It is about time—we took a (very) long summer break filled with travel, a new webinar series, and new and updated apps from What's Your Baseline? :-)

Oh, and crossing that 75,000 download mark and celebrating our fifth anniversary—all in this month!

But now we are back in the saddle, as they say, and we are starting Season 11 with a conversation between J-M and Roland, in which we dive into our shared painful experiences of process programs who have failed in on or another way. And the graphic below will give you the seven main reasons that we've seen in an overview.

But without further ado, in this week's episode of the podcast we are talking about:

• BPMOS Updates: Roland highlights the release of new BPMOS apps and use cases covering learning and enablement, SDLC from requirement to implementation, planning and procedure factory exercises, and tool selection.
• The Root of All Evil: The hosts establish that practice failures almost always stem from people making poor decisions, setting up major categories like strategy, structure, governance, technology, and process.
• Financial Institution Redux: J-M shares a story about a major North American financial institution that struggled with employee happiness initiatives because "too many cooks in the kitchen" forced 30 different capabilities instead of a core MVP.
• Winning Through Jealousy: To fix the financial institution's fractured program, the team focused on making a single lead stakeholder look exceptionally successful using clear dashboards and KPIs to spark community engagement.
• The 10-Second Login Disaster: Roland shares a horror story of a healthcare company that bought thousands of software licenses, only to see a 10% login rate with average sessions lasting 10 to 15 seconds due to a total lack of use case definition.
• Vendor Accountability: The software vendor experience proved that overselling without clear internal commitment or matching use cases leads straight to corporate blacklists and shelfware.
• Airline System Silos: J-M recounts working with an international airline where a major ERP re-implementation was restricted to a strict "project bubble," causing massive scoping failures when touching unmapped system interfaces.
• The Business Therapist: Navigating severe adversarial relationships between vendors and corporate clients requires consultants with high emotional intelligence to act as mediators and keep the project alive.
• Process Mining Roadblocks: Roland details a financial institution that loved process mining initial proofs-of-concept but ultimately stalled out because rigid 8-to-10-week data request cycles choked agility.
• Top-Down Power: The lesson from the process mining hurdle is that bottom-up enthusiasm is great, but getting data and capabilities moving requires the backing of executive “big guns."
• The Lifer Employee Challenge: Working with decades-long corpor“lifers” who reject new methodologies requires understanding their unique values and reaching out early to secure true buy-in.
• Whiteboards vs. Repositories: The hosts lament seeing critical organizational processes mapped solely on office sticky notes, physical whiteboards, or locked filing cabinets rather than a digital twin repository.
• Summary of Failure Pillars: The episode wraps up by reiterating the core pillars of failure: strategy, people alignment, technology choices, process sustainment, structural design, governance, and value achievement.

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