The problem with BPM Solutions....

BPM software is big business today. There are, literally, dozens of companies on this particular software space. Gartner classify some of them on various different magic quadrants. Forrester classify them on various different waves. Every day companies are pitched at by software vendors to put in the latest and greatest tool to help them.

But are they any better than people?

At a fundamental level, the answer is - obviously - yes. Software well designed to fulfil a particular task will always beat a human doing the same task (providing the task is something that can be automated or computerised - I wouldn't want a computer performing open heart surgery on me - although computers are now driving cars by themselves). A machine which is programmed to deal with workflow simulation is always going to be able to simulate thousands of transactions through a workflow better than a human.

But do we need them? Do we need to purchase a BPM system in order to be able to implement BPM in an organisation? Is it necessary to spend outlandish amounts of money to make BPM part of your everyday workflow? No. It isn’t. 

BPM - at a fundamental level - is the analysis and implementation of ideal process flows. These can be repetitive, or on a case-by-case basis. But they do not HAVE to be implemented via a computerised system. 

Working on basics it is simple enough to perform process analysis using pens, sticky notes and brown paper. This can then be documented in a workflow drawing, or a process flow, or a procedure. Employees can be trained and the new procedures can be implemented. All of this can be done without a dedicated BPM system.

But why would you?

Well, for one thing, you would do this to determine whether you have the right mindset to implement BPM It is wrong, in my opinion, to think that implementing a tool to solve a problem will solve that problem. Time and time again we see examples of computer systems being put in place to solve problems that don't actually solve those problems.

The problem itself, is, of course, that the problem under consideration is the wrong problem. (There were a lot of problems in that last, sentence, heh?). By this I mean that identifying a problem that needs a tool solution is the wrong problem. It’s similar to saying “This patient has a heart problem that needs a stent”. NO. The problem is that the patient has blocked veins. The stent is a solution for that problem.

Likewise companies become enamoured of the software solution to help them become more efficient, more effective, more responsive, whereas the problem may not be that the company is inefficient, ineffective or unresponsive in the first place.

This is why the first step in deciding whether to implement a BPM solution is NOT to decide to implement a BPM solution. It is to decide what the issue is that you are trying to address. Remove the system from the equation. Ask yourself  “If I was doing this manually, what is going wrong?” Understand what is the fundamental underlying item that needs to be changed to make your problem go away.

Losing customers? The problem might be that you need a CRM solution to better handle them. But it might also be that your product doesn’t give them what they want or you aren’t selling it right (See Jeffrey Gitomer for more about that) 

Manufacturing not fast enough? It might be that you are wasting time on a particular piece of the process and creating a bottleneck. But it might also be that your line is old-fashioned or your employees aren't trained to operate it correctly.

In the examples listed above, knowing what the actual problem is can lead to a completely different solution to the one first anticipated.

That's a good thing.

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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.

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Selfishness and Process.

Back in the mists of time I used to have a valid private pilots licence (PPL). One of the things I wanted to do was get a share of an aircraft so I could increase my flying hours and learn more about this great pastime of flying. I inquired at the local airport and found a great little plane that was within my price range at the time.

But when I looked into the small print of the costs there appeared to be something which - at first - struck me as strange, but than raised a red flag.

As a bit of background: when using a plane there is always a cost involved. This cost varies depending on whether you own a piece of the plane or are borrowing it without an equity involvement. But regardless of whether you are, or are not, there is always the cost of fuel that needs to be factored in. In many cases you take the plane, use it for however long you want and then fill it up when finished, at your own cost. In some instances you can fill it up on a company account and it gets charged to your costs or - and this was the case with the plane I was looking at - you were charged a fixed amount per hour for fuel, regardless of what you used.

The problem with this was the behaviours it promoted. Imagine the situation: regardless of how fast or how far you fly, you are going to be charged a set amount of money for fuel. This was not an insignificant amount either. It equated to 55 litres of fuel per hour for a single engine Cessna. (That's pretty much the same amount of fuel as my road car uses in about 8 days - and aviation fuel is more expensive). So in that situation, would you take it easy with the plane? Would you lean the fuel mixture to be as conservative as possible? Or would you just slam those throttles open and scream across the sky as fast as you could and as inefficiently as you could? Human nature would expect us to do the latter rather than the former. After all if there are ten people renting this plane in a week and they are all paying the same amount per hour, why should you be the one who only uses 75% as much fuel as them but still gets charged for 100%?

There was a knock on effect of this, too. The amount per hour was calculated on the average fuel usage that the owners of the plane were being charged. (They paid for all the fuel themselves and offset it against the hourly fuel rate). But the rate they set was based on current behaviour rather than future expected behaviour. Which means that after a few months of running at the new fuel amount (55 litres per hour), they discovered that they were actually paying for 70 litres per hour of usage (for example). Therefore the owners were losing out on this deal. So what did they do? That's right, the increased the hourly fuel charge to 75 litres regardless of actual usage.

Can you see how this would then become a bit of a problem? The upshot was that a lot of the guys who were renting the plane found that the fuel cost became prohibitive (even though they were using that much fuel per hour), and stopped flying. The owners then started to lose out on the rental charges for the plane. When it came to doing routine maintenance such as replacing the engine or the propellor, they found they had to stump up the money from their own pockets.

As I thought about this today I realised that there is a lesson in there from a process point of view. The process that was being initiated had measures or metrics that were - effectively - Key Performance Indicators for the whole process. They determined the efficacy of the process (after all, if the plane was using more than 55 litres of fuel per hour then the ROI on the process was reduced). But what had happened to this process was that it had become driven by the KPI rather than measured by the KPI. This was an occasion when the adage "What gets measured gets rewarded" did not apply. Quite the opposite intact.

The process had been designed with a flaw in it. The measure was inappropriate for the process. A more correct measure would have been to remove the fixed cost per hour and replace it with a variable cost based on actual usage. This added a small administrative burden to the billing process, but resulted in more flexible (and better run) flights, where the fuel usage wasn't excessive.

It might be worth having a look around your current process and seeing if there is anything in there which is working in a counterintuitive way. Do you have any process steps that are time dependent and allow a larger amount of time than is needed? Could you cut down that time to enforce the right behaviours of efficiency and speed? Could you organise your workflow in such a way that you are not encouraging unwanted behaviours from the participants.

You might be surprised at what you can change.

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What's your experience of BPM so far?

What's your experience of BPM so far?


It seems to me that a lot of the work I am currently doing is related to "Let's see what we’ve got and document it" rather than ”OK, I'm wanting to make this more efficient, how can I do that?”.

As an example I spent time last year working with a large merchant bank who were wanting to document their sales process to help them understand how they could better sell to customer. This included understanding what was ”core” to their business and what was ”ancillary, but still profit-worthy”. The whole thrust of the BPM side of things was just to understand what they did and how they did it. We used a process management tool to do this, but at no point where we considering understanding how we could automate this or anything similar to that. It was purely a documentation effort.

My last job, similarly, was with a large aerospace manufacturer who were looking to document their HR processes. They had built up over a period of about 50 years by acquisition and this had resulted in over 250 separate companies being brought into the fold. Each of these companies had their own ways of on-boarding people, promoting people, recruiting people etc. the company wanted to document and define a single method of doing all this and rolling it out to the all the divisions. Again, nothing about automating anything, mostly about documenting.

Now I'm in discussions with a UK based transportation company who are looking to document all their existing internal processes to ensure that everything is being done correctly.

Could it be that my experience is just limited in that I tend to do a lot of the ”Let's document what we do” type of work, rather than any of the ”Let's take what we do and improve it”? Or is everyone in a similar situation? Obviously if you are a vendor selling the tools that do this you're going to have a different view of this. But for the consultants out there who are actually at the coal face doing the work, what is the nature of the work you are doing?

I think it's important to understand where the market is at the moment. There are many tools out there to help document and automate, but if the end customer is more concerned with just seeing what they've already got (or want if they don't like doing ’as-as’ documentation) rather than taking that documented state and doing something with it, then we have a different environment (and a different level of maturity) than if the market was interested in improving and automating their processes to gain efficiencies and ”synergies” (excuse the buzzword).

I'm also aware that in ”the market” there are going to be companies that are more advanced in their thinking, and, indeed, in their projects, than some of the companies I'm working with. They will have documented, improved, automated, and implemented their processes already, either as a stand-alone project or as part of a bigger project implementation. And thats all right. But I'm trying to gauge an overall level of maturity across the people who read this blog.

If we were to look at the CMM scale for maturity I'm seeing companies at level 1 or level 2 when it comes to their processes. I think that a lot of vendors are looking at their clients as being at a level 3 and above. What's the truth to this? (The above statements are based purely on anecdotal, not empirical data)

Look forward to hearing your comments and thoughts.

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Silo thinking - It's still bad!

The most popular post on this blog (by a long way) is one entitled "Silo thinking and why it is bad...". It was written back in January of 2010 and appears to consistently get the highest number of views of any post I have written. Obviously I'm looking at it thinking "Why is that?'

Sure, it's a well reasoned, thoroughly researched treatise on the nature of the silo mentality in organisations, along with accurate and incisive commentary on how to get around it. (At least in my own mind it is...) but there's obviously something more than that.

 So what?

I think it's because it hit a nerve with a large number of the readers of this blog (over 4,500 last month - thank you!), and it is apparently something that everyone can identify with.

The first paragraph read:

"When everyone in an organisation is organised and works around the concept of individual functions or departments. This encourages introversion and also decreases efficiency"

I believe this to be as true now as the day it was written. The beauty is that it isn't just a process thing but a company wide thing.

The main thrust of that post relates to how a process is usually optimised to run as well as it can within a single department (or silo) and as such is not optimised to run as well across other departments or silos. I'm sure you've heard the tale of the manufacturing process which created some sort of metal engineering device. At the first department responsible for the manufacturing they put together the main three components of the device - the hub, the sprocket and the flange. They then boxed these up and sent them across to the next step where the electronics were added. The first thing this department did was remove the flange that had been added in the previous step. Then they fitted their electronic wiring & circuits and refitted the flange.

This sounds like an apocryphal tale, but it does illustrate quite graphically the ability of two departments working in the same company and producing the same product to - effectively - be working against each other. The first department had an optimised sub-process that meant it was efficient enough to be able to manufacture and construct the three main parts of the assembly, and - without reference to any further parts of the process - they were able to make themselves as efficient as possible. Across the whole of the process, though, this silo mentality was having an adverse effect.

I was reminded of this recently when working on a guest post for Squawkpoint.com which covered the topic of 'Who owns your processes'. In that post I mentioned that the process owner wants to be

 the person who has the ability to make a change to the process that effects multiple parts of the business. 

It we take the example given above it means that we want to be able to make the first step of the manufacturing process slightly less efficient whilst, at the same time, making the overall process more efficient. Having someone owning the individual parts of the process (silo'd) does not allow that to happen.

The other point I mentioned in the original post was that reward plays a large part in this. It has been proven in survey after survey, and experiment after experiment, that people generally tend to focus on the things that will reward them the best. If I am a department boss and I tell my workers "Your annual review and associated compensation is based on your ability to process 1000 widgets per day come hell or high water" you can bet that my employees will be focused on finding ways to process 1000 widgets per day. If it means that they have a way of doing this which is optimal for their own department but sub-optimal for the rest of the widget manufacturing process then that's not their fault.

This is how silos occur.

The solution is - obviously - to reward and recognise people based not on their own individual performance, but on the company performance as a whole. The correct statement should be "Your annual review and compensation is based on the company as a whole being able to produce 1000 quality widgets per day come hell or high-water". The approach is still the same - the employees how to find a process which works in their best interests - but the end result is different - you finish up with a process optimised for the whole process rather than one which is optimised for individual departments.

It is my opinion that - despite the interest in the original post from nearly two years ago - there still appears to be a large amount of silo thinking happening in organisations.

Am I right?



 .

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Business Process Management and Common Sense

This is a guest post by James Lawther:

In the beginning all businesses start out as small businesses.  They start with one, two or at most a handful of employees with a vision to give customers something new and different, or just better.  They then focus like crazy on those illusive customers, doing everything that they can to find and please them.

If the new, different or just better is truly new, different or just better; then slowly but surely the customers start to materialise, they like what they see and what they are getting and then they start to hand over their hard earned cash so they can have it.

And then the company grows.

If things go well the business won't be a small business any more.  It will have a hundred employees and it will be time to become organised like a big business.  Groups of accountants and IT professionals start to congregate, a sales force is born, a human resources manager is hired, functions develop.

Sensible business owners put dynamic pushy people in charge of these new functions and give them targets to hit, financial targets, cost targets, revenue targets, growth targets.  Now success looks like hitting your targets and those dynamic pushy people start to optimise away like crazy.  They start to focus on the internal mechanisms of their organisations and before you know it you have Sales people who are dragging in sales, Operations people who are slashing costs and Marketing people who are building new markets.

And they all do this with gleeful disregard to one another.  After all no operations guy is going to be rewarded if the accountants hit their target.  

As all this happens the customer who everybody started off obsessing about becomes of secondary importance, and their sales orders, complaints and queries start to fall between the cracks of the SLA’s, targets and departmental objectives.

Then things start to stagnate, accusations are thrown and the functions become more and more retrenched, each striving harder than before to hit their targets.  And so it goes on.

Maybe I have painted a very black picture, maybe a truthful one; either way the solution is not very difficult.  It is remarkably simple.  Get your business to re-focus on the customer and optimise around them not their functions.

And that is all business process management asks you to do.  There is nothing very clever about it, it is just common sense.

Are you using yours?

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Author Bio

James Lawther is a middle aged middle manager.

To reach this highly elevated position he has worked for numerous organisations, from supermarkets to tax collectors and has had several operational roles including running the night shift for a frozen pea packing factory and doing operational research for a credit card company.

As you can see from his CV he has either a wealth of experience, or is incapable of holding down a job. If the latter is true his post isn’t worth a minute of your attention.

Unfortunately, the only way to find out is to read it and decide for yourself.

Visit his web site “The Squawk Point” to find out more about service improvement.

www.squawkpoint.com

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All information is Copyright (C) G Comerford See related info below

The distraction of BPM

(In the style of Seth Godin)

For many project people the tools and associated detritus around BPM are what makes the project interesting: Get a good tool, implement it, either with your SI or internally, roll it out and watch the users flock to this brand new way of doing thngs.

Except that's not what happens.

Your user base couldn't care less about a new tool, or some new way of doing things. All they want is to be able to finish their work in the quickest, easiest way possible and go home.

Anything you put in the way of that will meet resistance

(And everything you do is in the way of that!)

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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.

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The Anachronism of Acronyms.

What is BPM? It's a simple question with a complex answer.

There appears to be a move in the BPM world to create a whole new substrata of 'process management'. Max Pucher appears to be one of the leading members of this cadre and - like so many before him - he tries to establish a little niche 'fiefdom' which he can call his own. Andrew Smith from  One Degree has posited Adaptive Process Guidance (APG) as a new paradigm too. Forrester have created Dynamic Case management

And bravo to them for doing that.

But here's the problem I have: Why seek to split the capability of BPM down into different acronyms or niches when we don't fully understand BPM as it stands at the moment?

Last year, Thomas Olbrich and I sat down and put together The BPM Nexus (along with original founder Theo Priestley) and we sought to create a BPM definition which we could use to create concensus amongst practitioners. Our efforts - unfortunately - came to very little for a number of reasons which are not important now. But what did come out of the discussions which took place was the fact that so few people have a common understanding of what BPM means precisely. They know what BPM means to them and the know what they do when it comes to BPM. But to sit down and write a standard defintion of BPM that everyone can agree on is difficult.

Because of this there have been a number of separate initiatives aimed at splitting BPM into component parts - or sub parts - to allow vendors, particularly, to attach to these niches and boost their own offerings. The phrase "Social BPM" has suddenly appeared in the BPM vernacular along with "ACM" or Adaptive Case Management.

My question to those who push these things forward is "Where is the diagram that explains how these fit together?" Are they all subsets of BPM as a whole (which I maintain they cannot be because we don't have a standard definition of BPM), or are they all related but separate capabilities which - if we put them all together - will bring a standard definition of BPM? More importantly, do we really understand the delineation of what ACM means - for example - in the world of structured processes versus unstructured processes? Alberto Manuel believes that ACM comes under the BPM umbrella but is a different paradigm. Fair enough, so what does that look like?

I would love to see such a diagram. I would love to see where in the diagram we could fit the following acronyms (or underlying capabilities):

• BPA,
• ACM, 
• APG
• CRM, 
• DCM
• Social BPM
• etc.

I  understand (and agree with) Max's assertion that "The discussion whether ACM is BPM has no benefit whatsoever for the business!" But I am not the business. I am a BPM consultant who needs to be able to explain this to the business. At the moment I can't.

Personally I believe these are all important capabilities which must be understood and managed in the context of the corporate entity. But I also believe that these are capabilities which are not only confusing, they are incorrectly understood leading to inefficiency and increased cost.

Anyone care to comment ( or more importantly, illustrate)?
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P.S. Just to clarify: I'm not wanting long diatribes on why ACM is better than DCM, or why we should be doing APG instead of drawing workflow diagrams, what I'm trying to understand is the gestalt, holistic view of where these all fit together.

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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.

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Why so few women in BPM?

I wrote recently about some of my favourite BPM bloggers. One of the comments I mentioned within there was the fact that only 2 females made the list.

It got me thinking: "Why is BPM a male dominated domain?"

In reality it shouldn't actually be so. There is nothing specifically masculine about BPM as a concept. In fact I've worked on projects with lots of females who were particularly well suited to the role and were able to grasp the concepts much easier than some of the males in the group (as with a lot of things....).

Throughout my years of blogging and following BPM I have only really come across two well known female BPM bloggers and they are Sandy Kemsley and Connie Moore. Both of them have deep industry experience. Sandy is an independant and Connie is currently with Foresster Group. Add to that list Elise Olding who is a well respected Gartner analyst who has only recently moved into the blogging sphere, and you can see that the field is very small indeed.

Why is this?

Is it because there are - in fact - a huge number of talented female BPM practitioners who choose to work below the radar and not publicise themselves?

Or is it that BPM does not attract a large female following and is predominantly a male discipline?

It can't be the blogging itself because there are literally thousands and thousands of really good female bloggers out there. It can't be the BPM because - as I mentioned earlier - there are many females involved in the practice of BPM itself.

So what is it - any thoughts...?

Do you know of good, female BPM bloggers I should be following? Let me know in the comments.

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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.

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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.

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The Bank Job

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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".

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Summary

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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?

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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.

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What bottling port taught me about process

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

Several years ago I was working with a very well known Port manufacturer in Oporto, Portugal. At the time I was helping them to implement a new financial accounting package. However they were also rolling out a new bottling line in the bodega.

Port is aged in huge barrels which are kept in cool cellars in bodegas on the banks of the Douro River in Oporto. It is a picture postcard scene with steep hills and multi-coloured buildings leading down to the bodegas which usually line the quays along the river bank.

On a beautiful September afternoon we were taken from the offices and toured through the bodega by George the owner of the company. (I could tell you his surname but that would give away the name of the company). Anyway we wandered into a cellar where new pipes had just been fitted into a huge aging barrel along one wall. The pipes ran up the wall, along the ceiling and through a hole in the far wall to an adjacent room. As we followed the pipe we came to a bottling line.

A bottling line is essentially exactly what it sounds like - a processing line where port is placed in bottles. In the more modern manufacturing businesses these bottling lines are huge and the throughput is phenomenal. You've probably all seen the footage of the Budweiser bottling line where hundreds and hundreds of bottles are filled every second. This isn't like that. Although the technology is modern it is very small scale. The throughput is quite small and the prices are quite high. This is how the company maintains quality and profits.

So the bottling line was essentially a single throughput line which processed a full bottle of port from end to end in something like thirty seconds. Quite slow by other standards.

Here's how the process went. Empty bottles are feed into one end of the line from a pallet. They are funneled down a single channel which accepts only one bottle at a time. The bottle meets the port and is filled. A label is added to the front of the bottle. A cork is added to the top of the bottle and finally a customs stamp is place over the cork. For those of you that don't know about this, the customs stamp is proof that duty has been paid on the alcohol to the government. It is essentially a strip of paper that is glued up the neck of the bottle, over the cork and down the opposite side of the neck. Opening the bottle will result in the strip being broken identifying that duty has been paid. (Note: The bottle in this picture does not have a customs stamp on it)

There were two problems with the process which I saw. The first related to adding the label. On beer bottles and a large number of other spirits, the label is just slapped on as the bottle passes a certain point in the line. As long as it goes on straight and level there is no issue. However with a number of spirits (and this one in particular) the bottle had a stamped-in seal on the neck which was created as part of the bottle manufacturing process. The label had to align perfectly underneath it. So how do they ensure that the label is placed in the right area? The answer is quite easy if you think about it but off the top of my head I struggled to find a solution. The bottle is manufactured with the stamped-in seal on one side and - directly behind it - is a little notch at the bottom of the bottle. The bottling line jiggles the bottles around until the notch aligns with a stud on the side of the moving belt and this guarantees that the front is facing the labelling machine. Next time you pick up a bottle of spirit with a glass seal on the front above the label check the back of the bottle near the bottom. You'll find the notch.

The more interesting problem was the customs label. To add this label the blanks are fed into the machine in a long strip. The machine cuts the strip behind each label, positions it over the top of the bottle and a sleeve comes down from above and forces it over the cork and down the sides where the glue would attach it. The problem was that the tolerances for this process are very small. If the sleeve is a fraction of a centimetre misaligned with the bottle it would come down and crack the glass. Indeed as we were watching the engineers were attempting to align this part of the machine and succeeded in smashing three or four bottles of vintage port all over the floor. Each time this happened the machine needed to be stopped, the wreckage cleared, the floor cleaned, the machine realigned and the while thing started again. This was taking quite a bit of time and costing a lot of money. After watching this happen for the fifth time (and starting to get a little high from the alcohol fumes drifting up from the floor) I turned to George and said "Why don't you stop filling the bottles and just use empty ones until the alignment issue is sorted out?"

Ultimately in process modeling it is the small items such as that detailed above which simplify the whole process.

Can you think of something you are doing in a process now which you can stop but which will
Improve the overall flow? I bet you can.

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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.

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All information is Copyright (C) G Comerford

See related info below

Silo thinking and why it is bad...

(This is my top-read post ever on this blog. Since it was written I've had additional thoughts on the silo mentality which I have added to this post)



I want to send some time discussing the topic of 'Silo Thinking' today

What is Silo thinking?
When everyone in an organisation is organised and works around the concept of individual functions or departments. this encourages introversion and also decreases efficiency

Is cost cutting the new BPM mantra?

It is a sad fact of life that some organisations pay an amount of 'lip-service' to BPM and the capability of process management. This is usually in the times of plenty when income is high and everything looks good with the world.

Having an efficient and cost-effective company is not high on their priority list as long as the revenue is rolling in. But when the market is down and income is drying up a lot of the same companies are looking at ways to reduce costs  increase revenue and positively impact the bottom line.

Pay me now - pay me more later

Here's the situation: You've documented some of your current processes, created your organisation chart, got a small team together to define your future state and now you're pushing them to finish this because you have an ERP solution waiting to be implemented with your processes. Congratulations you've fallen into the trap of "Pay me now, Pay me more later".  This trap occurs when you try to short-cut the whole process definition stage. You'll recognise this when you hear phrases such as "Why do we need a current state?", or "Let's define what we want our organisation to look like then define the processes"

"Tone from the top" - is your project already doomed?

I was in discussion yesterday with a senior manager at a major international bank. They have set up a worldwide business process initiative and were looking for people with my skills and experience to come on board to help. I told them I was happy to do so, and we discussed terms etc.

The main reason for the discussion, though, was for them to understand my skills and expertise when it comes to processes. Obviously they have never met me and they don't know whether I am up to job they were offering. As such this was really a job interview. One question they asked actually got me thinking about a situation which I wanted to discuss with you today.

The questions was "What is the main stumbling block you have encountered when trying to implement a BPA initiative across a large organisation?". The answer to this was actually really, really, easy. It's the same answer that I would give to the questions "What is the main reason a lot of projects do not achieve successful completion?". The answer is 'change management"

I told him that the single most important thing to have in place to ensure the success of such an initiative was a good level of change management. It is too easy when working in a small project of 10 to 15 people to forget that what you are defining and mandating may affect thousands of people in the organisation. In the case of the last company I worked at as an employee they had 45,000 people in their employ. We would be directly affecting a large proportion of them and we were relying on our ability to sell the proposition as a means of making it work. Suffice it to say we had problems.

But as I was talking about this it occurred to me that there was another way of thinking about this. It is a method which is mentioned in my book "The Perfect Process Project" and it is completely applicable here: "Tone from the Top" or senior management buy in.

Let me explain.

Several years ago, at the company I was working in at the time, the top four senior managers in the organisation had a meeting. They were the CEO, the CIO, The VP of finance and the VP of Manufacturing. At this meeting they decided between themselves that they were going to replace all the legacy finance and manufacturing ERP software with a global implementation of SAP. Shortly after this meeting they sent a memo out to all their direct reports telling them "You will implement SAP". These direct reports, in turn, sent this down to their subordinates telling them "They guys at the top want SAP installed. Make it happen". Before long I experienced things such as line managers funding and attending SAP training internally so that they would have knowledge and expertise when the package came on line. Everyone had the 'let's implement SAP' mindset. It was all being led by the 'tone from the top' i.e. the senior management buy-in.

Can you imaging the difference if someone at a lower level had tried to sell this to his people without getting the buy-in from people above him? Can you imagine how much more difficult it would have been to get people motivated if there wasn't someone at a senior level - someone with a written and agreed objective linked to their performance payment - who had made it his mission to make this happen? And now we had the top four people in the organisation buying into this. In words and in actions.

It made a huge difference.

I will say, at this point, that I was one of many people who didn't think that the SAP decision was the correct one. The business case was weak, the benefits were ethereal and the timescales were unrealistic (and indeed with the benefit of hindsight we were proven correct). But this didn't detract from the fact that everyone in the organisation was aligned behind the senior management in making this happen.

Compare this with the previous organisation I worked with. We had been tasked with implementing an ERP system across 13 European countries in 18 months. This was a difficult task at the best of times, but things were about to get a lot worse.

At the project kick-off meeting in Germany (an affiliate that was already running a well established - German - SAP implementation) we were introduced by the Finance Director as follows "Ladies and Gentlemen, Thank you for attending this kick-off meeting today. Gary and Luc are here to put this package in and replace our SAP system. We know that it isn't as good as SAP and we will lose a lot of functionality because of it, but let's let them explain it to us". He then turned around and sat down leaving my boss and I to try and salvage the situation. Talk about the wrong 'Tone from the top'! Needless to say that was a long, drawn-out and difficult implementation.

As you go about your work today - especially those of you working on projects and implementations - ask yourself how many of them are actually being championed by a senior manager in the organisation. A senior manager who has his performance measured on the success or failure of this project. If you don't have one in place, ask yourself if the project is as successful as it could be.

Photo of Barack Obama courtesy of Pete Souza, official White House photographer

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Reminder: 'The Perfect Process Project' is still 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.

---

For more about me check out my "About Me' page

All information is Copyright (C) G Comerford

Why processes can't be 'stalked and captured'

Forbes.com has an article that is garnering some attention around the web. it's called "Stalking and Capturing a Business process" and it is concerned with how we design a business process. As the article says:

Why are business processes seen as being handed down from on high? This week, the JargonSpy argues that business processes are like wild animals. They should be stalked, crept up on and then captured.

It goes on to mention several methods of doing this. These include Wiki-Based process discovery, Task-based process discovery and Mash-up-based process discovery.

The problem I have with all these approaches is that they are fundamentally flawed in their underlying principal. The article is predicated around the fact that new business processes come down 'from on high' with minimal, if any interference from the users. This is flawed for two reasons

1) Processes do not come down 'from on-high'. Good process design is a combination of interview, facilitation and process discovery

2) Asking the users to design the process using wikis, mash-up's and task-based discovery is tantamount to asking the fox to design the chicken-coop. Users do not know the best process to do their work. They know the current process, they may even know some flaws in the current process, but they don't have an overall view of the end-to-end process and they certainly don't know how to design the process to work correctly with, for example, a new system that may impose restrictions on how their workflow operates. Many users, in fact, do not even understand the difference between a business process and a procedure (but then again not many process analysts and industry experts do either). Getting them to define and document their own processes is not a viable proposition.

The key issues is that users are users and process analysts are process analysts. It is the role of the process analyst to determine what happens at the moment (using facilitated sessions, questionnaires and observation) and it is the role of the user to validate and confirm that. Of course the analysts should work in tandem with the user and of course the process must be defined whilst understanding the users needs and requirements, but the skill of the process analyst (The good one anyway) is in putting together a process which meets those requirements as well as giving them something they don't already have: simplicity and easy of use.

Stalking and capturing your process will result in a caged wild animal. You don't want one of those running your business, do you?

I do agree with the following point made in the article:

Fred Brooks, author of The Mythical Man Month, teaches us to plan to learn from the process of building the first version of asystem, and then throw it away and build a second one that has a better chance of working. Advocates of agile and extreme programming tell us to build the smallest possible system and put it in the hands of users to get evidence of what really is needed. Then keep this loop going and
improve the system rapidly. Google has led the way in launching large-scale products advertised as beta versions, a moniker that sets the expectation that continual evolution will take place. This is the triumph of incrementalism.

I am also aware enough to understand that in big business process improvement projects working in this iterative or waterfall method might not be allowed.

We can always hope, though.

The 'Auteur' theory of (process) design

John Gruber did a presentation at MacWorld 2009 which was called "The Auteur Theory of Design'.

His theory is that the film paradigm of having thousands of different people in a movie all working under a single man (the director) to produce a successful product should work for everything.

Listen to the presentation if you want (one comment was 'That was wildly obvious and verbose', so judge for yourself), but I'll summarise it for you here:

People who design things for a living fail because they have a lot of very talented people who produce something that is less than the sum of it's parts. But having a single person in charge with 'Final Cut' is the best way to ensure a quality well designed product.This is the reason a director such as Spielberg or Cameron was able to make his own decisions and say 'This is how it should be' and produce classic films.

Would this work with processes?
Traditionally it is the job of the process analyst to design the process (working, obviously with the users etc.) but who has the job of approving that? Gruber's theory is that the quality of output of any creative endeavor tends to approach the level of taste of the person with final cut. In the case where intelligent, informed people are deferring to someone with little or no 'taste' the final product will be of low quality. But the reverse can also happen. So in the case of process design, the sign-off is generally deferred to someone such as a process owner or a project manager. But in today's environment there are a lot of project managers who are 'professional' project managers i.e. they don't actually do anything other than manage projects. They don't have anything invested in the final outome other than making sure it comes in on time and under budget. Are they the right people to make this choice?

This leaves process owners. In "The Perfect Process Project" I make the point that there should be an end-to-end process owner responsible at a senior level for owning and managing the evolution of the process as a whole. This is the individual who should have Final Cut' on the processes. If this person does not understand the intricacies of the process then they will make a 'final cut' which will reduce the quality of the process. On the other hand if they are someone who is intelligent enough to understand that the process should be simple and well designed the resultant process should have sufficient quality to make it robust and workable.

So, two questions for you:

1) Do you have a process owner for your processes?
2) Does that process owner have Final Cut?

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Reminder: 'The Perfect Process Project' is still 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.

---

For more about me check out my "About Me' page

All information is Copyright (C) G Comerford

Five Simple Questions, No Easy Answers - The process version

Once again I defer to Amber Naslund over at the Altitude branding blog for her excellent post entitled Five Simple Questions, No Easy Answers.

It prompted me to see if there are similar questions that could arise in the process world

1. If you could change something about the way process management is tackled as it is right now, what would that be? Why would that improve things?

2. Give me a definition of 'process management' for a newbie, and you can’t use the words “BPM”, “Software as a service”, "process" or “tool”.

3. I’m a successful company, and I’m not yet looking at managing my processes or defining a process management capability. Why should it matter to me if what I’m doing isn’t broken?

4. Tell me the real challenges I’ll encounter as a business when I’m starting managing my processes. Now tell me why I should bother overcoming those when I have enough issues to deal with already - especially in this current economic environment.

5. Take 'process management' out of the sandbox. Tell me how else it moves business forward, operationally, culturally, otherwise, and how I can justify the cost of doing this.

What other questions are bugging you? (I have one more)

6. If people keep talking about BPM as something that is tool based, does it mean that I can't do this without spending money on equipping my organisation with these tools?

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Reminder: 'The Perfect Process Project' is still 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.

---

For more about me check out my "About Me' page

All information is Copyright (C) G Comerford

Chicken Little and the economy

(Image courtesy of Macroninja Released under a Creative Commons Attribution license)

The world is ending!

Unemployment is up! The economy is down! Companies are failing left, right and centre! Pink slips are being handed out willy-nilly! Consumer confidence is low! The Christmas rush is leaving many retail outlets with a let down feeling! Sales are down! Income is down!

Oh doom and gloom - the sky is falling on my head!

Chicken Little
The 'Chicken Little' school of economics has been rampant over the last month or so. The US financial markets, the bail-out of the big three car makers, the general 'credit-crunch' (as we call it here in the UK), overall dropping of consumer confidence and doom-laden headlines have started to make everyone believe that the world as we know it is coming to an end.

Well I'm here to tell you that it isn't.

Don't get me wrong, I'm sure it will be difficult. I'm sure that the companies who are laying people off are doing it for the right reasons (business is a business after all and not a charity), but I think that a lot of where we are today is a matter of our reaction to events rather than actuality.

The Burger Seller
Let me tell you quite a well known story, that goes something like this:

A hamburger seller had a prime selling spot on the beach. From morning until might he used to ply his trade. People came from miles around to buy hamburgers from him. Every week he used to decorate his stall, get the best ingredients in and serve whoever came for the food. One day a friend of his came from the nearest city and saw what was happening.
"Hey" said the friend "You really shouldn't be taking all this trouble and spending all this money. Don't you know there's a recession going on?"
The burger seller thought about this for a while. The next week he didn't put up fresh decorations on his stall. He didn't buy the finest ingredients, electing instead to buy cheaper ones to conserve money. He cut down his opening hours to save on running costs. Lo and behold his income dropped. Customers stopped shopping at his stall. The guy from the city came back a couple of weeks later and asked him how things were going.
"Oh, don't ask! Sales are down, customers aren't buying. I'm starting to lose money here. You were right" the burger man said "There is a recession!"

The story is a silly one but it does illustrate one point which is that attitude has a lot to do with how people weather this storm. Remember the last big worldwide recession was the starting point for a lot of today's biggest companies. Apple and Microsoft were both founded at that time and Google was a benefactor of "the dotcom bubble".

Opportunity
This is actually a time of great opportunity. The ability of someone to leverage this situation and launch a great idea for a product or service is phenomenal. Sure there may be a couple of rough years as the business is launched, but these will serve as an excellent foundation for when 'the good times' return.

But the other side to this situation is that businesses are currently in a prime situation to start looking at how they do things and improve that. In times of plenty, inefficiencies are allowed to creep in and are not removed. (For example when money is tight, one of the first things that people do is stop company travel, or at the very least restrict it to economy/coach class only. Why is this? Are they saying that at other times of the year they are allowing people to spend the company coin profligately? Surely ALL company travel should be important and therefore a diktat like this should be unnecessary?) Focusing on these inefficiencies is one way of reducing overhead or increasing sales.

Business Processes
This happens through Business Process management. Consider this: If you think that your company is working to the best of its process ability, that all processes are fully documented and that every process is fully optimised, owned and measured, I would warrant that you are in a very small minority.

I have yet to encounter a single company that could not be improved through the judicial application of some staple process analysis and review techniques. Ask yourself the following questions and see how many you can answer 'yes' to:

• Does every process in your organisation have an owner with authority to mandate change to that process?
• Is every process appropriately documented and managed by that owner (or people working with him)?
• Do you measure the effectiveness of your processes and feed that measure back into the process to affect change?

These three questions are fundamental to the appropriate management capability of a companies processes, and not one of those questions actually addresses any individual process to understand if it is working appropriately.

For some real-life examples of what companies do that can reap dividends of fixed processes refer to these two posts about "The way it's always been done" (post 1) (post 2)

Summary
There is no doubt in my mind that things are going to be tough over the coming months or even years. I submit, however, that focusing on the right things - in this case streamlining and reviewing your business processes - is the best way to ride out the storm and set your business up for success as it comes out of the other side.

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Reminder: 'The Perfect Process Project' is still 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.

---

For more about me check out my "About Me' page

All information is Copyright (C) G Comerford

Why Some Business Innovations Can't Get Off The Ground

I want to draw your attention to an excellent article by Andrew McAfee from the Harvard Business School about the interaction between IT and business process.

Andrew gives a great example of a business process that has been altered, implemented, and failed all as a result of the lack of user involvement and ability to manage the change. As a result the situation is exactly the same as it was before the change but now with a higher overhead.

His contention is that IT is an enabler for business process implementation in as much as it allows changes to be made which don't stretch the user base enough to cause non-compliance - in this case adding an extra layer of segregation to airline passengers at the gate.

So let's play with this a little: Is he saying that business process change can only occur through the use of IT? I don't think so (at least I hope not). Whilst it is obvious that using IT as a means of enforcing a business process change is generally a sound thing to do, there are occasions when only the human intervention will suffice. This is the time when the human touch is needed to ensure good customer service for example. This is the time when following process is wrong. This can also lead to process glitches occurring.

On the other hand it is also worth remembering that a large majority of process improvement through product innovation occurred as a result of implementing systems to speed up production.

Ultimately the use of IT to support a business process relies on understanding the potential impact of the process change on the customer and end user to ensure that negative results do not occur.

"The Way It's Always Been Done" (or how an aversion to change can hurt your business)

If you search this blog thoroughly you'll find reference to the following story, but I wanted to repeat it because I think it highlights a fundamental point when looking at processes: The need to ask yourself "Why?"

A well known UK insurance company was trying to compete with the new on-line insurance companies that could issue a policy document in three days. The current standard for this company was 33 days. A project was launched to understand why. Analysis indicated that after the policy is reviewed and approved (1 day) it was sent to a warehouse in Cardiff, Wales for storage. The state of the art warehouse was temperature and humidity controlled by computer, and stored the policies for 30 days prior to sending the final documents out to the end customers.

Further analysis at the warehouse indicated that the reason this step was taken (and had been brought in from the previous manual system when the computerised warehouse had been implemented) was not entirely clear. Everyone who was interviewed was very positive about the investment in the computer controlled warehouse and was anxious to tell stories about the speed and efficiencies that were gained by not needing men in fork-lift trucks searching for documents from the vast stores. Nobody seemed to know why the documents were stored for 30 days, though. Tracking down the longest serving employee in the company it was determined that was how it had always been done because this step was necessary to allow the policy to dry.


"Allow the policy to dry....?!?!?!"


Apparently back in the mists of time when policies were printed in ink on parchment they were stored for 30 days to allow the ink to thoroughly dry. In todays modern world this step was no longer needed. It was removed and suddenly the insurance company was able to mix it up with the new boys.

The story was told to me by Steve Towers from the BPMG at a BPM conference a number of years ago. Now I have no idea if this story as apocryphal or not and - frankly - I don't care. The reason I like it (and the reason I have retold it dozens of times in the intervening few years) is that it does identify a key problem that occurs when people look at streamlining processes and making them more efficient.

'That's the way it's always been done'

This is the curse of modern society (ironically enough). People are hesitant to change things that have traditionally been done because they think that this will - in some way - cause bigger issues.

I come from a background of heavily regulated industry. This is the sort of place where you need to have 24 people review a document before it can be officially approved. When electronic signatures were introduced into the process it was still felt that all 24 people needed to review each document despite the fact that research showed that, in fact, only about 5 people in each case had input into the review, the others either didn't review it or too so long to review it that the whole approval cycle took forever to complete. Reviewers were added so that they couldn't later come back and say 'Well I didn't know anything about this'.

When we looked at the problem through a different lens we were able to say 'Suppose this document was stored in a central place and you were informed when it was updated, would you be happy to take that as proof that you were informed, given 3 working days to come back with issues and - if nothing is heard - we take it that you are aware and up-to-date?' By adding in this 'Implicit review' step we were able to do several things.

1) We were able to minimise the number of folks reviewing the actual document.
2) We were able to substantially reduce the approval cycle time for a document.

The key was to ignore the way things had been done previously and concentrate on why we need to do things a certain way now.

So take a look around your own organisation and ask yourself the question 'Why are we doing these things? Is it because this is the way things have always been done?"

You might be surprised.

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Just a reminder the free download 'Doing Business Process Work in your organisation - A White paper' is still available. Click this link and follow the instructions. Your White paper will be sent as soon as possible. Don't miss the chance to get this valuable insight into how to make business processes work for you!

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All information is Copyright (C) G Comerford


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