2014年3月2日星期日

Is Project Management an #BPM Application?

At present, the BPM community is discussing a common definition of BPM (Business Process Management).

My favourite is "Business process management is the discipline to model, automate, execute, control, measure and optimize the flows of business activities that span the systems, employees, customers and partners within and beyond the enterprise boundaries."

This definition is emphasizing that BPM is helping you to carry out all this 6 verbs EXPLICITLY and TOGETHER. It is actually your choice if you want to carry out any combination of them.

Also, my definition of business process is an explicitly-defined purposeful coordination of works.

In the LinkedIn discussion, I found that that project management is an BPM application! Because the project management discipline is doing everything as BPM and a project plan is a particular form of process:


  • Modelling of future work by PMO which supplies some standard (or enterprise-wide) procedures as shown below and by the project team which defines Gantt diagrams; PMO does the modelling for all projects and project team does the modelling for its project by defining many interrelated business activities.



  • Automation by PMO which supplies some standard docs for all projects
  • Execution (actually, self-execution) by all team members (and services involved, e.g. procurement) of business activities assigned to them
  • Control by the project manager of schedule (planned, actual, projected), resources (planned, actual, projected), cost (planned, actual, projected), scope (planned, actual, projected), etc.
  • Measurement by the PMO of all projects
  • Optimisation by the PMO of standard procedures and documents, and by SMEs recommendation for particular types of projects


Of course, the project management uses a simple way to model the coordination of work within projects (i.e. Gantt diagrams) thus making simulation rather easy.

Shall we stop talking about "project management" vs "process management"?

Shall we start talking about how to use BPM to streamline project management?

Article by Alexander SAMARIN