Success Factors for Business Process Improvement Projects in Small and Medium Sized Enterprises - Empirical Evidence

This paper uses an innovative research method for identifying success factors of project management projects. It reports the empirical results of a world café workshop conducted with 31 practitioners in Business Process Management (BPM) projects from small and medium sized enterprises (SME). Informed by the existing studies on critical success factors in BPM and projects in general, the authors planned and conducted a practitioner workshop and were able to identify 117 single impact factor items that were subsequently summarized to 64 success factors and mapped along 9 project management knowledge areas. The most important issue areas were found to be project integration, project controlling and stakeholder management, followed by factors of risk management, HR-management and organizational culture. The identified factors provide a preliminary insight into what enables the success of BPM-projects in SMEs and they may serve as a starting point for further.