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