement the processes underneath, in order to manage our work flow. Pretty cool stuff actually. We are still pretty early in the process, but I am looking forward to getting my hands on Jdeveloper to see what we can actually do with this thing. Until that day comes, I have signed up with our good friends at Orbus to the stencils I need to get this show on the road. Hopefully I will get around to writing more about implementing BPM as our project progresses.