Assessing the critical success factors (CSF) during a business process management (BPM) effort will help an organization to understand the reasons why a particular BPM effort may succeed or fail. The traditional BPM perspectives have a problem of focusing on internal actions in organizations that seem to contribute to delivering outcomes to customers. Organizations spend time focusing on those actions without realizing that they do not necessarily contribute to successful customer outcomes–emphasis is on fixing the causes of work rather than their effects. The tendency in the field seems to be putting more emphasis on customer-focused results that go beyond basic customer satisfaction measurements, as customer relationships and engagement are better indicators and measures of future success of the organization. This paper goes through the business process management literature from the previous decades and synthesizes the change of focus and the critical success factors in the literature. We find that there has been a watershed period in the 21st century when the focus shifted from Inside-out perspective of organizations to Outside-In. BPM has several challenges over many categories like organizational, managerial, information systems and social problems. This has lead into difficulties of clearly categorizing and making critical BPM factors general. The contribution of this paper is to provide perspective on the business process management capabilities (BPMC) that affect successful BPM endeavors.