The operating model explicitly includes a BPM CoE to direct the BPM design  team and BPM solution teams, and to champion and evangelize BPM across the company. This section explores the BPM CoE in more detail and the challenges that it addresses and its goals and responsibilities.

When beginning your journey with BPM within an organization, you encounter  challenges that your organization can address by establishing a BPM CoE. Typical challenges include:

• Projects under-delivering on the original business value case
• Alignment difficulties between business and IT
• Different methods and standards across BPM projects
• Lack of coordination within the organization, leading to suboptimal usage  of resources

The previously mentioned points illustrate why strong executive sponsorship and effective working relationships between all departments in an organization are  essential, and the charter of the BPM Center of Excellence is to ensure that  these conditions exist.

The mission and goals of the BPM CoE are to ensure the success of the  organization’s BPM approach and initiatives by providing business solutions that support the organization’s strategy and goals. The goals of the BPM CoE are:

• To provide a single entity for using standardized methods, tools, assets, skills, and resources for the organization
• To foster clear communication and coordination between business and IT  along the BPM journey
• To ensure alignment with business architecture, process ownership, and the  overall  enterprise
• To provide and manage BPM policies and procedures
• To identify BPM roles and map them within the organization

The BPM CoE mission and goals provide a clear starting point in determining the  core responsibilities:

• Managing and maintaining BPM portfolio planning, including coordination  between BPM projects
• Managing the status of BPM projects
• Determining, implementing, and promoting the adoption of BPM standards  and policies
• Tracking delivered BPM value through established metrics
• Managing and maintaining the deployed process models
• Supplying and maintaining skills for BPM initiatives
• Gathering and establishing best practices
• Maintaining and promoting reusable BPM assets
• Developing custom value-adding tools for the enterprise
• Fostering processing (and even business model) innovation
• Delivering BPM education

At the setup of the BPM CoE, the success criteria and the metrics to measure success should be included in the BPM CoE charter. This action ensures the focus and direction needed to maintain executive support. The BPM CoE metrics  should be directly related to its responsibilities and characterize the value of the CoE.

The number of BPM projects for which the BPM CoE provides resources and consultancy are good candidates for determining return on investment (ROI) of the BPM CoE. The reuse of assets on BPM projects is in the same category. Less tangible, but valid, is the number of projects within budget, schedule, and with the expected business value delivered.

Typically, a BPM CoE is not established with the initial BPM project. It is established when the first BPM project is extended into a BPM program.

The proposed approach for establishing a CoE includes the following phases:

• Planning and establishing a roadmap
• Implementing the roadmap
• Activating the BPM CoE

First, you need to socialize the BPM CoE and the business process governance  and operational models. The obtained feedback is then incorporated into a formal charter for the BPM CoE. The BPM CoE charter contains:

• The  mission
• The  scope
• The roles and responsibilities
• The governance framework
• The mentoring and education plan
• The processes and procedures

The implementation starts with identifying the CoE human resources and then  training them on methods and tools. The operating model needs to be further formalized, and any questions about the working of the operating model need to be clarified.

Define the standard performance metrics that serve as a baseline for all BPM projects. Then you integrate the defined performance metrics into a common reporting process. Also include a change readiness assessment in the  implementation of the roadmap.

Start by deploying the CoE on the first BPM project. The feedback from this first BPM project is used to evaluate the contribution by CoE resources and to refine the operating model. You build upon the change readiness assessment from the implementation step to create and execute a change management plan.