Common Pitfalls in Business Process Management

Chosen theme: Common Pitfalls in Business Process Management. Avoid the traps that derail transformation and learn practical moves that deliver real, resilient improvements. Join the conversation, share your experiences, and subscribe for weekly, battle-tested insights.

Tool-First Mindset vs. Problem-First Thinking

When Software Leads, Value Lags

Teams often chase impressive dashboards and automation features, then discover they automated ambiguity. Without a crisp problem statement, workflows calcify around guesswork, creating rework, shadow processes, and frustrated users who quietly revert to spreadsheets.

A Quick Story from a Retail Back Office

A regional retailer installed a top-tier suite to “fix” returns. They skipped discovery interviews. Six months later, cycle time improved on paper but customer refunds slowed, because a missing exception path forced manual escalations everywhere.

Your Turn: Map Before You Buy

Before any demo, draft the problem, desired outcomes, and non-negotiable constraints. Share a one-page process map with vendors and ask them to walk the variant cases. Comment below if you’d like our checklist template.

Neglecting People, Change, and Culture

Co-create steps, thresholds, and exception paths with the people who actually click and call. Their stories surface edge cases you will miss. Participation builds pride, reduces resistance, and reveals quick wins you can publicize.

Neglecting People, Change, and Culture

Treat training like a user experience: scenarios, practice, job aids, and reinforcement loops. Track adoption like a metric, not a hope. If people cannot succeed easily, the process is not ready for launch.

Neglecting People, Change, and Culture

Share stories of someone using the new exception path correctly, even before the KPI moves. Normalizing the behavior creates momentum, which later shows up in the numbers. Invite readers to share their shout-outs.

Weak Metrics, Poor Data, and Measurement Drift

Agree on outcome metrics, lead indicators, and guardrails. Assign data owners and refresh cadences. If two teams calculate the same metric differently, stop and harmonize definitions before any dashboard work continues, however tempting.

Weak Metrics, Poor Data, and Measurement Drift

Capture timestamps across touchpoints, measure handoff quality, and annotate exceptions. End-to-end visibility exposes where promised SLAs die. Field notes, even qualitative ones, enrich numbers with context, guiding smarter experiments and faster causal understanding.

Siloed Design and Losing the End-to-End View

Write a one-sentence promise for the process: what the customer expects and when. Trace backwards across departments. Any local optimization that breaks the promise becomes a candidate for redesign, de-escalation, or elimination.

Siloed Design and Losing the End-to-End View

Document who sends what to whom, and in what quality. Set explicit acceptance criteria at each boundary. Publish handoff SLAs beside team dashboards so gaps surface quickly, without blame, and prompt collaborative fixes.

Common Pitfalls in Business Process Management

Tool-First Mindset vs. Problem-First Thinking

When Software Leads, Value Lags

A Quick Story from a Retail Back Office

Your Turn: Map Before You Buy

This is the heading

This is the heading

Neglecting People, Change, and Culture

Neglecting People, Change, and Culture

Neglecting People, Change, and Culture

Weak Metrics, Poor Data, and Measurement Drift

Weak Metrics, Poor Data, and Measurement Drift

Siloed Design and Losing the End-to-End View

Siloed Design and Losing the End-to-End View