conferences – Page 83

Six Sigma and Proforma

Day 2 of the Proforma conference included three additional customer presentations, one from a partner, then all the exciting stuff about the upcoming product release.

Following on the heels of the panel at the end of day 1, in which Paul Harmon and Geary Rummler slammed Six Sigma, Deb Berard from Seagate spoke about their successes with Six Sigma and Proforma. Seagate has been using Six Sigma since 1995, and has been seeing a lot of success with it and Lean — not surprising for a manufacturing organization, which is where Six Sigma originated. They use the Six Sigma framework in ProVision, and their initial process analysis and modelling efforts led to the improvement of some of their product development processes. Based on that success, they then pushed it out to an enterprise-wide initiative.

The only thing that I really had an issue with was her calling ProVision a business process management system (BPMS), which it’s not: it’s a modelling suite. Although BPM still doesn’t have a fully accepted definition, I believe that BPMS has a very specific meaning.

Proforma Conference Day 1: Geary Rummler x 2

Our after-lunch keynote on the first day was by Geary Rummler, co-creator of the well-known Rummler-Brache methodology and author of Improving Performance: How to Manage the White Space in the Organization Chart. In case you’re not getting the significance of this, the original swimlane diagrams are more properly called Rummler-Brache diagrams.

Rummler retired from Rummler-Brache a few years ago, then after “failing at retirement” as he put it, went back into practice the Performance Design Lab. His talk was a bit rambling, and he had 84 slides for a one-hour presentation, but I’m quite sure that he’s forgotten more about process than most of us will ever know.

He talked about how “as-is” process maps tend to drive out issues into the open, something that I have seen time and time again: management looks at what you’ve documented as their current process, and they say “We do that? Really?” One of the prime examples of this was a financial institution that I was working with on an BPM project a few years back. I documented all of their current processes on the way to the proposed processes, including their paper handling procedures. They sent the original of all transaction documents offsite in order by date, but made a photocopy of each document and filed it locally for reference by account number. Of course, we planned to replace this with a document scanning operation, but I felt obligated to point out a pretty major problem with their current process: since they were so behind in their local filing, the photocopies of the documents were just being boxed in date-order and stored onsite, which made the account-order files useless for any recent documents. Furthermore, they had stopped sending the originals offsite some months before that, so they now had both the original documents and a photocopy of each document, stored in the same order but in separate boxes, kept onsite. The management in charge of the area was truly shocked by what was going on, and I think that my fees were covered just by what I saved them in photocopy costs.

Back to Rummler, he showed a diagram of a business — any business — as a system, with financial stakeholders, the market, competition, resources and environmental influences as the inputs and outputs (since you can search the Proforma site and find the full presentation, I don’t think that I’m spilling the beans here to include one of the diagrams). I like this view, since it simplifies the business down to the important issues, namely the interactions with external people and organizations. He also spent quite a bit of time on the processing system hierarchy: the enterprise business model at the top, the value chain extracted from that, the primary processing systems derived out of the value chain, the processes from each primary processing system, and the sub-processes, tasks and sub-tasks that make up each process.

He went into organizational structure, specifically showing departments/resources on one axis and processes on the other, to illustrate how process cut across departments, but making the point that most organizations are managed by department rather than having true process owners.

There was one quote in particular that stuck with me: “Visibility is a prerequisite to optimizing and managing systems.”

We had a second dose of Rummler in the wrap-up panel on Day 1, where he joined Paul Harmon of BPTrends and one of the Proforma team who was filling in for the missing Aloha Airlines representative.

Harmon stated that none of the major business schools have any courses on process, but that they’re all function-based, and that most CEOs don’t see process as their primary concern. Rummler agreed, and made the point that being functionally-oriented, or siloed, leads to sub-optimization of the organization. Harmon’s initial comment led me to wonder if it’s necessary to have the CEO want to “do process”, or if a process approach is just an implementation detail, but Rummler ended up addressing exactly that issue by saying that it is necessary because methodologies are competing directly for the CEO’s attention, and it’s not always possible for the CEO to distinguish between the different methodologies at that level. Harmon made quite a rant against Six Sigma, saying that “Six Sigma people don’t understand high-level process”, blaming the widespread acceptance of Six Sigma on Jack Welch and GE strong-arming their suppliers into using it, and stating that Six Sigma people could be converted into a business process view, as if they were some sort of cult that had to be deprogrammed. I’m not sure that I would take such a hard line on Six Sigma versus a process-centric organization; “process” can’t be so easily pushed into an organization as Harmon implied since it’s not a methodology, it’s a pretty fuzzy concept that a lot of consultants like to bandy about.

At the end of the day, I’d have to say that I also disagree with Harmon’s assessment that BPMS is still very early market. Although it’s not a mature market, I think that to call it “very early” is ignoring the many successful products and implementations that have been done in this space over the past several years.

Seeking a BPM definition

The last customer presentation of Day 1 at the Proforma conference was Mary Baumgartner Vellequette from Genentech‘s Corporate Treasury division. Through curiosity on both of our parts, Mary and I later toured the show floor of the International Lingerie show that was going on down the hall, although they were in the process of tear-down so we didn’t see as much as we would have liked. 😉

Mary had some great material on establishing BPM programs within an organization, including governance, but the more that I listened to her, the more I realized that we still have a definition gap: her BPM (which does mean business process management) doesn’t really include one of the main foci of my BPM, namely the systems used to help automate business processes. Hers is really about analyzing and modelling the processes, integrating them into an overall architecture, documenting and communicating the processes, business reorganization and other non-automation tasks. Only on her long-term plans does she mention “business process automation” tools.

She does include some BPM measures and direct/indirect benefits in good detail, helpful to anyone who is looking to establish ROI for their BPM project. She also steps through the BPM project process in detail, discusses change management and how to map process improvements to organizational change.

I am left with the feeling that we still don’t have a comprehensive definition of business process management: although I consider everything that Mary talked about to be part of BPM, I also consider the process automation and BPMS to be a significant part.

Dispensing with the As-Is

Sometimes I don’t pick up a lot from a presentation, or at least I don’t write a lot of notes about what I learned from it. Bill Riordan from HP talked about modelling customer support centre processes, but I came away with only a few points.

First, the term “happy path”, which in process modelling, means the best-case/simplest route through a process map, originated at HP. Who knew.

Second, and likely more relevant to those who aren’t as fascinated by process modelling trivia as I, is that they didn’t do any “as-is” process modelling, only the “to-be” models. That way, they were able to completely bypass the “but that’s the way we do it now” argument for not changing things. That really harkens back to the days of business process reengineering, where everything old was tossed out and the new processes started from a completely clean slate.

Enterprise Architecture in pharmaceuticals

It was Craig Confoy’s presentation on Johnson & Johnson Pharma where I really started to get interested in the issue of where EA sits in the enterprise. Although the “E” in EA stands for “Enterprise”, it seems that most organizations, and J&J is no exception, start out with EA in the IT infrastructure group somewhere. Like many large conglomerates, they had a bit of a mess with five pharmaceutical R&D companies (out of J&J’s 200-odd companies), each with its own IT department supporting 14 different functional units per company, and little alignment between the company functions. Since EA was in IT infrastructure, anything in the business layers of EA, such as business modelling, was done on a project-by-project basis and not shared between business units or companies.

Sound familiar? Almost every large company that I deal with has the same issues: some real architecture going on at the lower infrastructure levels, but practically none at the business levels.

About 5 years ago, J&J Pharma decided to do something about it, and created a business architecture group. There were a few stumbles along the way, such as the use of a (seemingly inappropriate) CASE tool that resulted in business process documentation that stretched over 42 feet at 8pt font — unusable and unsustainable — before they started using Proforma.

One of their models that I really liked was an enterprise data model that could be overlaid with departmental ownership, so that you can easily see how changing any part of the model would impact which departments. I think that this is one of the basics required by any large organization, but often not used; instead, companies tend to replicate data on a per-department basis since they don’t have any enterprise data models that would tell them who is using what data.

This was one customer presentation that showed some clear ROI of using the Proforma tools: they found that systems could be implemented 30% faster (a huge advantage in pharmaceuticals), that the modelling process identifies system integration points and allows them to create standard EAI models for reuse, and that the data models helped meet their regulatory requirements more easily.

Milk, butter and business processes

Mary Berger from Land O’ Lakes kicked off the customer presentations by talking about how they modelled several of their core business processes in spite of the lack of in-house resources, both analysts and SMEs. They backfilled their own resources with some of the Proforma team, then had sufficient success on the first three core processes that they split the efforts and did the next six processes, three product and three office, as two separate streams using Proforma and internal resources.

Mary summarized a number of key success factors that any organization attempting this could take to heart:

Do the modelling live during the sessions with the SMEs, rather than taking notes and trying to transcribe them later. This increases the accuracy, since there is immediate feedback on the process model, creates the final documentation as you go along, and forces those who are facilitating and documenting the session to become very familiar with the modelling tool. I can’t tell you how many nights I’ve spent in hotel rooms after a day of customer requirements elicitation sessions, transcribing my notes and trying to recreate every detail mentioned during the day; real-time business modelling is definitely the right way to go, assuming that you have both a facilitator and a scribe/modeller.
Use small teams, and involve the right people from the start. Smaller teams just get things done faster and more efficiently, and having everyone on board from the beginning means that you spend less time playing catch-up with those who join later.
In workflow models (the most common model type that they used), you can pinpoint the functions of highest risk as those with the most I/O outside their own swimlane. That seems obvious in retrospect, but she highlighted the point well.

They also found that there were a number of unexpected benefits that came out of the analysis and modelling efforts: a common corporate glossary and vocabulary; documented business procedures for use in training and procedures manuals; a visible link between business requirements and goals; and a set of business rules.

Proforma conference presentations

I totally slacked off after leaving the conference on Thursday afternoon, spending the early evening at the Voodoo Lounge catching the sunset from 51 floors, then hanging around the Masquerade mezzanine watching the Mardi Gras show before turning in early enough to make that 7am flight home on Friday. So here it is, Monday morning, and I’m catching up on a week’s worth of blogging.

This was a relatively small conference, about 150 customers attending, but what an enthusiastic group! When one of the speakers talked about how ARIS had been abandoned on a project because of its complexity, there was clapping from the audience, and I don’t think that all of it came from Proforma employees. There were no breakout sessions, just a main stage, and almost half of the presentations were given over to customer presentations. Not only that, all of them were talking about what they’ve actually done with Proforma’s products, not what they plan to do, so had some pretty practical advice for the rest of the crowd.

The product presentations from the Proforma people were also pretty interesting, in part because I haven’t worked with the product that much so a lot of it was new to me.

More detail on the individual presentations to follow.

I also had a number of interesting conversations with customers, and I kept driving to the question of where enterprise architecture fits in their organization. For the most part, companies are keeping it under IT (which I think is a big mistake and posted about previously, not surprisingly when I was reviewing a Proforma webinar), and there seem to be a lot of conflicts in defining the roles of data, information, business and enterprise architects still.

Proforma conference Day 1 quick look

There’s wifi in the conference room, but you have to sign up at the business centre for it ahead of time, which was just too much logistics for me to blog live. However, it’s 5am on Day 2 and my brain is still on Eastern time, so time for a few updates. I’ll do a more complete review of the sessions after it’s all over. First, let’s start with the other conferences that were running in the same conference centre,which you can see in the photo on the left.

Best quote of the conference so far: “I can DODAF FEMA!”, from Tony Devino, an engineer with the Navy, in his presentation about creating a process for quality control on temporary housing installations in New Orleans following Katrina. First time that I’ve heard “DODAF” used as a verb, and a bit funny (well, to EA geeks), especially when you consider that they use DODAF for weapons systems.

Best dance (not usually a category that I assign at conferences): Judson Laipply, a motivational speaker who gave a keynote, also happens to be the originator of the Evolution of Dance, the most-viewed clip ever on YouTube. He talked about change, which is the theme of the conference, then did a live, extended-play version of the Evolution of Dance for us at the end of his talk. I really would have hated to follow him on stage as a speaker!

Dr. Geary Rummler spoke at the afternoon keynote (yes, that Rummler), which was pretty exciting for those of us who have been around in process modelling and management long enough to have a view of his part in its history.

There was a bit of discussion about Proforma’s leading position in the new Forrester report, which is an amazing coup for Proforma when they’re up against a company that’s many times their size.

I’m left with a great impression of Proforma as a company. Although considerably smaller than IDS Scheer, their major competitor, they have an enthusiastic customer base, judging by both the customer presenters and the attendees who I’ve met, and a really nice corporate culture. I sat at the dinner last night with Dave Ritter, one of the founders and currently VP of Enterprise Solutions; we had a lengthy chat before we realized that we had (sort of) met on a Proforma webinar where he spoke several months back, and in some follow-up emails to that webinar. Michelle Bretscher, their PR Director, has given me completely red-carpet treatment, offering to set up meetings with any of the executives, and making sure that I have whatever I need. I don’t think that a lot of press shows up to their user conferences, but when you’re a one-person consultant/analyst/blogger organization, it’s nice to be treated with that level of respect, something that larger vendors could take a lesson from. I also had the most pleasant surprise when I turned to page 6 of the program and saw the watermarked graphic behind the print.

Sessions today include a lot of material from Proforma on their upcoming Series 6, and I’ve very eager to hear about their advances in zero-footprint clients and other Web 2.0-like features, considering my recent focus on Web 2.0 and BPM.

Process 2006 Day 2

I attended many fewer sessions today since I was presenting “Web 2.0 and BPM” just after lunch, and wanted to spend the morning doing some fine-tuning — this is the first time that I’ve done it in this form, although I’ve talked and blogged about the ideas extensively. Although I sat in on Ian Gotts’ session before lunch, I have to admit that I didn’t absorb a lot.

I ended up making the last changes to my presentation about 8 minutes before show time, and it could certainly use a bit more tuning now that I’ve presented it once straight through and have an idea of what worked and didn’t work. You can find my slides here, and I’m thinking about podcasting some or all of it and making that available as well. I had some nice feedback and I’m looking forward to evolving this presentation over the next few months.

At the end of the day, Terry Schurter gave a presentation on Customer Expectation Management, based on the material in his new book. I reviewed the book for Terry before publication, and it was funny seeing the book in print, finally, with a quote from me on the front flyleaf. Following his presentation was another rather unstructured panel discussion and closing remarks, from which I ducked out early.

The conference seemed slightly less well attended than last year, although I don’t know the actual numbers from either event. I made a couple of good contacts, so definitely worth the trip. I also had a chance to visit (and stay with) my friends in London, where I earned my keep by fixing his computer and teaching them both about Web 2.0 and BPM. 🙂

I’m now off to southern France to see more friends, Nancy and David Wood: she used to be the MD for FileNet in Australia at the same time that I worked for FileNet at their corporate headquarters, then I camped out at her place for a few months when I was bumming around Australia a few years back, and now they’ve moved to the south of France. She was involved in The Process Factory startup last year, an example of BPM offered as SaaS, although she’s on to other things now.

I’ll be offline until next Tuesday when I’m back in Toronto.