Roland and J-M go solo to pull back the curtain on something that’s been years in the making: BPM OS, a purpose-built, local-first tool stack designed to help small, talented process and architecture teams stand up a real BPM practice — without the vendor dependency, IT overhead, or 12-month procurement nightmare.
In this episode of the podcast we talk about:
- Most BPM programs fail not because of bad content, but because organizations treat it as a pure IT exercise — buy a platform, check the box, and wonder why nothing sticks.
- The three pillars every BPM capability needs are content, governance, and adoption — yet most organizations only address the first one.
- Knowledge rented from consultants or SaaS vendors disappears the moment you stop paying; BPM OS is built on the principle that you own it outright, forever.
- BPM OS targets three groups: small internal teams doing more with less, consulting organizations that want baked-in methodology for client delivery, and vendors looking to bundle a white-labeled practice layer with their platforms.
- Groundwork is the brainstorming and planning app — dump ideas onto a canvas, sort them into zones, and shift into structured planning mode with priorities and rough timelines.
- Playbook is a lightweight wiki for capturing structured knowledge, course profiles, stakeholder analyses, and methodology documentation — with templates so you never start from a blank page.
- Atlas generates visual subway maps of your learning curriculum or capability landscape, complete with time-sensitive station states, deprecation indicators, and links back to Playbook pages.
- Outline lets you define the detailed content structure of a course or deliverable in a hierarchical, mind-map-style view — moving from “What do we need to teach?” to “Exactly what are the chapters and items?”
- Course Flow is a Kanban-based project management tool for developing and iterating on courses, complete with a built-in feedback form, an inbox for triage, and a status dashboard across all active projects.
- Cadence is a personal (and optionally team) task planner organized by day and category — with recurring daily items, carry-forward of incomplete tasks, and a simple velocity metric to spot overload before it becomes a crisis.
- The entire stack runs on Node.js, saves files as Markdown and JSON (no database required), plays nicely with Google Drive or OneDrive for backup, and optionally connects to GitHub or GitLab for full version history.
- Apps interoperate through lightweight linking and import/export — cards from Groundwork flow into Atlas, tasks from CourseFlow export into Cadence, and every Playbook page carries a permanent link that works anywhere in the stack.
Find out more and download your free personal copy of Cadence at whatsyourbaseline.com/bpm-os—and check the episode show notes for a PDF overview of all six apps.
Please reach out to us by either sending an email to hello@whatsyourbaseline.com or signing up for our newsletter and reading articles about process and architecture on our Substack… Go and subscribe at whatsyourbaseline.substack.com.
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Additional Information
A short deck introducing BPM OS below 🙂
Credits
Music by Jeremy Voltz, www.jeremyvoltzmusic.com
Roland Woldt has spent nearly 30 years helping organizations cut through complexity — transforming how they think about their architecture, processes, and strategy. A former officer in the German Armed Forces, he has held executive and leadership roles at Accenture, Software AG/IDS Scheer, KPMG, and iGrafx, leading engagements across the full project lifecycle from solution design to rollout.
Roland is the author of Successful Architecture Implementation and Successful Process Mining Projects, and co-hosts the podcast What’s Your Baseline?, where he demystifies Enterprise Architecture and BPM for practitioners worldwide. Learn more at woldt.de.
