Humans : Your process's greatest failure point

How many times have you written an email to someone and promised to attach a document/photo/link etc. and then sent it without adding the attachment? This is usually followed a few moments later by an apologising email saying “Once again... this time with attachment”

What about the opposite? Have you ever been sent something confidential or sensitive and - whilst forwarding the email to someone else - omitted to remove the confidential attachments? It happens more often than you would expect.

What about back in the days of snail mail when you would write a letter saying “I’m enclosing a cheque in full settlement of the outstanding bill" - and then not included the payment? On the subject of cheques have you ever written a cheque to send to someone and then forgotten to sign it?

These are all basic examples of processes where the crucial human element has failed. Each failure has caused an issue which - though usually easily remedied - has delayed the process and built up ill will in your customers.

Humans are your most crucial failure point in a process. When ever you are designing processes (or systems to support processes) you should ensure you try and minimise the ability of the human to cause a failure. Google Mail now, for example, can scan your email and look for the words such as ‘attached’ which might indicate that an attachment is expected. If you send the mail without an attachment it will warn you. But how many other email systems have that functionality?

What about building checks and balances into your process, splitting steps so that - in the case of the missing cheque in the envelope - you have one person write the mail and another person stuff the envelope? It is something that is done all the time in the financial world under the banner of ‘Segregation of duties’, but outside that world is it so widely adopted?

The downside to this, of course, is that it removes a level of agilty or - even worse - adds a level of overhead and therefore cost. The decision that has to be made is one of risk analysis - are we more comfortable having a process which has the potential to go wrong then have a slower process which has a much lower potential to fail? If the downside to the failure is lower than the downside to increasing your process overhead then the answer should be ‘yes’.

But make sure you do that calculation correctly.

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 - 22nd July 2010



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

BPM and Dieting - Adam Deane with a short, sweet look at process design. And a dieting motivator.

Process Intelligence and Business Intelligence: Do They Share More than a Word? - Jim Sinur at Gartner is trying to start a conversation on this topic. Do you have any thoughts or comments?



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 silo thinking (It's still bad for you)

One of the most popular posts on this blog is about Silo thinking and why it is bad for you.

In that post I discussed the concept of silo thinking, what it is, how it occurs, why it is bad and how to solve it. But I recently came across a very interesting example of silo thinking where the project put together to document the companies processes are themselves designing the processes in silo's.

Picture the situation. A financial organisation, globally known, well respected. It commissions a project to document the whole of its customer facing processes to enable it to better understand what is happening and to present a better view to the customer of the services it offers.

The project is outsourced (!) to a third party, Indian based company. They send a team of people to the UK headquarters of the financial institution (which we'll call JohnPeterCorp) and they set about documenting the processes in a modeling tool

But the first mistake they made is that rather than taking the processes as a Gestalt whole they have split them out into sub processes and have teams working on each one. So we have the team looking at Investment Pricing. We have the team looking at Asset Trading. We have the team looking at Month-End Reporting.

Can you see why this is a problem?

Now - after almost 6 months in the project the team have realised that all they have managed to do is take a bunch of Visio documents that JohnPeterCorp had done last year and drop them into an expensive modeling tool. They are effectively no further forward on their ability to better understand their processes than they were 6 months ago.

I was talking with the modeling lead recently and he told me that they were having modeling issues now because a lot of what they wanted to do involved linking the processes together which, if they had started looking at this from an overall process point-of-view would have been easy but - because they had siloed their processes - is becoming increasingly difficult.

The net result is a lot of work an effort has gone into this but very little actual progress has been made.

Why did this happen?
The question has to be asked about why something like this was able to happen. Surely the third party company were experienced in doing things like this? Durely the senior management of JohnPeterCorp knew exactly what they wanted and what they were going to do with it? Why did this happen?

The truth is that this was a case of the blind leading the partially sighted. I don't believe JohnPeterCorp really had any idea about what they wanted to do with the information they would get out of the project. They were looking at 'documenting things' to get a customer's eye view of this but they constrained themselves in the documentation by adding a codecil which specified that processes had to be linked up to an existing hierarchical view that they have traditionally been working on. Nobody questioned this. The third party company then made their best efforts to actually meet the brief passed by the customer, but nobody took the time to step back and understand why this was needed in the way it was needed. It is only now that the modeling issue have arisen that people are starting to look back at the original brief and wonder if they might have done this in a different way.

So this has turned into an interesting project where - in order to try and remove silos - the modelers have modeled the processes in silos and are now stuck trying to sort this issue out.

Take a look around some of the projects you are working on. Are you 'silo bound'?

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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

The Tao of On-line Processes (or how Amazon have got it right)

I’ve just ordered a book from Amazon.

Yippeee! Roll out the bunting, let’s hold a parade. Comerford has ordered a book from Amazon!

OK. OK, before everyone gets too sarcastic let’s look at the statement at the head of this post from a process point of view.

“I’ve just ordered a book from Amazon”

To put this on more verbose language: I have searched a web site, identified and selected a suitable piece of writing, entered my name, address, payment and contact details, selected a delivery address, reviewed the final cost and placed the order.

How long did it take to do this?

From the time I decided which book I wanted to the time the order was confirmed took 11 seconds and three mouse clicks.

Think about that for a moment. Without the intervention of a single human (other than myself of course) I was able to place an order for something, give all my payment details, have those details accredited and reviewed, select a delivery address, identify a means and cost of shipping and confirm that everything was correct. In 11 seconds. With three mouse clicks.

A mere matter of a few years ago this would have been unlikely. When I was first using computers back in the 80’s this was impossible. Even quite recently the technology and process to enable this was only for the very committed web retailer. In fact there are still places on the web where something like this takes a lot longer and is far more stressful. What makes this even more special is that I could have done all of this in one click AND I could have done it all from my smart phone.

(One of the shows that was regularly on TV in primetime during my youth was Quantum Leap. (For those who don’t know about the show it concerned a scientist who was the victim of an experiment that went wrong and who was transported each week from one situation to the next and dropped into somebody else’s body. Each week he would have to work out where he was, who he was and why he was here. Oh, and it involved time travel) In Quantum Leap our hero, Sam, was helped by the computerised embodiment of a colleague of his who would appear visible only to Sam. This character would have a small, digital device in his hand that he could consult and it would relay information to him instantly. He could check historical records, charts, building layouts, TV clips everything. We all watched this and thought ‘Yeah right! Something like that in the palm of your hand. That’ll be the day’


And of course that day has come. Millions of people are now walking around with digital devices in their pocket that connect directly to the internet. Some of the higher end ones have applications that enable specific activities to be carried out such as reviewing video content or - here’s the link to the earlier thought about Amazon - purchasing items directly. We now look at this as being something which is commonplace and expected (indeed Finland this week mandated high speed broadband - an enabler of this technology - as a constitutional right).)

But none of this would be possible without the correct processes in place.

Let’s go back to Amazon and compare it to, say a cut price airline ticket.

The process needs to be as quick and as painless as possible. With Amazon One-click I can, literally, identify it and purchase it automatically by clicking the button next to the item. I can do this on the web and I can do this on my smart phone. Of course there is a piece of set-up to be done such as adding contact info and delivery details as well as payment details. But that was done for me several years ago.

With an unnamed ‘Budget airline’  - let’s call it Bryanair for convenience sake - for example, from the time I have selected the flights to the time I have confirmed is 6 minutes (Assuming I have already entered my contact and billing details. Payment details will still need to be entered). Furthermore I have had to make 4 clicks on the first page, click through one unnecessary reminder, bypass an unwanted advertising page for car rental and select payment type and click ‘Purchase now’ at the bottom of the page. I also know that if I was to make the Bryanair purchase I would then have additional information to enter due to the fact that I was theoretically booking a flight to Spain and they need additional passenger information for Spanish destinations.

So let’s look at this;
Amazon: Potential cost of goods £3279 (if I was to purchase, for example, the Canon EOS D1 camera body). Number of clicks 3. Time 11 seconds
Bryanair: Potential cost of goods £159. Number of clicks 8 (minimum). Time 6 minutes.

Who would look at these and suggest that Bryanair has sorted out their processes to the benefit of the customer? In fact who would look at many on-line retailers and say that they are customer focused? I purchase quite extensively from the web and - with the exception of Amazon and Tesco - I find the on-line purchasing to be generally user unfriendly.

It appears as if many companies have designed their processes around an existing bricks-and-mortar method of dealing with customers and have then transferred that directly to the web. Let’s take the example above of airline ticket buying. After selecting my flights and telling them I didn’t want insurance, how many bags I wanted to check in and whether I wanted to check in on-line or at the airport, I was confronted with a message asking me if I was sure I wanted to continue without insurance. This was despite the fact that in order to continue to this point I had to physically click a drop-down box on the screen and select ‘No insurance’ as an option. Surely if I have physically selected ‘No Insurance’ then reminding me about taking out insurance is just supposed to annoy me, right? Now had I not selected anything in that field it is possible that I had overlooked this option and would need reminding. But not when I have made a choice and indicated this already. This smacks of the ‘old’ way of doing things with an estate agent where they would ask you as part of their purchasing spiel whether insurance was wanted and then remind you later on in case you had changed your mind. Once this warning was dispatched on the airline site I was then confronted with a whole page unrelated to the airline that related to booking car hire. All the details were filled in already, but there was no choice of providers and the rates being quoted are - I know from experience - quite preposterous.

Amazon on the other hand have designed their purchasing process to be customer focused from the ground up. ‘One-click’ ordering takes the hassle out of buying things, preloading information makes the purchasing process simple and little items such as ‘Customers who bought items in your list also bought...’ are invaluable.

How good is your customer purchasing process?

How good are your other customer facing processes? Are the optimised for the medium they are using or are they electronic versions of old-fashioned bricks-and-mortar processes?

Could you do better?





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 - 9th July 2010



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

Article: BPM: Advanced SLAs « Adam Deane - Adam Deane takes a humorous - but still quite scathing - look at SLA's and how many people are doing it wrong. Very good

Feature lists miss the point - This article relates to BI in general but I think it could apply to BPM/BPMS as well. A lot of people are baffled and amazed by the smoke and mirrors of a demo. They like the 'Ahhhh' factor of a tool that can produce 'At the speed of thought', when in fact all they want is a tool that can do what they want it to do

It’s Time to Let Simulation/Optimization Out of the Box Jim Sinur on simulation and optimization. Whilst reading this I would add a word of caution about simulating process as raised by colleague Thomas Olbrich (http://taraneon.de/blog/2010/06/07/dont-blame-the-it-for-faulty-and-expensive...)

How Much Does E-mail Cost? - I think that many organisations feel that e-mail is free. Of course it isn't free in the same way that your telephone isn't free. But generally it is a ssunken cost that is absorbed by the company as a whole. Would we still be as profligate with our e-mails if we had to pay for them? It would certainly cut down spam.


Coming Monday "The Tao of Processing' Or how Amazon have got it right" A look at the world of on-line purchasing and how some companies have created customer focused processes and some haven't.

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 posts of the Month for June - Process Cafe

Usually at the beginning of the month I send you through a list of the most popular posts from the blog over the last thirty days. I'm still going to do that. But what I found is that there appear to be regular posts that come up every month. I think the reason is that by highlighting what the popular posts are for a given month more people will check them out during the month and hence they will remain popular over the following 30-or-so days.

What I therefore wanted to do was to give you a list of some of the more popular posts from a response or feedback point of view. This will broaden the possibly base of information you can look at and, maybe, highlight a couple of posts you might want to read.

So here goes. The top five posts for June 2010

1. Silo Thinking and why it is bad
2. Review - Lombardi Blueprint modeling tool
3. My thoughts on Gartner's BPM Magic Quadrant
4. Your Criteria for choosing a BPM tool
5. Are your processes well designed?

You might also want to check out the following posts from last year:

Process inconsistencies hit the customer .. again
Why we aren't Storming The Bastille of processes
Health checks for processes: Treat them like you would your own body
It's a TRAP: Documenting processes rather than managing them


I'm also going to be tweeting some blog posts links from the last couple of years over the coming weeks. If you wish to follow me on twitter you can do so at @gaz4695


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