Risk Management in the BPM Lifecycle

Business Process Management (BPM) is considered an essential strategy to create and maintain sustainable competitive advantage. While researchers are anxious to identify critical success factors for the management of business process related projects, the risks associated with these projects have received considerably less attention. This is a concern: Although BPM projects contain phases that relate to software development and deployment, simply applying risk mitigation strategies found in software engineering ignores the subsequent process management phases that follow upon the implementation and automation of processes. This paper provides an overview of risks associated with BPM projects along the phases of the BPM lifecycle. After a classification of the risks identified with the individual life cycle phases and transitions we discuss four strategies to deal with these risks: avoid, mitigate, transfer, and accept. The outlook of this paper discusses how assessment frameworks such as CobIT and COSO relate to the identified risks.