Process Mining Center of Excellence

Using Program Management for Success

Guest post by Leslie Goldstone who has implemented process mining and reflects on her time building out a Center of Excellence (CoE).

Your company has started to dabble in process mining, whether engaging in a Proof of Value project or extending the capabilities you already have. You want to set up best practices in a consistent manner and align to your organization’s priorities. It sounds like you want to build a Center of Excellence.  But how to get started? How do you ensure you are working on the right projects that will provide the ROI you are seeking?

Programs inherently drive benefits important to the organization’s strategic objectives.  Process Mining is used by organizations to drive benefits. Establishing a Process Mining Center of Excellence as a program will allow you to follow a systematic approach for success.

According to PMI’s The Standard for Program Management, the domains of Program Management are Strategy Alignment, Stakeholder Engagement, Governance, Benefits Management, and Life Cycle Management.  Each of these domains relate to building and sustaining a process mining CoE.

Strategy Alignment is the CoE strategy.  A strategy needs a purpose.  It is WHAT you are trying to do and HOW you are going to get there.  A Process Mining CoE needs to have a clear objective and a way to measure success.  For example, the organization’s goal may be to streamline processes and automate manual work by 30% or save a portion of the bottom line. The program manager will work with executives to understand their objectives and decide what the strategy is for the CoE. By knowing WHAT the strategic objective is, the program can build a plan on HOW to get there.

Stakeholder Management is about the people that are part of the program.  The CoE needs to identify and analyze WHO will make the program successful. Who are the sponsors of the program?  Who is responsible for the end-to-end processes you are looking at and who will make the actionable decisions for each use case? Who else should be included? Process Mining stakeholders include the technical teams that will be the data engineers and analysts who bring in the right data to build process maps and dashboards. Source System Owners may be needed to identify what tables/fields are required for the use case.  Process Subject Matter Experts (SMEs) will confirm and explore the process.  Process Owners review the findings, evaluate potential opportunities, and commit to actions to produce benefit. Continuous stakeholder analysis allows the CoE to identify who you need to manage closely, keep satisfied, monitor, or inform. A CoE is to produce best practices and consistency. It is the stakeholders that the CoE needs to make sure are aware, aligned and know where to go for the best practice.

A program uses Governance to provide oversight and control.  The CoE creates a methodology of tools and processes for its stakeholders in order to deliver the intended benefits. This typically includes what tools that will be used, documentation requirements, detailed roles & responsibilities, training, and communication. Governance also includes logs, such as issue and risk logs, decisions logs, and a benefits register. The CoE may develop Guiding Principles, the framework that guides teams on their process mining journey. It is important to develop a consistent user experience, standards for bringing in data, global templates for dashboards development, and a data dictionary. The CoE brings best practices to life as part of the Governance domain.

Benefits Management is the reason to do process mining because it brings benefits to the organization. The CoE will prioritize use cases based on potential impact so it focuses on use cases that yield the highest benefit. It will also track the value of each use case using a value framework. The CoE partners with process owners and their teams to review potential value, confirm actions that are needed, and establish a commitment to a quantifiable benefit for monitoring.  By following-up on the benefits derived from process mining, the CoE is able to communicate the status and total ROI being achieved. This not only provides kudos to the teams involved but raises interest from other teams. The CoE can work with these teams to evaluate their ideas and build a roadmap of opportunities to continue to obtain value generated from process mining.

Life Cycle Management pulls all of the domains together and is the management of the program.  Once benefits are achieved, it is necessary to ensure the organization is prepared to operationalize the process changes to ensure the improvements continue as expected. If automation is involved, the operational support team may be IT or the process mining technical team. Regardless, the CoE needs to identify the tools used, responsible teams, deliver training and escalation paths, and provide guidance on how to continuously monitor the new process. Change management may also be needed to deliver the right communication.  Organizations don’t want to lose benefits because the improvements from process mining don’t stick. The CoE supports the organization with the capabilities and keeps a check on the operations.

As you can see, establishing a process mining Center of Excellence as a program will help set up best practices, build a community to support process mining capabilities, and ensure the use cases align to your organization’s priorities.  The intended benefits will result with positive ROI outcomes and be monitored for long lasting results. What are you waiting for?

Leslie Goldstone, PgMP, PMP

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