Managing Experience in Business Process Management

Business Process Management (BPM) is a management approach to identify, document, manage and finally to optimize business processes continuously. Today, Information Technology is an enabler to improve such processes. Learning objectives in a university course on BPM should be rather practice oriented in the area of business management, information systems development and team-working, because in enterprises typically people from different departments with different competences have to work together in BPM-projects. We have developed a new master study course that itself follows the paradigm of continuous process improvement and apply case-based reasoning as a mean for improving the projects of participating students. In the course, students develop in teams of five a business process application. Four major steps are problem formation, design and modelling of a process, deployment of the process in a workflow management system and monitoring of the deployed business process. Each team can freely choose an application domain with a business process and key performance indicators, a modelling tool and a workflow engine. Competences of students, decisions during the project and issues occurring in the different phases are documented in a content management system with sophisticated rights management enabling students to learn also from experiences from other teams. Case-based reasoning is applied to share experience between different projects, by indicating similar projects, teams and issues. This approach is now taken in the third year and first experience with knowledge sharing are reported. Such an approach could be also taken by an enterprise planning several business process management projects.