Customer Reviews

Business Process Management, Second Edition: Practical Guidelines to Successful Implementations

5 star:		(11)
4 star:		(6)
3 star:		(0)
2 star:		(4)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

This book is truly unique and like no other. It provides step-by-step guidelines how to actually do BPM projects. The framework gives me confidence that all aspects will be addressed during a project.

I specially like the first chapters, written in the form of Questions and Answers, they address precisely the type of issues which my company is struggling with at the moment.

The "one approach does not fit all" write-up shows that the authors understand the challenges of being successful in various organisations and that BPM in itself not a silver bullet is.

This book is very pragmatic and highly recommended for any BPM professional. Also check out the useful tools and checlists in the appendices.

This book is really different: it is practical and powerful. It has helped my colleagues and myself tremendously. We use the book as approach for all our BPM initiatives as it provides clear, understandable and logical steps to achieve success. We prefer to use this book to provide our colleagues and management with the WHAT, WHY and HOW about true process improvement.

I especially like the chapter on demystifying BPM: away with all the fog & mist and concentrate on the tangible and pragmatic aspects. It is a delight to have something different than most of the other BPM books, as those books are generally quite vague, too high level and keep on repeating the same message over and over again.

The practical tools and checklist in the appendices are very helpful. I hope that the next edition (or next book?) will contain a CD Rom with some of these tools as well as some generic BPM awareness presentations.

Anyone who's interested in process improvement needs to invest in this book. Written in simple plain language, the book simplifies bpm and bpi.
Though I bought this book based on other people's reviews, I am proud to send mine. If you are new in business process management, redesign or even re-engineering, this is a good place to start. I have found this book as a great material with real-life examples. It is an excellent guide for implementing a process improvement or management project. I am currently working on a business process improvement project for one of my training programs and I have found the ideas expressed in this book handy.
As a six sigma specialist, I find myself reading similar books but this book stands out and I look forward to the next page as I read on.

This book is going to be preferred by all sorts of people who ardently admire and regard with wondering esteem so-called PROJECT MANAGEMENT FRAMEWORKS. I personally feel I can't join a club of 5-star Amazon reviewers claiming this is a "complete BPM book". I am certain, this book is millions of light-years from 4- or 5-star rate. If this books reached an average 4 star rate so far, then the incomparably better book on the subject like that of, for example, Sharp and McDermott deserves 44-star average rate. Wake up people!

Having read dozens of BPM books (none of them is and can't be complete even if it claims so), I cannot comprehend how can anyone write "this book is truly unique and like no other". Unique?! This must be a kind of joke. Show me please where I may find this uniqueness because I was searching it but was not able to find it.

If you are looking for things like: roll-out, back-out, contingency plan, mitigation strategy, realizing value, feedback loop, governance, stakeholder management, strategy, objectives, goals, mission, vision...yes - this is a book for you.
People who place an emphasis on more specific BPM subjects (technics for discovering true business processes, detailed process analysis, dealing with complexity and usefulness of a process model, designing real-life metrics helping align a job of individual performer with a whole E2E business process) are going to be disappointed with the book's wording.

You'll encounter many commonly known terms used in BPM world like SOA, Six Sigma, Balanced Scorecard, Kaizen, ISO, eTOM, SLA, TQM, SWOT...All of them are just mentioned in a manner that does not makes you more aware than WIKIPEDIA does. Actually, the free encyclopedia does it a way better. One more thing - why didn't authors even mention anything about Statistical Process Control?

I found in this book too much general information from other management fields, so I dare to speak out that some beginners after reading 469 pages (provided they made it somehow through) may be scared to further study any BPM stuff.

Not to mention reviews, two things encouraged me to buy the book: the title (practical+implementation) and words on the cover: FOREWORD BY TOM DAVENPORT. I own a couple of his books, not all of them are excellent, but some are a must-read, so I naively thought Mr Davenport would not praise a boring text pretending to be innovative. By the way, you'd rather read Mr Davenport's "Process Innovation" instead.

Some quiz questions with answers:

What is the number of total instances of words containing `STRATEG' (strategy, strategic etc.) in this book? ANSWER: 644.
What is the number of total instances of words containing `MANAGE' (managerial, management, manager, etc.)? ANSWER: 1595.
And what about PROJECT? ANSWER: 1877.
An acronym BPM appears often as well, but surprisingly not so often as `project''. ANSWER - 1180
This, of course, does not have to mean anything. Really?
Let's try to search for subjects like workflow modeling, workflow analysis or business process improvement. Workflow (38 instances), workflow modeling (0 instances), workflow analysis (0 instances), improvement (227 instances), process improvement (94 instances), business process improvement (14 instances). Now it means something?

The book's text is boring, especially for those who prefer something different than vague statements like "ROADMAP FOR THE CREATION OF A SUSTAINABLE, SUCCESSFUL AND REPEATABLE BUSINESS PROCESS IMPROVEMENT PROGRAMS AND ORGANIZATIONAL CULTURE". This might be a part of mission statement of a very big intergalactic corporation. All such phrases about "sustainability" sound to me as if they were told by Arthur Andersen CxO to his young junior consultants accepting anything as true, even in the absence of any proof. Sorry, I can't stand it.

If you get any significant responsibility for the management and success of any project having to do with BPM, then this book is a must. It is very practical and it denotes immediately the vast experience and unselfishness of the authors who share precious fruits of their practice. I would like to use this space that Amazon gives us to thank wholeheartedly John Jeston and Johan Nelis for this jewel of technical literature.

Overall, this is a very good process management book. As a consultant and BPM trainer, I often recommend this book to my classes. It provides a newcomer to Business Process Management a structured "how to" approach for applying Business Process Improvement step-by-step.

The first 18 chapters (there are 28) are great. The first 10-12 chapters are essential for both experienced and inexperienced BPM analysts. These chapters should be read carefully and re-read many times.

The only reason that I didn't give this book 5 stars, is because some of the business examples could be better and there is a lot of "fluff" writing in the middle chapters that could have been condensed and made this book more readable. But don't get me wrong; this book is well worth the money and I refer to it often. It is definitely a "must buy"...

Jeston and Nelis provide a framework, practices, case studies, and templates to apply to the business process-oriented analysis and organizational change preparation that must occur prior to the Unified process, agile methods, scrum, or any other code-producing activity.
Business Process Management (BPM) provides an actionable approach that recognizes business processes are not silos but part of an organization's ecology. The BPM approach is more than process modeling. BPM starts with the organization's business architecture, business objectives, capabilities of the people, and organization's capability to undertake change. The conclusion of the managed approach to modeling may call for a solution that uses technology to enable interactions across automated systems but BPM as an approach should NOT be confused with the marketing hyperbole of BPM product vendors.
The book does focus on a phased approach to prepare for and conduct the analytical effort once the priority processes have been selected. The reader is left to seek out the approach to the enterprise business and operational architectural modeling that should provide the context for which any area of the business is addressed by BPM. (We would be well served to convince the authors to undertake a similar book on an "actionable" approach to business architecture--something more than TOGAF.)
The authors address the history and hype related to BPM's predecessors including business process re-engineering. But they do not address a potential competitor to BPM: Business Motivation Modeling (BMM) recently recognized by The Open Group as an official standard. BMM also calls for defining and maintaining enterprise and line of business objectives and measurements. BMM then focuses on identification of business policies and rules.
I would like to see business rules thought leader Barbara von Halle and BPM's Jeston collaborate to make the best of business process management and business motivation to guide organizations in scoping and mapping their projects before the developers get involved.

First BPM book that provides this level of depth. The framework described should be closely looked at by mid and large companies bringing BPM. I believe it's most beneficial to center of excellence participants, BPM project managers and executve sponsors. The maturity model described on page 300 is outstanding.

If you are seeking guidance on what corporation need to do to become process centric, this is the leading book on the topic. I am on the OMG OCEB committee and we are writing OMG's certification exam for Business Process Experts. While this book was not cited on the fundamental exam, it certainally will be cited in the intermediate and advanced exam. Many on the committee recognize the contribution of this amazing book.

In my work with OCEB I have read just about every BPM book listed on Amazon. and this is the best, by far. The book is well written, well organized, beautifully produced and the discussions are authoritative.

From the reviews, you would think you are getting a crisp "how to" book on successfully implementing BPM. If may be in the pages, but the verbage and numerous peripheral topics detract from a pick-up and use that I was expecting. This book could be distilled to half the pages but the authors do not know how to get to the bottomline. For these reasons, I was disappointed.