I think there is a need for this thing called Agility in your organization.

You agree?

You do? OK. I had a feeling you would.

It is a burning need, no? Third degree, even.

Now let me ask you this. Of all those people in your organization – CXOs, Business users, process owners, compliance managers, IT, you name it – who do you think has the biggest need for that agility?

[sound of clock ticking]

Ok, let me pose that question differently to you. Who are those people in your organization who lose sleep over a lack of agility?

Is anyone even losing sleep at all?

Alright. Let me try again. If agility is such a burning need, what are the damages your organization is experiencing in its absence? Can you put a Dollar value to it?

If you had to think hard to answer those, then you are probably just very influenced by some vendor pitch that made agility sound like a big deal (and of course, that it was best supported by their tool).

Vendors – your BPM product vendor as well as your Systems Integrator –  will give you loads of wisdom on Agility and soon, before you know it, Agility begins to figure high up there in your list of ‘must-haves’.

That’s not bad at all, having  Agility high up in your list.

But what is really bad and pointless, is when Agility becomes a Holy Cow for you. That makes you just put it up there in that list without a view on exactly where and how it can really help you.

I am coming across more firms that bring it up in the very first conversation about BPM without having really broken it down to see what, how and where exactly agility is going to make a worthwhile impact. Many firms seem to be looking at it like it was some magic pill that could make all their woes disappear, make them happier, wealthier, wiser, fitter, taller and maybe even give a brilliant shine to their teeth.

But guess what? After the first automated processes get out that door, all the excitement and eagerness around Agility makes a slow and quiet exit through the other door at the far end.  And no one even notices it is gone, and that fancy strategy fades away slowly.

But calm down and wipe that sweat off your brow. Although agility in the BPM world is turning out to be a big farce, the sooner you see it, the earlier you can set things straight and address the real agility needs of your organization.

Because first, you have to see that it is not something a tool can give you. I wrote about this a few months ago in a post titled A Reality Check on Agility and BPM where I had argued that it is unlikely that a tool capability alone will make your organization agile. Technology may contribute to an extent, no doubt, but that by itself is not going to cut it.

Secondly, you need to realize that at the core of this fancy idea of agility is the degree of inclination (or inertia) an organization has towards being responsive, reactive, alert, adaptive to work, business, markets. In other words, the root of agility lies in the collective consciousness of an organization.

The the real secret to agility lies with your people. Your culture.

Faun deHenry’s recent post titled Culture “vs” Strategy discusses this important aspect that you need to deal with to put agility in the right perspective. She writes

If your organization is an incumbent in an industry that has a disruptive newcomer, adaptability becomes paramount. Yet, strong corporate cultures are typically less adaptable. To use Edgar Schein’s analogy, strong corporate cultures possess antibodies that protect them from “foreign” ideas or proposals.  Therefore, it is critical that leaders heed Drucker’s warning and remember the lesson of DEC as they attempt to change a corporate culture so that it can function harmoniously with a new strategy.

Culture and strategy must fit and work together to move an organization’s performance forward.  Without harmony between culture and strategy, the organization suffers and, eventually, dies.

I couldn’t agree more – and this is really what brings that fundamental quest for agility into perspective. Yet we continue to look towards  technology, while we should be equally and in fact more seriously looking at culture, change, and the harmony between culture & strategy to pull it off.

That IMHO is really the disconnect that makes Agility in BPM a very elusive thing.  What are your thoughts? Do you have any experience of a firm pulling it off successfully? Or missing it? What were the causes?

©2012 Bouncing Thoughts. All Rights Reserved.

Organizational change in any form, evokes much the same feeling you have when you are on a diving board looking down at the cold water below. Although you know it will all be fine in under 20 seconds after you’ve left the board, for the 20 seconds before that actually happens though, you display emotions that seem to suggest you are about to confront a most dreadful event.

The thing is, that hesitation, that sense of apprehension, is not really about diving nor about swimming. It is about those few moments when it can get incredibly jarring as your body splashes through that cold water. It shakes you up for a few moments.

Much the same way, I like to think employees really do not have a fundamental disagreement to the reasons why they need that ‘change’ that is being introduced – that new software, those process changes, those revised roles and responsibilities, those new user interfaces. It may not be any of those at all.

It may really be that ‘jarring’ effect of stepping out of one comfort zone into a new zone that they need to warm up to all over again.

With BPM, the extent of change is significant – it is not just about change in the proverbial ‘run-time’. There are change implications to the very approach right from conceptualization of the solution, stakeholder participation, design, through to roll out. And no, it doesn’t end there either!

So there definitely is some level of inertia to most every organizational change and more so for BPM related change. I had made a post on this sometime back where I had noted

change issues threaten BPM success much more than you ever cared to admit. If you really want to tackle every force adversely affecting your BPM success, you need to stand up and look at that BPM Inertia in the eye.

And the big challenge really is what you do after you are done looking at it in the eye.

Chris Taylor posted few days ago a very good piece titled “Selling BPM – Three things that make the difference”.  This post in fact achieved the feat of breaking my silence here, which is incredible considering the widening gaps between my posts.

The third among Chris’ ‘list of ‘things’,  was “Getting colleagues to come along”. This struck a chord with me.

Chris goes on to say about “Getting colleagues to come along”,

Your management has accepted your analysis and signed off on your business idea…but your idea is only meaningful when everyone comes along. They will follow your lead when they realize that it is in their interest to do so. Sure, management can require people to behave a certain way, but that only gets you so far. ThyssenKrupp was able to get everyone onboard by  by training small groups at a time and showing them a relevant, role-based view of the world. Finance was trained on what they care about and machine operators on machine operation.

There will always be resistance to factor in. Christian describes the ThyssenKrupp Stainless method of overcoming it by saying, “We didn’t tackle the people who were most resistant, but instead focused on those who seemed open. We built a critical mass gradually.”  In the end, no person likes to be an island.

Chris’ most important point is buried in the first paragraph and could almost go unnoticed – “They will follow your lead when they realize that it is in their interest to do so”

This, I believe is really the crux. This is the real incentive and all the arsenal you need to sell the idea of ‘coming along’. I said before, and it is worth saying again,

One key pivot that I am increasingly beginning to believe Change Management success hinges on is when everyone involved is aware and truly believes that  the ‘change’ can improve their daily work life, and can indeed help them work smarter, easier and better.

What are your thoughts? Are there other equally, if not more crucial aspects you can think of?

©2012 Bouncing Thoughts. All Rights Reserved.

It is about to become something of the past. That’s sad because it really is something from the future.

Something that could have even shaped it.

If you had a Wave account, you might agree with me. Google announced the end of the Wave project months ago, but last weeks mail from the Wave team was sad to read and if you have an account, am sure you felt the same way.

The Google Wave project excited the imagination of everyone and every user was able to visualize the potential of Wave in their own sphere.

Some of my colleagues in the ECM space were excited about it’s potential for co-creation and collaborative content management. Could Wave sow the seeds for the new paradigm in Content Management?

Yet another bunch of my geeky friends found the mash-quotient exciting. A colleague and I, spurred by some intense possibility discussions used Wave to mash up maps and tried to work up a sort of a ‘beat route’ for Medical Reps. Another friend who was already on high octane excitement on Yahoo Pipes almost choked looking at new possibilities that opened with Wave.

Others were excited about some of the new possibilities in social features.

In the meanwhile, our own BPM community was buzzing with possibility thinking.

Perhaps the single common thread among all these perspectives was that it fired the imagination in a lateral direction on Collaboration. Collaboration between people. And technologies.

Needless to say the ‘adaptive’ aspects brought out some of the most interesting discussions wrt BPM.

And it didn’t stop with just discussions. SAP’s Gravity prototype was Wave in action and piqued our imagination.

Gravity was a sort of proof what Wave could do in BPM. Although it was around design-time use of collaboration, the possibilities in run-time were not difficult to imagine.

And so, it is definitely sad that Wave won’t be around after January 2012. Google though has indicated that some of the technology that went into Wave will be used in their other products.

A lot has been written about the Wave and its implications on BPM.  Scott Francis wrote a few posts (I liked this one particularly) on the possibilities of Wave in BPM and in one of them, he discusses Jacob Ukelson’s article Can Google Wave Become a Disruptive, Good Enough BPMS. Scott lists out why Wave could not become a serious contender in the BPMS space.

1. It isn’t really Google’s intent to build a BPMS.  They don’t think of the problem Wave is solving as a “process”.  As a result, they’re unlikely to take it in that direction.  I don’t think you end up with a good BPMS my accident.
2. The structured parts of process are actually useful for larger organizations that actually have that kind of structure or volume.
3. There is a lot of magic under the hood of a BPMS that wouldn’t be trivial to recreate using Wave.  Not impossible, just not trivial.  More likely is a mash-up approach like the SAP Gravity demonstration.
4. It still sits outside the firewall of the corporation, and for all too many companies, that is still a regulatory problem, not to mention a security problem, for their data.

But today although it is rather sad to learn that Wave is not going to be around, I would say that it has already achieved a lot. It has widened our imagination and posed possibilities that can inspire the evolution of adaptive and collaborative features that can be incorporated in BPM suites.

Wave came in with a message like a messiah and left leaving us with a lot food for thought as we move into another exciting year of BPM.

©2012 Bouncing Thoughts. All Rights Reserved.

Here is a video that leaves very little to be said about a rather painful aspect of the vendor-customer relationship.

Thanks to Faun for sharing this.

©2012 Bouncing Thoughts. All Rights Reserved.

During a long weekend last year, a group of friends and I headed to a small  sea-side town around 100 miles from Bombay. Enroute, we stopped at a small hotel for refreshments – a franchisee of a reasonably well known restaurant chain in India. However considering it was along a highway, although a busy one, we weren’t sure of the quality of their service or their menu items.

Such a situation calls for a safe bet on steamed ‘Idlis’, a very popular South Indian dish. Simple, clean, no toxic masala, demands minimal cooking skill, etc. [TIP: If you ever travel to India and want to play safe, Idlis are the way to go]

As we waited for the Idlis to show up, I noticed something that lit up my eyes – a black board scribbled with numbers in an adjoining room (not meant for customers). I discovered that the board apparently served as the performance dashboard for managers at the hotel.

I took a closer look (and also managed to click this picture) and noticed target vs. actuals, YTD and MTD numbers. Suddenly the nondescript hotel piqued my interest. It did seem like some professional thought was being applied in managing the setup. At least I certainly couldn’t have imagined the small hotel would approach its performance with such number focus.

What puzzled me really though was how they could use that information on the board to influence any revenue when in fact, they had very little control over it.

Consider this: On any given day, their revenue is directly influenced by the volume of traffic on the highway outside and by the number of people feeling hungry as they cross that section of the highway. As you will agree, they had no control over either.

The only influence they could have is in making sure their hotel was visible on the highway from at least a mile or two away (a strategically placed billboard, perhaps) giving enough time for travellers to note, relate to the brand and (perhaps discuss with fellow travellers to take a consensus) slow down, park and walk in.

But once the billboard goes up, how much influence do they really have on what happens next – other than by praying?

‘None’. Zero. There is absolutely nothing they can do to make more customers walk in. (see image on left)

In the final analysis, the black board was saying something that summed up the performance of the hotel – a snapshot the franchiser would be interested in, but for the franchisee, it does not provide any insight on what was being done right (or wrong) that could suggest focused action to improve business further.

Obviously, the real control they have is only in what they can do once a customer does walk in. If their service and menu items are able to delight the customer, they could create loyalists who would stop every time they pass by.

And so, if ‘customer delight on service and quality’ were made to be the defined objective, then the measures tracked today need to be revised – or at least, seen in context of some additional measures that can influence business more directly. You might measure things like average bill amount for the day, number of repeat customers, etc. You might want to find a mechanism to track if first time customers (those that answered the prayer) will come back again, ratio of repeat to new customers and so on.

Those are the kind of metrics that will eventually help the hotel drive more revenue.

In a sense, I think firms of all sizes, in almost every industry, are grappling with a similar challenge – that of not tracking the real measures of business and operational performance. That of chasing the wrong measures. And then, having to depend more on prayer than other things.

BPM has opened up a whole new approach and opportunity to measuring performance and I see more and more organizations looking for those as stated benefits to leverage. Yet, it seems to me that many organizations are falling short of identifying relevant measures that can actually serve as a means to take corrective action and push a dipping graph back up.

One of the main reasons for this comes from viewing process performance as an independent subset of overall corporate performance. But in truth, that is seldom the case. Every process contributes to either the topline growth or bottom-line  impact and has to therefore be given that due regard when you define metrics or measures of its performance. With BPM, it is important to align process performance measures to overall corporate performance measures.

But in the end, though,  Corporate Performance Management is not just about bridging the gap between Strategy and Result, but is also about getting Strategy and Result spelt out right to start with.

Have a great weekend!

©2012 Bouncing Thoughts. All Rights Reserved.