must not only be envisioned differently but also executed differently. Success rates when these initiatives are handled like conventional technology projects aren’t flattering and for digital initiatives, failure is not just about burnt project budgets, but a loss of significant opportunity for business differentiation, and revenue.

Indeed, the stakes can be high.

Urgency to Deliver comes with Risks
Given that the threat of digital disruption in almost every market and industry is significant, organisations are under pressure to respond quickly in order to get ahead, to catch up or, in the least, stay relevant. Being a matter of survival, the pressure to respond is not without a sense of tearing urgency.

Urgency of that kind inevitably comes with compromises. In most situations, there simply isn’t enough time to think enough, plan enough and deliberate enough. This exposes digital initiatives to serious risks of failure. To add to it, our traditional decades-old approach to technology delivery is rather misaligned with the demands of delivering truly successful digital initiatives.

Don’t take your eyes off the basic goal
Today, many organisations make the right moves. They bet on the right focus areas and find the right budgets, but when it comes to execution, they tend to handle their digital initiatives a lot like traditional projects. Most organisations get distracted with the dynamics of conventional software development and delivery methods, thereby inevitably compromising the degree of success from these initiatives.

There can be a long checklist of dos and don’ts for digital transformation success, but at the core, you will not be too off the mark if you can stay laser-focussed on the basic force driving the very need for them: two essential elements that fuel and propel all these dramatic changes and disruptions in the first place –

1. Shifting Consumer Behaviour
According to the Telecom Regulatory Authority of India (TRAI), the wireless subscriber base in India as of May 2015 is upwards of 975 million connections. Another independent study pegs mobile internet penetration at about 200 million users. An ever-increasing number of Indians want mobile internet access and are willing to pay more for it.

Meanwhile, alongside this growth, Online Banking transactions have seen a significant upswing in the last 18 months. The Internet and Mobile Association of India (IAMAI) estimated that the digital payments industry in India grew 40% in 2014 —in value terms that is $20.2 billion. The same study pegged the 2013 volume of transactions on electronic media in India at about 800 million transactions.

Bottom-line? Increased digital penetration is rapidly changing lifestyles and there is a significant impact on buying behaviour and payment preferences.

What that means to your business is this:  Traditional methods of engaging with your customer—no matter what your business is—are open for disruption. And non-traditional channels of commerce (payments) are becoming more acceptable.
E-commerce firms like Flipkart, Jabong, SnapDeal, Amazon, Pepperfry and Urban Ladder are seriously threatening the footfall and revenues for traditional retail consumer goods showrooms and, as the subscriber base grows further for smartphones and connectivity, this trend is only going to continue.

So ensure that your digital programme always keeps the focus on enabling strong alignment with shifting customer behaviour at the core of every decision across the entire journey through conception, design and execution of the programme.

2. Shifting Customer Expectations
Digital penetration is also directly influencing access to information. No matter what they are shopping for, customers today are more aware than they ever were—and it is not an awareness that happens by chance. Customers are actively seeking information and do their research before making buying decisions. As a general rule, buyers are getting smarter. Their expectations are clearer and more precise than ever before.

One thing that changed forever for me in 2013, when I took my first Uber ride, was my expectation from a taxi service. Not only was I delighted by the whole new experience of taxi rides but I became aware of how really good a ride can be.  It created an  ‘experience benchmark’ of sorts for me when it came to taxi rides.

By keeping the focus on shifting customer expectation, many aspects related to scope, design and execution of technology solutions become suitably well aligned.

Success does not have to be elusive
Your digital initiative is arguably very unlike other initiatives you’ve seen before. The skills required at various stages from conception to execution are different. The technology is different. The objectives are very different; it just isn’t a regular IT project.  By keeping these two most essential elements—customer expectation and customer experience—at the core of execution approach and planning, will ensure your digital transformation journey is on track.

This is part of a series of posts addressing critical aspects that make Business Technology initiatives successful. The series will cover topics relating to Digital transformation, Business Process Management, Customer Service, Change, Culture, etc.

This article was originally published on Forbes India Blogs and has been lightly edited.

The post Digital Transformation – Execution is Key to Realizing Your Vision appeared first on Bouncing Thoughts.

For us in India, in the good old days, buying a “Lambretta” scooter or getting yourself a land-line connection meant making a booking and then waiting in a long queue patiently for weeks, sometimes months. The 30 something population in India today wouldn’t even be able to comprehend that. Across almost any industry, the opening up of the economy in the 90s, the emergence of the ‘Great Indian middle class’ with its higher disposable incomes, and the IT revolution and explosion of jobs have all resulted in a consumerist shift and have in fact rewritten the equation between buyers and sellers.

More recently, the phenomenal penetration of personal devices and always-on connectivity has dramatically changed online habits; and with that, the online buying habits of customers have seen an almost revolutionary change. Whether it is insurance or consumer durables, competition is stiff and every seller is now chasing the buyer, promising better value and experience.

Customer Journey Mapping is a great mechanism that can help sellers differentiate themselves from competition and has very crucial underpinnings, especially when setting off on a Digital Transformation programme. Customer Journey Mapping puts the customer at the centre of all the changes a seller is planning.

Here to There From There to Here
Living in Mumbai, I’ve depended on public transport for several years. I’ve had a respectably fair share of the local trains in the metropolis. I’ve been in and out of the good old black-and-yellow taxis on an almost daily basis and have had nothing to complain about them. In fact, I loved them. I still do, and for more reasons than the quintessential charm they represent.

But if you are like me, then your first ride on a Meru or an EasyCab must have been a new experience and a welcome change. Clean new roomy cars, friendly uniformed cabbies, air conditioning, transparent fares and printed bills are all welcome changes. Yet, much later, when I discovered Uber in 2013 it pushed my taxi experience to a whole new level.

Whether you are a customer experiencing the consumerist delight of newfangled on-the-go convenience, or a business feeling the uneasy hot breath coming down the nape of the neck from smarter tech-savvy competitors, digital disruption is a clear and present phenomenon and it is happening in India already.

The radio taxi market in India, for example, has been quick to understand the implications of what Uber is doing for its customers. Most Indian radio cab service providers have since stepped up their game to match the Uber experience. Today, Meru, Ola and TaxiForSure (recently acquired by Ola) all have excellent apps for smartphones that are dramatically changing the way Indians move around in major cities. Like many other city-dwelling Indians, I now have apps for all three rides on my phone besides Uber. I simply love the convenience of these apps and while I have my favourites I have the freedom to pick one over the other right off my phone based on real-time availability of cabs.

The taxi market is a classic example of digital disruption. But the shift to a digital model isn’t unique to the taxi market, of course. In many similar ways, almost every known business is experiencing or is on the verge of experiencing, such disruption in some way or the other.

Uber is easily one of the most quoted examples on how the digital revolution is changing our lives and our business models, and there is a reason for that. Uber’s model nails it as one of the most important aspects of the digital transformation idea—that of the customer journey and the power of re-imagining it.

A few years ago if you were tasked to imagine a better taxi service, chances are you would have thought about just the core of the cab service: grand cars, luxurious interiors, friendly chauffeurs, pleasant smells, good air conditioning, good music, reasonable rates and so on. But Uber went much beyond that—they re-imagined it so comprehensively that it had the potential to disrupt the entire industry globally.

Traditionally, most business models have had the tendency to focus only on the core service, almost like saying “once you come to us, we will serve you better than anyone else can”. In other words, the battle was usually between your business and your competitor—either you were trying to match what your competition offers or you are trying to improve over it. And that was fine till recently—but isn’t anymore.

That is really what Uber jumped on: Taking a fresh lateral look at the entire experience of a taxi ride from the customers point of view, rather than just improve over what was currently available for customers in the market.

If you really think about it, the whole idea of a taxi ride actually starts not when you settle in the cab and shut the door, but from the moment you decide to ride a taxi. And it ends not just on reaching your destination, but when you make the payment for the ride.

In other words, while they built their customer engagement model, Uber saw the journey of a potential customer to be spread across three phases:

1. Hail a cab: Across the world, the most painful phase of taxi rides really is hailing one. It could be from the sidewalk in New York City or over the phone to the radio cab service or the concierge. Regardless, it is a big pain and is fraught with a sense of anxious suspense.

2. Ride the cab: The actual ride is mostly not the real problem. Think about it. How often have you really had strong opinions or issues with the actual ride? It is rarely our biggest issue.

3. Pay the cab: World-over, payment is another common pain—the credit card reader in the cab seldom works. Cash isn’t always a great payment option. Even if it were inevitable, you would need to have the right change. And then there is this matter about tips – no matter how much you tip or how little – someone in the cab (either you or the cabbie) isn’t entirely happy about it. You know this feeling – paying for the ride is a nuisance often.

Cleverly, by addressing all three phases, Uber managed to create a superior experience along the entire engagement journey, right from the moment you think ‘I’ll cab it’, till you get off at your destination and shut the cab door.

Map that Journey
Customer journey mapping is a crucial first step, but what makes that deliver true value from digital initiatives is when a well accepted and established journey is creatively and effectively re-imagined.

Enterprises across several industries including banking, retail, and manufacturing, are beginning to see the value in making the customer journey a superior experience—these initiatives cover a wave of emerging technology paradigms better known as SMAC (Social, Mobile, Analytics and Cloud).

Banks are looking at what is called the Omni-channel experience for example, which provides their customers a common seamless experience regardless of what channel the customer is interacting though—mobile, IVR or over a desktop browser.

It is essential to re-imagine the real journey
The digital transformation idea is different from most conventional technology initiatives we have undertaken in the past. The proposition lies in winning over the customer, not just in elbowing out a competitor. The customer and her experience with you become the focal point and addressing that comprehensively could become your most powerful differentiator.

More important than a great product or a service, therefore, is the experience and the journey that the customer undertakes with you. And this can be the key to your success from a digital transformation initiative. And that is success, not because you pulled off a great technology implementation but because you have put in place a comprehensive approach to delight a customer, trigger a sense of loyalty and probably even get her to spread the word, spawning off more loyal customers.

Now that is true success from a digital transformation programme.

This is part of a series of posts addressing critical aspects that make Business Technology initiatives successful. The series will cover topics relating to Digital transformation, Business Process Management, Customer Service, Change, Culture, etc.

Link to original article

The post Re-imagining Customer Journeys, the Uber way appeared first on Bouncing Thoughts.

This year, the number of smartphones, tablets and connected devices is expected to cross 7 billion – that will mean more connected devices than there are human beings on earth. With more and more people owning smart gadgets, these devices are going to have an increasingly bigger influence on our communication patterns, online habits and of course, our buying habits, and globally, organisations are trying hard to keep up with this shift by leveraging Digital Business Technology themselves.

‘Digital’ is also becoming a potent leverage point for businesses to transform the way they approach their markets.

Consider what Tesco did in Korea around four years ago. In 2011, Tesco’s affiliate, Homeplus in South Korea, had to deal with a strange situation in order to meet its aspiration of market leadership: While it was a problem that Homeplus did not have enough stores as its main competitor did, the real problem though seemed to be the very lifestyle of their potential customers – given that Koreans were extremely hardworking, they just didn’t have enough time to go shopping. So even if Homeplus was to set up enough stores, it was going to be a challenge to get people to visit the store.

While Homeplus was looking at its options, they were aware that the Korean smartphone subscriber market had exploded in the recent few years – the subscriber base had gone past the 10 million mark. This had caused a significant shift in consumer behaviour: young Koreans were relying more and more on smartphones to deal with several of their personal transactions that they could handle on-the-go in the midst of their daily activities or as they commuted to and from work.

The killer plan Homeplus came up with was to set up virtual grocery stores in strategic locations like subways and metro stations – they erected posters of products and groceries just like they were displayed at their stores – each item displayed in the poster came with a QR Code that provided product details such as pricing, etc, and could be scanned from an app on a smartphone into a virtual shopping cart. What’s more, the delivery of their checked-out items could be timed conveniently. Customers could now use their smartphones to buy grocery as they waited for their trains or whenever they found time as they commuted.

Opportunities within challenges
In overcoming their business challenge, Tesco Homeplus had found an opportunity to align better to shifts in consumer lifestyles and behaviour and had solved a genuine problem young Koreans were trying hard to deal with themselves.

Yet, what is most significant about Tesco’s story in Korea is that it demonstrates how digital initiatives can be more than just about keeping up with shifting consumer behaviour – they have the power to disrupt traditional customer engagement paradigms.

Such opportunities to rewrite well-established customer-engagement patterns are springing up in every geography, industry and market and as a natural result, world over, across industries and markets, enterprises are under an ever increasing pressure to meet such challenges – and, more importantly, one-upping (or avoiding being one-upped) by competition.

‘Digital’ initiatives involving social, mobility, analytics and cloud, have consequently become one of the most common themes in focus in enterprise strategy discussions across industries. Within the enterprise too, digital is fast becoming more and more relevant across many functions, including marketing, IT, business transformation and customer service.

However, beneath all this hype around digital and even as more and more firms take on digital initiatives, there is still confusion around what digital really is and what it takes to ensure its successful execution.

Digital initiatives today are designed to establish business differentiation and to better manage customer engagement and experience, workforce effectiveness, decision-making, market analysis and so on, none of which has traditionally been so directly influenced by conventional technology implementation.

Cracking the digital code
Digital means different things to different enterprises and to different enterprise departmental functions. As with any business technology initiative, success from rolling out digital initiatives depends on not only success from technology implementation but also how enterprises are able to interpret and leverage what digital really means to their specific business.

We understand digital is about social, mobile, analytics, cloud and so on, but what is digital, really?

There are enough definitions out there, but perhaps the best bet you will have from digital is not as much as understanding what it is, but really from understanding what it is not. The traditional role IT has played in enterprises and the way the IT function has evolved in the enterprise makes it easy to overlook some fundamentals on which digital success depends on. Many firms make the mistake of overlooking these, thereby seriously compromising the success of their digital initiatives. Here is a short list of what digital is not, which will hopefully give you the right levers to make decisions on ‘digital initiatives’ and ‘digital transformation’ and in taking the right perspective to make your next strategy meeting more productive.

It is not entirely about YOU
As you set out to lay the foundations for a digital initiative, one of the most important aspects on which your success hinges on is in keeping a steady, consistent focus on the very purpose of it all – that of aligning better to the customer and the market. Many firms make the mistake of limiting initiatives to fancy user screens or creating great mobile apps – and not going any further. Nothing could be more damaging than a snazzy interface that inevitably leads to clunky customer support and poor customer engagement.

While you need to manage operational costs and internal efficiency, customer-facing digital initiatives are best delivered by putting the customer expectation, experience and engagement at the core. Be sure to meticulously map customer journeys and be prepared to rejig internal processes to better align your internal forces to make those journeys short, efficient and delightful.

It is not about doing different things
It is really about doing things differently. It is about re-imagining your business in the light of changing consumer behaviour and expectation.

Smartphones, tablets and other devices are enabling us to always be online and connected and are changing us. RadioShack is probably the best example of a market leader that wrote its own downfall by ignoring changing markets and changing customer buying behaviour. No matter what your business is, it is very likely that you will be impacted by these changes. Your digital strategy and initiatives have to eventually help you deal with these changes holistically. You need to enable the mechanism to adapt and to re-imagine your business to survive. Slapping on new technology over old processes designed for old methods of customer interaction and behaviour will be a sure way to fail.

It is not about the technology
Among the most important things to come to terms with first is that digital is not just entirely about technology. It really is more about how you enable your firm to adapt to the dramatic technology-led changes happening around us. Be sure that the teams involved carry the same objectives and everyone views digital initiatives as enablers that allow your organisation to adapt and take advantage of new technology paradigms.

One of the most critical success factors for digital initiatives is for business and IT to be efficiently aligned. These initiatives call for a culture of transparency and communication needs to be open. To achieve this, be sure there is consistent top-management buy-in and ensure you put the right leader on the driving seat.

It is not a project
Many failures of business technology initiatives can be attributed to treating them as disparate IT projects. Your digital initiatives face the same threat. So when you think about digital initiatives, be sure the right objectives are firmly set at the very beginning. Create success criteria for execution teams that go beyond conventional IT project management considerations (like timely delivery) that are measured on specific tangible impact to business. Again, business and IT alignment will play a crucial role.

It is not a one-time initiative
Digital is a journey. It is a hat that your firm will now wear forever. While a true digital initiative may have delivery milestones, you are never really ‘done’ with it. Ensure that there is a strategy and plan for continuous monitoring and improvement, to continuously adapt. Digital is also not one-off from the sense of being siloed from other initiatives that are planned or are currently underway. All your digital initiatives need to add up to a bigger meaning.

It is not about dumping old technology
Digital is not about shedding old technology and bringing in new age apps. It is really about exploiting investments that have already gone into your technology infrastructure and aligning them smartly for the new age of technology.

This is part of a series of posts addressing critical aspects that make Business Technology initiatives successful. The series will cover topics relating to Digital transformation, Business Process Management, Customer Service, Change, Culture, etc.

Link to original article

The post Putting ‘digital’ in perspective appeared first on Bouncing Thoughts.

It is about the Future.

And you can get there only when you have a sense of acuity of that future. Because the more clearly you see your target, the better are your chances of hitting it.

But is it all only about the future?

The answer is a definite no.  It need not, and should not be only about the destination. For, where you are when you begin, will decide the path and the journey to that future you have imagined. In other words, the starting point, or your current state actually does matter and so, it is all very much about the Present, too.

Great vision is nothing more than just a fancy dream – or wasted dollars, if you don’t meticulously connect the dots from the present to the future. You knew that, of course, but there is an important point there that I want to highlight. A point that I feel is often overlooked when these initiatives are being planned.

Transformation initiatives – especially those involving business technology like BPM, fail badly when you see the present and the future as just two dots that need to be connected by one line or a single path of execution. The reality that many initiatives fail to acknowledge, thereby seriously compromising their chances at true success from transformation, is that it is not just two dots and one path that’s involved. There are in fact many dots that need to be connected and therefore many paths connecting them.

What can guarantee, or at least considerably improve the chances that you turn your vision to reality is the ability to astutely decipher the number and position of all the dots and all those different paths that connect them. Those paths form the actual journey that will take you from the present to the future and help you pull off real transformational success.

What are my dots?

So, figuring out the right path for your transformation journey would mean knowing how to spot those dots and then taking the path that connects all of them, right, but the nature and position of those dots to be connected are very unique to your organization, so it is important to  know that it will take someone who understands your ecosystem pretty well to do the job.

But IMO, at a very basic level, regardless of what kind of organization you are, it is possible to say that the state you aspire for will be the path connecting dots that fall under three basic categories.

Keep the good, get rid of the bad

These are dots around discovering and preserving what you are doing right today while at the same time, discovering and fixing what you are doing ineffectively or downright wrong.

Firms tend to assume they are either doing everything right or everything wrong. The truth of course, is somewhere in between and it is important to discern the good from the not-so-good and the downright bad. What are those best operational  practices that have evolved over years that have endeared customers?  What are those areas where deep employee insight and creativity have made a difference – to cost, efficiency, customer experience or even something seemingly peripheral as enabling camaraderie among employees? What are those activities that are always delayed? What are those tasks that stress your users the most? What are  those inefficiencies and that might have crept in to become restraints to better business performance?

Re-thinking, re-inventing, re-engineering

This set of dots will be a result of weaving together opportunities to rethink how you are doing what you are doing – to question, challenge, change and disrupt the status quo. This again isn’t some grand new idea, but certainly one that is most challenging to pull off. As is the nature of human beings, we tend to slip in to the comfort of familiar routines, habits and comforting known patters to perform our activities at work. Improving processes with transformation as a goal calls for breaking free of these chains. Obviously this has very little to do with technology and more about unlearning and re-thinking. Figure out how to get this done and your dots begin to appear more clearly and your chances at success dramatically improve.

Inertia, Change, and resistance

And finally dots that need to be connected to battle all the forces that distract, resist change and challenge you along the journey. The security of a comforting routine makes our work and personal life appear more manageable and we tend to feel better in control of things on both fronts. It is a natural reaction to resist any force that upsets that balance. Transformational programs involving business technology depend a lot on the collective positive energy, and buy-in from end-users to usher in change. Success comes from creating a collective sense of enthusiasm and individual level desire to seek improvement and eagerness to change and improve the style and quality of work. Again, not as easy as it seems, but getting this right would again mean astonishing outcomes.

There’s More than Meets the eye

Transformation initiatives usually involve much more than you bargained for and success is not guaranteed by just the task of imagining a great vision and a future, but more from being able to understand your present state very very accurately so that you can chart out the best fit itinerary for that journey to the ‘future’ state that is visualized.

Figure out the dots relevant to you and the chances of a great result are all yours for the taking. Think about it – with the kind of returns BPM initiatives done right have to offer, there really is not much that that can keep you from transformational success once you figure out the right approach and take it.

The post From here to there – thoughts on transformation appeared first on Bouncing Thoughts.

In this article, Gluck delves a bit into how these three work, touching upon some interesting insights. I recommend you read it too, but couple of lines in the article sprang out and grabbed me by the shoulder and shook me fiercely, directing me to do a quick post on them. And, here I am doing that. Inevitably though, I am about to relate all this to BPM and business technology. But you probably guessed that already.

Gluck talks about how, while Strategic planning  provides the raw material and factual basis for strategic thinking and opportunistic decision making, the real challenge is to synthesize this raw material from strategic planning into an “integrated set of actions designed to create a sustainable advantage over competitors”. One of the points that interested me was Gluck’s view of this being “..the province of CEOs and their top-management teams, and the quality of the synthesis and the effectiveness of the implementation are determined by the quality of the interaction between those teams and the strategic planners.”

The general tendency I feel is to think of strategy as a starting point flowing towards downstream execution, but that is just one part of the picture. What we perhaps overlook is how equally important it is for the execution related context moving upstream to influence strategic thinking. This really is one of the essential links that could bridge the all too familiar gap between strategy and result. Vision, Strategy and execution are all important, but unless they are infused into each other and pervade across the enterprise energy and ethos behind all effort underlying strategy as well as its execution, outcomes will always fall short of expectations and/or potential.

BPM Strategy and Result – The Gap

When we look at the forces and dynamics behind large BPM initiatives, this view IMO, has significant relevance. Enterprise-wide decisions on BPM are often made by senior management wearing a thinking hat different from the hat that is worn by teams that execute the decisions. Owing to this, we have had outcomes from BPM initiatives not substantially delivering to expectations from management – leading to a great number of views and theories on why and how BPM benefits are elusive and challenging to achieve.

The thinking hats of senior management and execution teams must be mutually and adequately aligned for better chance at success from BPM investments. And as Gluck purports, the qualitative standing of this alignment has a direct correlation to the quality of interactions between these teams.

This is one aspect where I think leadership can most positively influence a BPM initiative. We have talked much about top management support to BPM initiatives being critical to success from BPM, but that support certainly has a qualitative aspect that isn’t appreciated much nor discussed enough.  Choosing the right leader to drive a BPM initiative is more crucial than having just any senior leader driving it.

The Quality of Leadership Matters

It is essential for leaders to actively engage with their teams – and I am, of course, not talking about Friday Lunch outings and bonding activities. Leaders need to be connected with the realities and nature of effort that goes into converting mission to result – and more specifically, the hurdles and challenges that manifest along that path.

That is really how strategic plans drawn for BPM initiatives will result in benefits that matter – and with execution insight flowing back upstream to the top management, we will have the perfect recipe in place for continuous improvement, enabling consistent competitive differentiation.

The post A Strategy between the Gap and the Result appeared first on Bouncing Thoughts.

The biggest advantage, however, goes to the athlete that gets those few micro-seconds of advantage from a perfect start. It is an advantage that the athlete creates for himself less than one second into the race. The rest of the race is a battle of sheer skill, years of training, endurance, and grit.

If you have ever been a finalist of the 100m dash in the Olympics, you’ll know exactly what  I am talking about. Surely you prayed fervently for a perfect start. And secretly, and with equal fervor, you prayed that Usain Bolt will have a bad one. Admit it.

But on the other hand if you are like me, leading the life of a common man, doing common things like drinking a lot of coffee, doing BPM projects, being in a perpetual quest for uncommon excellence from them; frequently obsessing about processes,  hungrily reading up any material published on BPM; eagerly following new thinking emitting from BPM conferences; agreeing and/or disagreeing with analyst views; visiting Bouncing Thoughts regularly and trying to discover great depth of perspectives there, and frequently giving up; occasionally getting emotional about nomenclature & definitions and so on, then let me assure you that the importance of a good start is still very much relevant to folks like you and me too.

Why exactly is a good start being discussed in such detail on your favorite BPM blog?

I can explain in a sentence and two words.

• Because the seeds of BPM success are sown at the start of the project and there are many who still don’t get it.

And

• Peter Schooff.

Those two words behind some of the most thought provoking discussions in the BPM world, recently provoked yet another thought provoking discussion at BPM.com about the goings on during the start of a BPM project initiative.

To me, the start of a BPM initiative really happens much before the kick-off meeting, but the kick-off is equally important and is a ‘starting block’ of sorts for sure.

For at least a decade now in these BPM kick-off meetings, a section of attendees have involuntarily, and often privately, grimaced and winced  during the proceeds and Peter’s question in the forum has brought out the despair of fanatical believers of business technology.

Who are these grimacing and wincing participants, you ask.

Let me try to answer your question briefly. These face contorting participants are typically fanatic believers of business technology, and, in particular, Business Process Management. Indeed, almost all of them non-Olympians. Like you and me.

Interestingly, if you read the responses to Peter’s question ”What is the worst thing to hear when starting a BPM project?”, you will quickly come to the conclusion that the forum there is teeming with such folks who might exhibit copious facial convulsions because they are getting a lot of  heart burn at the start. This also implies there is another party of people in action who are bent on  giving them a lot of heart burn at the start.

In other words, there are two kinds of people. People who get it and people who don’t. And today after over a decade, as the well meaning fanatic has become more vociferous , others in the room have also started to respond with frowns, grimaces, sneers and scowls. This has undoubtedly created a very strange situation.

Which begs the question, why does everyone go into these meetings and wince? What is it about these meetings that causes this?

Here is a sample exchange in one such meeting. Attending the meeting, we have the client – usually a project owner, then we have a fanatic believer of business technology like you or me or someone from Peters forum, a project manager, and the Rest that includes some IT peeps and a miscellany of folks from business, and from here and there responsible for this and that. By the time you get to the end of this sample exchange, you will also realize that all of them are wincing and grimacing through-out the meeting.

• Client: “because of our new urgency, we need to reduce the requirement gathering effort by two weeks to ….”
• Business Technology Fanatic in the room (BTF): “huh?” Raises eyebrows and groans.
• The Project Manager sits up, completely ignoring the ‘huh’ and says “hmm OK” briskly and immediately open MS projects and make modifications. Knocks off one consultant, cancels his back-ground checks, thereby saving related costs, sends out 8 mails and completes all action items in 48 seconds flat. Hits the send button on the last email with a loud flourish and looks up at the client for the next instruction. He was brilliant like that. And knew it.
• PM’s team in unison:  “Like the PM rightly pointed out, hmmm OK”
• BTF: “But is that really necessary? This will seriously compromise time spent on discovery, and th…”
• Now it is the turn of the PM to look at the BTF and raise the old eyebrow. His mind is agitated and is thinking “I just made all the changes in the proposal document, the Contract, and the MPP files, sent 8 action mails and updated and saved the ‘Onboarding_Proj_Plan_Ver193.10.mpp’ and even renamed it to ‘Onboarding_Proj_Plan_FINAL_Ver01.00.mpp’. Who brought this inconvenient ass to this meeting?”. But instead of saying all this he turns and gives a look with an expression that says “can you shut that tent flap for sometime, everything cannot be as ideal as you’d like it to be. You have such a long way to go boy, oh yes”. Aloud, he calmly says “umm, lets take this offline”
• The Client seeing this strange exchange, has a quizzical look on his face as he tries to read the expressions flying back and forth(very unfamiliar to his culture) but really wants to move on. His wife will be at the station in 15 minutes and he must pick her up. One doesn’t want to be late for THAT. But still, this was an important meeting and it was his duty to be on top of it. So deciding to take charge of the moment, he lifts himself to full height and says “Great! that settles that”. “Moving on, Another thing we just heard is that the on-boarding  process owner  wont be available, so we can get his laughably inept and inexperienced minion to sign-off”
• PM: “Sure, the show must go on, right. Excellent work around”
• BTF: Wince. Groan. Moan. “But..”
• PM, the Rest and the client turn to BTF and glare. This lasts for a full, uneasy 30 seconds. A collective thought, “Will this disruptor of meetings stop disrupting or what?” hung in the air. A wife was to arrive at the station soon, an MPP file had been already updated thrice, the contract has been updated thrice, the resources are all booking their tickets. This ass is not only slowing this meeting down, he also is clueless about the bigger ramifications.
• But rather than be caught on the wrong foot and be blamed later, or accused of poor decisions, they instead wisely choose to attack the disruptor with substantial non-verbal weapons involving unspoken words, hints and clues and expressions. They grimace and frown and scowl and were even prepared to stick their tongues out.
• Suddenly the IT Architect speaks out of turn: “Anyway i wanted to bring this point that the services will not be ready next month, we expect it only by 2nd week of March 2039 and so i wanted to let everyone know that we will have to use our existing patchy methods and tightly couple things and totally forget about SOA.”
• The PM scowls, for this means another change in the plan and another version of that mpp. The BTF winces again. The project sponsor groans because IT seems to always drop things. The chief architect frowns because he was privately told it would be ready by1st week of October 2024. Seeing all this, the IT Architect jerks his head back at the massive change in everyone’s expressions after he’d relayed what his new boss (who couldn’t be there) had asked him to relay. Was he tricked into doing some dirty job? He wasn’t sure. So for the rest of the meeting he sits with the expression of someone who had unexpectedly tasted a severely raw lemon or something very very sour.

So you get the picture. Everyone was experiencing strong feelings, everyone had something to say and when they had a chance to say what they had to say, everybody else is grimacing and groaning and wincing and slapping their foreheads and contorting their faces and banging their heads on the desk, tearing their hair, trying to jump out of the window, biting into the plaster on the wall and peeling it off and so on.

Meanwhile, on the other side of the glass wall of the conference room, an AC technician walking by casually turns and takes a look inside  – an unusual sight greets him –  everyone was making really extreme faces at each other and to say the least, there was a significantly wide range of expressions on all the faces inside. Expressions that somewhat resembled those depicted in the image below.

The BTF steps out for a coffee and almost bangs into the AC technician.

“You got some teamwork going there” the technician says to the BTF pointing inside the room. “I didn’t know you guys did Theater, man – that’s a big change from the usual same-same! One look at all your faces and I can tell you guys sure are care-free and committed. Happy practicing for the big gig, dude!”

The BTF was of course surprised to hear this. For once that day he had a blank expression. And with that, he could feel all the muscles on his face relax and ease out. He suddenly felt better and as he started feeling better, a new detached perspective started to form.

The start was important, alright, but it wasn’t a 100m race, after all!

It was more like a 4X100m relay race. It was about the 4 that made the team. Consultants, developers tool experts, architects, whoever. Do what you have to do, but do your best and give me the baton on time and I’ll run with all my might like you did towards our goal.

Suddenly, he knew how to fix the situation. He turned and went back into the room with a very unusual expression. Everyone stopped and gaped at this strange, unfamiliar, new expression.

It wasn’t anything mysterious, it was just a warm smile.

The post Flinching faces, heart-burns and BPM initiatives appeared first on Bouncing Thoughts.