The final session of the conference will feature an exclusive event: a set of practical workshops to help you piece together key aspects of what you have learned this week to hit the ground running upon your return to the office! Each hands-on interactive session will focus on specific topics and will use a planning framework that will provide a quick start towards your own BPM mobilization. Led by members of the conference faculty and with plenty of audience participation, these extended length sessions will provide a brief synopsis of the issues followed by a guided set of questions, considerations and potential alternative answers to help you start building your "roadmap for success".

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Thursday, November 15, 2007 | 11:30am-1:30pm

After the Project: Managing Continuous Improvement

Facilitator: Douglas Timmel, Bluewolf

For more information about this session, please visit our Web site at iirusa.com/bpm.

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Thursday, November 15, 2007 | 11:30am-1:30pm

Moving from Business Process to IT Specifications

Facilitator: Alec Sharp, Senior Consultant, Clariteq Systems Consulting Ltd.

Every few years a new requirements definition technique emerges, with great fanfare, promising to solve the problems we've all struggled with. Unfortunately, it never quite works out that way. As Fred Brooks pointed out twenty years ago in his classic article "No Silver Bullet," defining requirements is inherently difficult, and will always be so. However, methods are available that can improve requirements definition substantially, and having a business process model is a great start. The purpose of this facilitated working session is to explore the development of useful requirements with a process model as the starting point. We'll begin with a review of the key points from Alec's top-rated 2006 session on this topic, and then it's up to you! Please come to this session prepared to participate by suggesting specific topics for discussion, and sharing your issues, questions, and experiences.

Key Points:
• What are IT requirements, and what can make them both accessible to subject matter experts and useful to developers?
• Different types of process models and the characteristics impacting their usefulness in requirements definition.
• When should you stop using business process modeling and start using other methods?
• Techniques (successful and otherwise) for discovering, documenting, and verifying requirements
• Common concerns – controlling detail, the definition vs. management balance, the role of tools, etc.

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Thursday, November 15, 2007 | 11:30am-1:30pm

Building a Process Change Project Plan

Facilitator: Sandra Foster, Senior Consultant, Process Renewal Group

After the conference many attendees will be required to propose what their organizations should do to leverage the knowledge that they have acquired to improve process performance within their organization. The process improvement journey should be directly tied to what your organization is trying to accomplish but the journey will start with a commitment to provide resources to invest in a process change project. To achieve your organization's business objectives, your process change project will need to be well managed using techniques that will lead to gaining and maintaining stakeholder commitment to the change required. In addition, your role as project manager will be to balance the process project change scope and quality with resources and time available and using the methods and tools that are available/ acceptable. This workshop will help you map out the first draft of your project plan.

Key Issues:
• Gaining and maintaining project commitment – understanding stakeholders and expectations
• Determining appropriate project scope
• Defining project deliverables
• Defining project roles and responsibilities
• Crafting a high level business case for investment in process improvement
• Defining project communications strategy