Engaging your stakeholders forms the foundation for ongoing success. One of the biggest barriers to business success is lack of trust, both internally and externally. When customers are faced with mixed messages and missed deadlines, they lose faith in your business. These issues crop up when your stakeholders are not on the same page, so engaging stakeholders early and often allows you to deliver on business goals; business process management (BPM) gives you the framework you need for increased engagement.
A BPM platform allows you to identify the stakeholders involved in any project, simply by tracking workflow. You can monitor the key players on any project and get them on board early; by pulling in everyone on the planning stages, you will have a big picture overview on how a project should work. With your players working on a project around the same table, you can walk through the goals and KPI for a given project to avoid confusion from the start. Then, you can follow each project from inception to completion, without spending a lot of time in face-to-face meetings.
Transparency helps all parts and pieces of an organization move in the same direction. The more each department knows about business goals, the better they can work to fulfill them, since communication forms the foundation for ongoing engagement and process alignment. Using BPM, upper management can see slowdowns and potential problems as they happen, thus correcting workflow through direct department communication. BPM services can help manage all four basic types of internal business communications (awareness, performance, change management and knowledge transfer) in a single platform, to ensure all collaborations happen with improved transparency. When every department can see instant changes, and the reasons behind those changes, it helps eliminate mistakes and mixed messages to clients.
Ultimately, BPM offers management a platform in which to manage stakeholder engagement and performance. By using analytics gathered through a BPM system, you can start developing internal communities that cross department lines to break down barriers and help create a learning environment. The more sales department personnel know about fulfillment, the less likely they are to make impossible promises to customers; when fulfillment understands the pain points on the sales team, they can make suggestions and offer possible solutions. Leveraging the information gathered by a BPM service allows you to take control over how your company functions, without getting bogged down in micromanagement.
You can read more about working in collaboration with your internal stakeholders in our blog "Selling BPM to the business - How to get your internal stakeholders on board"
