Friday Review 30th April 2010



Here are some of the links posted over on the Process Cafe Espresso Shots this week1

BPM is Shifting into High Gear - Jim Sinur from Gartner on the evolving state of BPM. Rapidly changing business environments are calling for more agile BPM technologies. Case management goes someway towards solving the issue but more is needed.

Do You Understand the Difference Between Workflow and BPM? - Useful article. Graphic included.

Agile Methods is still an IT project - I can manage my own bank transactions and build my own website. Why can't I do the same thing in a business environment?

The Business Value of IT – there is none… - A hypotheses from Gartner stating that they believe there should be a shift from IT creating efficiencies in the business to IT adding value to the business. In related news touching hot surfaces can cause burns and running on icy pavements can lead to falls.

Process Modeling: Doing by Design - Jim Sinur at Gartner lists the different types of process modeling that can occur, from my favourite - butchers paper and Post-it notes - to complex BPMS systems. Which ones do you use?

Does EA Die By PowerPoint? - An interesting take on the use of Powerpoint in the Us Army.
Personally I think that the key take-away from this - in any field - is to keep it brief and put forward just your key points. Death by Powerpoint is a no-no, but so is putting too much detail in a lot of things.

Cricket, Lies, and....Content Management - A fascinating look at some of the issues facing the IPL and how these could have been reduced with appropriate processes.

1 The Process Cafe Espresso Shots is a place for linking to process related articles written by other people that don't merit a full post on the Process Cafe but are still worth your time reading. Sort of an espresso shot of 'The Process Cafe'-eine.

Friday Review 23rd April 2010



Here are some of the links posted over on the Process Cafe Espresso Shots this week1

Invensys Operations Management Acquires Skelta Software - More news on the narrowing market for BPM vendors. Where will it end?

Metastorm expands in Australia and New Zealand - After years of running operations through it's resellers BTP and iOctane, Metastorm have finally opened an office in the Antipodes. Is this a sign that the market there is becoming more mature? Or maybe they had surplus cash and felt that opening an office there would use some of that? Whatever the reason it's good to see the sentiment that Australia is a place worth investing in.

At What Price, Beauty? BPM as an Art Form - An interesting post on aesthetics and their influence on user adoption. The premise is slightly shoe-horned into a BPM context but the points are valid nontheless.

1 The Process Cafe Espresso Shots is a place for linking to process related articles written by other people that don't merit a full post on the Process Cafe but are still worth your time reading. Sort of an espresso shot of 'The Process Cafe'-eine.

Top Process Cafe posts for the month for March

Here are the top 5 posts on the Process Cafe for the month of March. These are classified according to number of visitors.



1. Why Saas pricing will kill BPM in the cloud
2.White Space and BPM - The Invisible Problem
3. Review - Lombardi Blueprint modeling tool
4. Your Criteria for choosing a BPM tool
5. Silo Thinking and why it is bad

Thanks to everyone who visited the site last month. I hope you keep coming back and finding interesting articles to read and comment on.






Reminder: 'The Perfect Process Project Second Edition' is now available. Don't miss the chance to get this valuable insight into how to make business processes work for you.

Click this link and follow the instructions to get this book.






All information is Copyright (C) G Comerford

See related info below

Friday Review - 16th April 2010



Here are some of the links posted over on the Process Cafe Espresso Shots this week1

Ovum Publish BPM Vendor Decision Matrix - So Metastorm, Oracle and Savvion should be on any BPM solutions shortlist? Any? Sounds like a blanket statement to me. Any thoughts?

Thoughts on Collaborative Planning - So BPM is not dead. It's merely suffering from disillusioned users in some of the space. Oh, and the fact that BPMN is moving towards the technical arena rather than a business one.

Are SOA Vendors Committing Cloud Computing Suicide? - Is the urge to jump on the cloud bandwagon hurting some SOA vendors?

A "Bart" just wants protection from the "Marges" and "Homers" - Some interesting thoughts on scaling up departments and how most workers then become consumers rather than providers. Are you a Bart, a Homer or a Marge?

McKinsey Agrees: Outcome of EA is Change-Friendly Capability Delivery -Some thoughts on McKinsey's EAM report from a supporter of the report's basic premise. Case study included.

1 The Process Cafe Espresso Shots is a place for linking to process related articles written by other people that don't merit a full post on the Process Cafe but are still worth your time reading. Sort of an espresso shot of 'The Process Cafe'-eine.

Exceptions and Problems - The Non Standard Process

"So what happens if it fails this check?". The question was a simple one but the answer would cause lots of problems.

I was working with a group of people looking to document their internal processes. They had gone the easiest route prior to my arrival by putting their thoughts down in Visio documents. Unfortunately they were not proficient in process definition and the models they had created were -frankly - useless. So I sat with the business analysts and went through each model trying to understand what they were trying to do. For the most part the process was quite easy to understand, although the models needed a lot of work to clean them up and have them make sense.

The problem started when I took a step back to review where we were and what we had documented so far. I realised that I had complicitly fallen into the same trap that they had of only documenting the 'ideal' process.

In every instance of the models the logic was predicated on everything working faultlessly with the process. Hence my original question "What happens if it fails this check?"

You see we had put together a workflow which followed the path of a business transaction through it's various steps. At one point we had an activity 'Validate transaction' followed by an activity 'Update system' ('Verb-Noun', you see. Good process modeling standard). It occurred to me that we were assuming in this case that the transaction would always pass validation. But I knew that wasn't always the case. It was entirely possible for a transaction to fail validation at this point. Our process had no logic to deal with that.

We could, of course, have pretended that the activity of validation included dealing with the items that failed validation. Indeed if this was a top level workflow that detailed the overall process rather than a specific part I probably would. But it wasn't. It was a detailed workflow model. If the logic wasn't included here it would not be included anywhere.

Looking over other diagrams it was the same story. There were no exception processes and nothing to deal with problems or unexpected items.

Now the issue was trying to make the client understand that there would be more work involved in defining what would happen in 'real life' as opposed to 'process life' to allow for the exceptions and the problems to be dealt with. That didn't go down too well.

So here's my question to you: When you're working on designing processes, do you always document the ideal process or do you include logic to deal with situations that don't follow the 'standard process'?

I would be amazed if everyone said 'Yes'

Friday Review 9th April 2010



Here are some of the links posted over on the Process Cafe Espresso Shots this week1


IT spend as a percent of revenue – a dubious metric at best. - 'm a big believer in having the right metrics to measure performance in most things. I agree with a lot that the author says here. The comments on 'the downside' of this metric are particularly telling.

K2 updates SharePoint workflow-BPM » OnlySoftwareBlog - The latest developments from K2.

Mapping Process Problem Spaces to Solution Spaces - Gartner claim that Column 2's Sandy Kemsley has misinterpreted a comment made at a recent conference. I await Sandy's reply with interest.



1 The Process Cafe Espresso Shots is a place for linking to process related articles written by other people that don't merit a full post on the Process Cafe but are still worth your time reading. Sort of an espresso shot of 'The Process Cafe'-eine.

More BPM Survey Results

A couple of weeks ago I asked for people to flick over to a friendly site and complete a 4 question BPM survey

The questions were -

1Which implementation strategy did your organization choose? Big bang, phased rollout, parallel adoption, combo of big bang and phased rollout, or other.
2. If you selected other, please describe the strategy you chose.
3. Was the implementation a success?
4. If you selected no, please explain why.

The results of that survey have recently been released.

The main question asked what sort of BPM project approach have you adopted: Big Bank, Phased roll-out combination big bang and phased or parallel adoption. 89% of respondents followed "big bang," "phased rollout" or a combination of the two strategies.

Eighty-eight percent of implementations - or 40 out of 45 - were successful. This is interesting when taken with the comments from Craig, The Process Ninja, who wrote recently of a 'successful' project that he thought was unsuccessful.

For more detail (and some graphics) about the results check out the google document provided by Houston Neal from  http://www.softwareadvice.com/






Reminder: 'The Perfect Process Project Second Edition' is now available. Don't miss the chance to get this valuable insight into how to make business processes work for you.

Click this link and follow the instructions to get this book.


All information is Copyright (C) G Comerford

See related info below



Bad Process Drivers - or Why the banks suck at looking after their customers

(This is the second in an occasional series of posts recounting real life process issues I have encountered)

Question: Which of the following are good reasons for having an activity in a customer facing process workflow?

1 Legal requirements
2 Governance requirements
3 Value added processes
4 Internal needs

There could be lots of debate over this but I suspect the one which is least likely to be debated is the last one - Internal needs.

Having customers jump through loops to satisfy an internal requirement is - in my opinion - very bad process design. And unjustifiable too.

Let me tell you a story to illustrate my point.


The Bank Job

For almost thirty years now I have been a customer at one of the big four UK high street banks (No names, but Julie Walters might recognise them) . I opened my first account at my local branch and have stayed with them ever since, despite the fact that I moved away from the village I grew up in and moved abroad. Over the years things have changed. The local branch became part of the nearby city branch. The local contact number was replaced by a centralised country-wide support function and I lost the personal touch with the branch. But things continued to function appropriately with my account.

Then about three years ago I opened a business account.

I didn't want to open a business account. I actually wanted another personal account that I could use to keep my 'sole trader' things separate from my 'regular' things. I ended up being contacted by my nearest branch who mandated that I open a business account for this. I didn't want to do this but they insisted it was the only way. So I did. I filled in all the forms, provided documentary evidence of who I was and what I was doing (despite having been with the same bank for almost thirty years), and even had a telephone interview with my 'personal business manager'.

All so that I could give them my money.

Being a business account of course meant that I was now subject to bank charges: charges such as transfer fees, monthly account fees and - my personal favourite - the deposit fee. This is where the bank charges you a fee to put your money into your account.

I grumbled silently about these fees, realising that they were an integral part of having a business account and for three years we carried on with barely an issue.

Until last month.

Last month I decided to incorporate my business. I wanted to change the legal status from a 'sole trader' to a 'limited company'. This involved registering with Companies House in the UK, and getting an official company name and number.

Unfortunately the name I was using for my sole trading activities was already taken as a limited company so I had to take a different name. This wasn't a problem for anyone. Until I tried to change the name on my business bank account.

Initially I went through the central help desk number I mentioned earlier. They told me changing the name was no problem and I had to pass it on in writing to my business manager at my local branch. Details of this individual were provided and I duly forwarded a letter to him with all the details.

A week later I received a phone call from a lady at the branch. She had received my note and was calling to tell me that I couldn't change the name on the account and that I would need to open a new bank account. I asked her why and she said because your new company is a different legal entity and couldn't have the same bank account. I asked her why a different legal entity needed a new bank account given that the new bank account would be identical in all respects to the old one except for a name change. She repeated her previous statement. I pressed her again on why I - as the customer - had to jump through the bank's hoops for something as simple as a name change. She had no answer to that other than to say she was unable to change the account name.

On top of that this was not a change that could be dealt with over the phone and I would need to come in to the bank for an interview. I told her I would be in to see her on Saturday. But she didn't work Saturday. I told her I was working outside the local area during the week and was unable to get there except on a Saturday. She arranged for someone local to my place of work to contact me with a view to me being interviewed during my lunch break.

The following week a pleasant sounding young lady from the local branch contacted me and said she had been told I wanted to open a new business account. I told her no I wanted to change the name on my existing business account to something different. She said I couldn't do that and would need to open a new account. I asked her why. She couldn't tell me exactly why. I asked her to put me in contact with someone from the branch who could explain it to me. She said she would have somebody call me back.

A little later I received a voice mail which basically said the following "There is no legal reason why you need to open a bank account however the bank needs you to do this for internal reasons".


Summary

So coming back to the question at the start of this literary missive: what is the one reason not to add an activity into a customer facing process workflow? Internal reasons.

In this case the bank had mandated that the change in status from a sole trader to a limited company had credit risks associated with it which would need to be mediated. But rather than mediating these risks internally and then changing the name of the account, they had decided that the paying customer would have to open a new account. The steps the bank would need to take would be identical in both cases. The only difference is that once approval had been given the bank would then create a new entry on their systems rather than updating an existing one. This adds no value at all to the customer - indeed it takes value away because now I have to update my bank details with places that I may have given them to already. Don't get me wrong, I understand that there are things which need to be checked, validated and confirmed when limited liability companies are concerned. I understand that the bank as a fiduciary duty to try and minimise the risk to itself and the potential for fraud and loss. I just don't understand why - if it has to do all this anyway - it can't do it on an existing account rather than a new account.

My final thought on the subject was this "If I have to open a new account for this business why should I open it with your bank? Why don't I go to one of your rivals?"

One more example of bad process losing business for a company.

This is an example of a phenomenon known as Hutber's Law which states that 'improvement means deterioration'.

How many unnecessary internal process steps do you have in your customer facing processes?







Reminder: 'The Perfect Process Project Second Edition' is now available. Don't miss the chance to get this valuable insight into how to make business processes work for you.

Click this link and follow the instructions to get this book.

All information is Copyright (C) G Comerford

See related info below



Friday Review 2nd April 2010



Here are some of the links posted over on the Process Cafe Espresso Shots this week1

It's time to define 'BPM' for a new era, just forget about the name for now - Theo at BPM:Redux talks about the rebirth that is needed for BPM. He gives persuasive arguments about the similarity to BPR which is inhibiting adoption as well as the ability of movements such as Social to break down silos. Well worth a read even if you disagree.

BPMN Tool Interoperability – Make Your Voice Heard! - Bruce Silver's comments about BPMN 2.0 and some of its gaps is quite an enlightening read. There's also an opportunity to help influence the future direction of the standard.

Are people losing interest in BPM? - Adam Deane at his excellent blog analyses some google search statistics to determine if people are, in fact, losing interest in BPM.

Lessons from a Process Project Failure - Eight lessons from Craig, The Process Ninja, on what went wrong in a recent project he was involved with. I recognise some of these from past experience. Do you? Any to add?

Coming next week "Bad Process Drivers - or Why banks suck at looking after their customers" They charge people fortunes, have usurious rates of interest and still lose economy-crippling amounts of money. How is this possible?

For those that celebrate I would like to wish my readers a Happy Easter. The Process Cafe will publish its next post on Easter Monday

1 The Process Cafe Espresso Shots is a place for linking to process related articles written by other people that don't merit a full post on the Process Cafe but are still worth your time reading. Sort of an espresso shot of 'The Process Cafe'-eine.