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BPMN poster and templates

There’s a public domain BPMN poster and set of Visio templates on SourceForge for free download.

Via BPM.com.

A month of travel

Forgive me readers, for I have slacked off. It’s been 8 days since my last blog post. I blame the Canadian government, who insist on me doing my personal taxes by April 30th.

I’ve had a number of vendor product demos over the past several weeks, and it’s time to start blogging about them before I start into a month of travel: I’m giving a presentation at the TIBCO user conference in San Francisco next week, then attending the BEA user conference in Atlanta the following week, a few days vacation in Nova Scotia after that, then on to Las Vegas for a presentation at the Shared Insights Portals and Collaboration conference. Watch for live blogging from all three conferences, although not from my vacation.

ProVision 6.0 release

I finally made it home from Chicago around 1:30 this morning: United Airlines wimped out and cancelled all their flights, but Air Canada came through in the crunch.

I’m now on a Proforma webinar about their new V6.0 release of ProVision, of which I had a brief preview at their user conference last fall. Some highlights:

Browser-based access for collaboration, although I suspect that this does not include full modelling capabilities based on the comments that I heard at the user conference.
Web services access to Knowledge Exchange — this is pretty exciting, and I’d like to hear about more of this. For example, if ProVision exposed process models via a web service, could a BPMS consume that model directly?
Embedded Crystal Report functionality, which I recall was a big deal for the user conference attendees.
Updated UI in their desktop application, which was looking a bit dated.
The concept of dimensions in models, which allows for alternative versions to be created based on specific dimensions, where a dimension may be, for example, geography, or as-is versus to-be. In one model, then, you can compare North American as-is models with European to-be models, or whatever else you want to define based on your dimensions. Pretty powerful stuff.

I’m not familiar enough with ProVision to tell exactly what’s new and what was there before, but it does look like some significant improvements in this version.

ProVision 6.0 is being released over the next two weeks. A replay of the webinar will be available on their website.

BrainStorm BPM Day 2: Pat Dowdle

I was wrong, the last one wasn’t my last session, I had time for one more: Pat Dowdle on a Roadmap to Implementing Process-Based Management, based on CAM-I’s emerging Process-Based Management (PBM) assessment and framework. There’s a number of pieces to this:

Mindset/culture (how things are done; values, rules, practices)
End-to-end processes (classification; portfolio; structure)
Process-based measures (process performance; incentives/compensation)
Initiative integration: (ABC/M; ISO/quality standards; Six Sigma)
All centred around customer expectations

He went through a management model for process ownership, from a process council to process owners to team leaders and the team, and talked about a roadmap to PBM through the seven key milestones: awareness, commitment, engagement, managing processes, integration, embed and optimization. In this, he talks about moving from process metrics to transformation metrics once processes start to integrate across the organization: critical for moving from local optimized processes to global optimization, which seems to be my personal theme for the day. He also names the transitions between the seven milestones: discovery, foundation, transition, transformation (moving from managing processes to integration), institutionalization and realization.

There’s a presentation on the CAM-I website that goes into more detail about PBM including much of this, and quite a bit of material of theirs on BPMInstitute.org (just search for CAM-I). Check out slide 13 on the CAM-I presentation for a great chart that maps different quality programs (such as Six Sigma) against their seven milestones.

My flight home just cancelled, so I may hang around a bit longer…

BrainStorm BPM Day 2: Dan Madison

Last session of the day for me: I’m headed off to the airport following this, although I realize that the probability of a flight in or out of Chicago being on time when it’s snowing is near zero. With some luck, I’ll make it home tonight. The only thing that I’m missing is some sessions where the vendors get to show off their products, and a final wrapup keynote.

This session by Dan Madison is on Creating the “To Be” Process, something that I often do with customers, and I’m always looking to learn new tips and techniques from others who do the same thing. This session is part of the Organizational Performance symposium, the first of those that I’ve attended these two days.

He suggests a number of “lenses of analysis” to look at processes and derive the “to be” processes from the problems seen in that process.

First, create a customer report card, which for each ranked criteria, shows the current process performance (usually around quality and timeliness), what the best possible performance in that process would look like, and the two main competitors or outsourcers.

Second, look at the things that frustrate the people who are currently participating in the process, since there’s a high correlation between frustration and quality problems: frustration has the ability to act as a lens focussed on problem areas. Once frustrations are identified, the process participants tend to generate a ton of ideas on how to fix the problems, and there’s a huge amount of buy-in for changing the process from the grassroots level. I’ve definitely seen this with my customers. There was an audience question about how to keep this from becoming a bitch session, and Dan said that he uses some basic rules if things start to go that way: only process problems are discussed, not people problems; and each person can only bring forward their three main frustrations.

Third, look at the time required for each type of work in the process: processing, waiting, rework, moving, inspecting and setup. He finds that processing — the actual work — is typically only 2-20% of the time, which indicates that there’s a huge amount of inefficiency in the process. Of that small percentage, even all of that may not be time that adds value to the process. If you’ve automated your process with BPM, then you can gather this information with your system, but if your processes are still manual, then figuring out how your process breaks down will be manual, too.

Fourth, a cost lens such as activity-based costing; ABC calculates what it really costs to deliver a specific product or service by looking at the labour, overhead and material costs of each step in a process.

Fifth, a quality lens such as Six Sigma for measuring defect rates or some other relevant quality measure.

Last, take a look at benchmarks and best practices, by looking at your direct competitors and what they’re doing; and by looking at companies that have a process similar to your problem process and are considered to be world class, regardless of their industry.

He then moved on to design principles for the to-be process:

Design the process around value-adding activities.
Provide a single point of contact for customers and suppliers.
If the inputs coming in to the process naturally cluster, create a separate process for each cluster.
Ensure a continuous flow of the “main sequence.”
Bring downstream information needs upstream.
Involve as few people as possible in performing a process [our old adage of reducing handoffs lives!].
Ensure 100% quality at the beginning of the process.
Use co-located or networked teams for complex issues.
Redesign the process first, and then automate it.

Putting it all together, creating the to-be is the synthesis of:

Customer feedback
Worker frustrations
Time analysis
Cost analysis
Quality analysis
Benchmarking and best practices
Design principles
Information technology

Dan’s obviously experienced at this: he does it as a consultant, he teaches process mapping and improvement at the local university, and he has a couple of books that he’s written on it. I haven’t read his books, but I’ll be checking them out soon.

BrainStorm: Meeting my peeps in Chicago

I’m starting to see more and more familiar faces at these BPM conferences, and this one is no exception: I’ve met Gregg Rock and Tom Dwyer of BPMInstitute.org at a couple of conferences now, finally met Brett Champlin at the last Gartner conference, and Bruce Silver and I meet up so often that our spouses are starting to get suspicious. 🙂 There’s also the people who work for the vendors — I seem to see many of the same ones at every show, and these shows must be some small form of purgatory for them.

It’s also fun to meet people who I’ve only met online previously, and I’ve had a couple of those experiences here in Chicago. David Novick, who added a comment to my blog that turned into an email conversation, recognized me in one of the sessions — I guess that Rannie’s new headshot of me is paying off. At lunch, I happened to sit at the same table as Barbara Saxby from Ramco, who was on a webinar that I moderated last month. And Jean Campagna of Resolvit found me yesterday evening at the vendor showcase/drinks party to say that her colleague was sending me a hello: apparently her colleague back at the office has been reading my blog to Jean over the phone.

BrainStorm BPM Day 2: Ken Orr

For the first breakout session of the day, I attended Ken Orr’s talk on Business Process Driven Enterprise Architecture. He started out with some observations: improving business processes is essential for enterprises; business architecture is critical; modelling is critical; and business processes are hard to manage in the real world and especially in big organizations. Nothing earth-shattering here, but excellent points.

He made a great analogy by talking about IT levees — fragile yet critical applications and systems where you know that they’re a weak point but just never find the time or money to fix them — and understanding when they’re going to break. Apparently, a year before Hurricane Katrina, there was an exercise that modelled exactly what would happen if a force 4 or 5 hurricane hit New Orleans, but nothing was done; when Katrina hit, the levees failed exactly as modelled. Orr talked about mission critical spreadsheets as being one class of IT levees that are all set up to fail at the wrong time.

He talked about how enterprise architecture is like city planning, where your deliverables are things like a city plan, a zoning plan, a building code and an approved building-materials list. Sticking with the disaster analogies, he talked about how building codes are the result of disasters, and the obvious analogy with software and system disasters is pretty clear.

He covered off their enterprise architecture framework briefly, but used it mostly to discuss how the different layers in a framework interact: in short, technology changes enable business changes, and business changes drive the need for technology changes. He also talked about determining what type of business that you’re in, that is, what business processes are you really doing, so that you can figure out whether or not you should be in those businesses as well as how to improve them. Funnily enough, he really answered part of the question that I asked in the panel in the previous session with respect to getting an end-to-end business process view, but that’s sort of expected from an enterprise architecture person since EA can be a key tool in doing just that. In his terminology, what I’m talking about is a value stream, defined by James Martin in The Great Transition as “…an end-to-end set of activities which collectively create value for a customer.”

Update: I forgot to add “Orr’s rules of modelling”, which he gave after I had shut down my laptop, so were just scribbled on a piece of paper:

It’s more important to be clear than correct. If you’re clearly wrong, someone will correct you. If you’re obscurely correct, you may never know.
It’s not important that your first model is correct, only that your last model is correct.

BrainStorm BPM Day 2: Transforming to a Process-Driven Enterprise

Following our morning break in the beautiful but sadly lacking in hot water (for tea) vendor showcase area is a panel moderated by Tom Dwyer on Transforming to a Process-Driven Enterprise, featuring speakers from Adobe (Ashish Agrawal) and BEA (John Lauck, former president of Fuego before it was acquired by Fuego) as well as the last session’s speaker, Jeremy Alexis. Surprisingly, the speaker from Adobe didn’t show up until 13 minutes after the panel was supposed to start, but many of us think that Adobe is pretty late to the BPM space anyway.

I’ve been tagged by Tom to ask a question early on in order to get things rolling, which means that I’m paying more attention than usual. 🙂 Panels are difficult to blog about because they’re so unstructured and there’s no visual aids, but there’s often some conversational gems that pop up.

The first question was about the business-IT divide, which resulted in a completely expected reply: if you don’t get the business and IT people together, then BPM initiatives will almost certainly fail. Lauck just referred to “SOA” derisively as a buzzword, which was a bit unexpected and did make me laugh — wonder what his current bosses think about that — and then took a swipe at BPEL.

I then popped up and asked how organizations can move from being functionally-focussed to having an end-to-end view of their processes that will move from local optimization to global optimization. Unfortunately, the two vendors appear to have thought that I asked the question “how can I sell more software to my customers”, because they both spoke about how you start with small projects, then roll out other projects across the enterprise and possibly find some efficiencies via shared services. In fact, Lauck said that if you have “grandiose plans” (his words) like modelling your end-to-end processes, then you’ll just be modelling forever. Okay guys, but you’re not answering my question: everyone’s talking about moving from functional silos to process-centric views, but how do you actually do it? Shared services is not equivalent to finding a global optimum. Tom must have known that I wasn’t satisfied, because he came back to me and asked if I wanted to clarify. By then, I was itching to have the microphone back, and said explicitly that I hadn’t asked them how they could sell more software, but that’s the question that they answered, and said that I was interested in Alexis’ view on this since it is really a question about how companies innovate. He responded that leadership is key, which is a sort of motherhood and apple pie statement, and talked about the importance of change management. Okay, that’s closer, but still doesn’t answer the initial question.

A third question came up about how transitioning to a process-driven organization creates winners and losers, and how companies deal with losing people who just don’t fit into the new world order. I think that the question was really about people who can’t adapt to the new way of thinking, which is essentially a change management issue.