BPMS evaluations fail for a number of reasons. However, failure may not be obvious in the first instance, at least not to persons outside the evaluation team. It may take months or even more than a year for failure to finally become evident. But, in the end, failure will come to the surface.

Below are some top reasons that cause BPMS evaluations to fail.

Technology-Centric Evaluation 

Some triggers for failure are:

• Organization and IT do not really collaborate;
• The focus is more on functionality, interfaces, protocols and formats, rather than on the business process life-cycle;
• The focus is too much on the existing technical IT infrastructure.

Not Having a Proper Foundation 

If you start a BPMS evaluation before you have the proper foundation, you are going to fail. Three essential elements of that foundation are:

• A defined evaluation process, which is repeatable and ensures that the evaluation is performed systematically;
• An Evaluation Specification that contains all requirements that the BPMS needs to meet;
• A sound scoring methodology that makes evaluation results comparable.

Badly Written Requirements

There are numerous examples for badly written requirements. Quality requirement statements have characteristics, such as "feasible", "unambiguous" and "verifiable".

Badly written requirements cause confusion and result in inadequately defined measures of success. In addition, it usually takes more time to get badly written requirements right than to write quality requirements from the beginning.