Let’s take a look the enhancements in detail:

• Model Portability With XPDL: We’re committed to ensuring that you can leverage the processes you create in Blueprint in anyway you like. That includes giving you the ability to seamlessly execute the processes in Lombardi Teamworks, but also any other tool that you choose. To that end, we’re committed to supporting the BPMN 2.0 specification when it is released. However, we know that you need a way to use your models today, so we’ve introduced the ability to export your processes to XPDL 2.1 format in this release. You never need to feel “locked in” when using Blueprint — you can get your information out in any format you’d like, whether that be as a PowerPoint presentation, Word document, or in XPDL.

• Enhanced Security And Access Controls: As you get more and more of your organization using Blueprint, it becomes increasingly important to make sure that you have the right controls, security, and governance procedures in place. To that end, you now have the option to restrict by IP address the places from which your account can be accessed. For example, this allows you to choose to only allow your users to log in from within your corporate network. Additionally, you also now have the ability to ensure that only people from an authorized set of email domains can be invited to your account. The combination of these two new security features allows you to ensure that only your employees and your trusted partners can see and collaborate on your processes.

• Top Customer Requests: One of the great benefits of Blueprint’s quick release cycle is that we’re able to quickly respond to your feedback. We made a bunch of small enhancements to address the requests we’ve heard most often. That includes improvements like making swim lane names more readable, making the user administration interface sortable and more usable, and much, much more. We think you’ll find this is the fastest and easiest to use version of Blueprint yet!

Log in now and try it out for yourself! If you don’t have an account yet, just sign up for a free 30 day trial now. And if you want to hear the latest inside info on what’s coming next, make sure you follow us on Twitter.

It’s a good report for you to send to those colleagues in your company who are interested in 3rd party takes on BPM technology.

The bottom line – excerpted from the report:

“Teamworks 7 is a full-featured BPM solution, with all the functionality expected of a market-leading solution. It really differentiates itself from its competitors in two distinct areas, one technical and one non-technical. By using a shared-model architecture, Teamworks ensures that the process model is always up to date, regardless of where and when changes to the model are made. Thus, changes to a running process instance can be reflected back to the high-level model. From a non-technical point of view the major focus has been on ensuring ease of use for any and all of the participants of process lifecycle management. This ensures that the people involved in the process are able to help in optimising the process, which makes far more sense than handing off the task to a ‘process expert’.

Allied to Teamworks is the Blueprint solution which creates a collaboration and communication environment that further empowers the process participants in all aspects of process management. A final factor worth highlighting is the graphical nature of the product – not just in process design terms, but in having the ability to graphically represent KPI and/or SLA non-compliance on the process map.”

We couldn’t agree more!

Butler customers can access the full Technology Audit report here, or you can also get it compliments of Lombardi here (if you have not registered with us before, you will be asked to do so).

I talked with Dave to hear how the course went and how BPM fit into the syllabus.

>>My talk with Dave (5:12): Take a Listen

Prof. Dave Angelow of Texas State in action.

Some of the topics Dave tackles:

• How a fair number of students also have day jobs (the course is taught at night) and how this allows them to directly apply what they’ve learned.
• How BPM, both Business Process Management and Modeling, fit under the quality management section
• BPM as a means of compressing cycle time and extracting more value for customers.
• Using Blueprint for a hands on modeling exercise and value the students saw in the tool.

Blueprint Educational Program

Lombardi provides free Blueprint subscriptions for educational use.  If you are teaching or taking a course where you think Blueprint would be appropriate, please contact us at blueprint@lombardi.com to learn more.

Let’s take a look the new features in detail:

• See Changes and Discover Relationships: Social networking sites like Facebook and LinkedIn can tell you when a colleague switches jobs or a long lost friend gets married. It’s news you wouldn’t have heard otherwise, or perhaps even known to ask about. Blueprint now does the same for process in your enterprise. The new Activity Feeds show you changes happening to your processes and helps you discover relationships between what you do and the rest of the company. Now you’ll know when something changes two steps upstream from you that will affect your job, or that the person in the next building over does something similar that you leverage.

• Involve Every Desktop In Process Improvement: You have core teams of people modeling your processes in the business, but how do you involve the tens, hundreds, or thousands of people that participate in those processes? We’ve introduced a new “participant” role in Blueprint that allows people at the desk level to reference, review, offer feedback on, and participate in discussions about their work.

• Share And Control Access To Processes: Once you start involving a larger audience in your process improvement efforts, it becomes essential that you ensure that the right people have access to the right information. To that end, we’ve added the ability to set access controls for each of your Blueprint projects that allow you to choose to grant full edit privileges, review only access, or no access at all to the appropriate audience. This allows you to keep sensitive information private, or even share a limited set of processes with your customers or vendors. And just like the rest of Blueprint, we’ve given you this power in an interface that doesn’t require a degree in rocket science to understand!

• Understand Relationships At A Glance: How many times have you been asked, “who is affected if we were to shut this legacy system down tomorrow?” or “who else in the organization depends on the work we do in this process?” Blueprint can now let you answer those questions with a single click. The new Where Used view can show you everywhere a person or system is involved in processes, where your inputs and outputs are used, or even where you see the same risks, problems, and opportunities for improvement.

• Better Usability And Experience: The Blueprint design team has been listening to your feedback and doing research on ways to make using the product even easier and more productive. To that end, we’ve redesigned the home page to make it far more personal–Activity Feeds and Favorites put information that’s relevant to you at your fingertips. We’ve studied your navigation patterns and made it easier to get to the view of the process you need with fewer clicks. We’ve made the Discovery Map better than ever by adding panning, zooming, and printing to PDF just like the Process Diagram. Finally, we developed the participant / read-only view for processes from the ground up to make sure the highest value information is viewable on the screen at all times.

What are you waiting for? Log in now and try it out for yourself! If you don’t have an account yet, just sign up for a free 30 day trial now. And if you want to hear the latest inside info on what’s coming next, make sure you follow us on Twitter.

Lombardi announced major advances in all three areas that determine success or failure in BPM:

1. The need to communicate — you have to make business improvement personal
2. The need to automate — you have to drive productivity and re-use
3. The need for talent — you need to be able to assess risk, plan, and lead

Forget about simplistic approaches to driving transformational change based solely on whether your BPMS (or “BPP” or “PAAS”) has a given feature. The so-called “Business Process Platform” as a sole-sourced technological salvation is a hoax. It’s a solipsistic approach by technologists to once again say “if I have a better tool, I won’t be as big a fool.” Go on, stare at your image in the water and try to pawn all this off on simply another development tool or architecture. Instead, you need to take to heart what Toby Redshaw, CIO of Aviva, said a couple of weeks ago (paraphrasing here): “If you’re in IT and not doing BPM, three years from now you won’t have a job.”

He wasn’t talking about a tool. He was talking about change and changing everything: how we relate IT to the business, how we use tools, and how we manage, nay, lead, change in our businesses through the use of BPM tools and methods.

Yesterday Lombardi re-defined what a BPM platform needs to be; three specific vehicles: Blueprint (Spring ‘09), Teamworks 7, and Lombardi University.

Together, these 3 pillars — communication, automation and leadership — combine to form the basis for the platform for BPM’s second decade. Lombardi is that platform.

Editor’s note: The above is excerpted from Phil’s personal blog. Follow this link to read the full post, including a discussion of each of Lombardi’s new products.

Usually only a relatively small number of people inside an organization do real modeling of processes. The vast majority of us have “day jobs” and don’t necessarily think of things in terms of flow charts, activities, and decision points. How do we participate in the process improvement discussion?

Blueprint now leverages social networking technology similar to sites like Facebook and LinkedIn to build a community around business improvement that everyone–modeler or not–can participate in. “Participants” can reference and offer suggestions and feedback on their processes without the need to know any mapping or diagramming  techniques. “Authors” can have threaded, two way conversations with the participants in the business and leverage Blueprint’s existing easy to use modeling capabilities to rationalize and improve processes. Tying this all together is a Facebook-style activity feed that proactively notifies you when your processes or the conversation about them changes.

We’re announcing the Spring ‘09 release today and it goes live on blueprint.lombardi.com on Saturday morning. Want to see more? Make sure you attend the introduction webinar tomorrow at 10 AM central.

We didn’t.

In particular, we could not help but notice the name similarity with Blueprint — our cloud based process mapping and modeling application that has been on the market for two years. Now, before you call me paranoid, know that we average several thousand hits to our website per quarter from IBM labs in China, Italy, Germany, Canada and the US. And we get dozens of requests for Blueprint accounts from IBM Labs across the world every quarter. So, at the very least, the IBM team was aware of Blueprint — if not imitating it. They are not the first to follow Blueprint’s lead — and won’t be the last.

Despite this, IBM has missed the mark — at least from what we can tell from the slide pitch.

Bruce Silver has had his head in the IBM Clouds lately and wrote up an interesting post on BlueWorks. The phrase that captured my attention was that “democratizing modeling and analysis” is key to creating a culture of BPM in a company. On that point, we could not agree more.

Bruce goes on to say that “BlueWorks does that”. From what we have seen so far, I could not disagree more.

BlueWorks is still “tooling for the few”.  What I mean by this is that IBM is missing the bigger point that needs to be addressed – that the future of BPM is dependent on our ability to enable everyone within an organization to collaborate on process improvements, within a “BPM” framework and language.

Making the entry point to these conversations based on IBM’s Component Business Modeling methodology or introducing eTOM Frameworks does virtually nothing to get broad set of people in your company talking about how to improve their everyday work. No matter if the tool is free, applies new metaphors from social networking and works in the cloud. It propagates the message that unless you are steeped in process knowledge, you have no part in the conversation.

Blueprint, on the other hand is about reaching and giving voice to the many. It is about upending traditional process paradigms and giving organizations the tools to be successful both inside and outside of traditional BPM roles.

We use social features and an “Enterprise 2.0″ approach as well — and as such it’s tempting to think that these two products are more similar than they, in fact, are. The underlying philosophy of Blueprint still stands in stark contrast to that of BlueWorks and its maker, IBM.

Blueprint is, as Bruce Silver also wrote, “Process Modeling for the Rest of Us.”

IBM said that version 1 of BlueWorks will be available some time on or after June 26. The fully mature version of Blueprint is available right now. In fact, if you want to hear how companies have already used Blueprint to drive process improvement, check out podcasts from Symantec, PRC and West Bend Insurance.

Get your own little slice of democracy right now by giving Blueprint a spin.

One of the efforts that helped in this restructuring and which continues today is an effort to document, standardize and communicate all of the company’s processes.

Rachel Pace-Maron, Director of Operations Support Service was asked to lead this effort with a shoe-string budget.  Last week I chatted with Rachel to learn more about her effort.

My conversation with Rachel (11:19)  Listen

Some of the topics Rachel tackles:

• The goal with mapping PRC’s processes was to find out how they could do things better and faster and why things take so long.  They weren’t able to answer why a process took so long because no one person knew every step.  This is what lead them to process mapping.
• One of the first processes they mapped was “agent time,” how much time do agents spend on break and what is the management process for keeping them on the phone efficiently and within break parameters.
• They found each call center had a different process and none were doing it efficiently.
• By standardizing on a process for all centers and bringing them into metric, they had a bottom line impact on revenue.
• Before adopting Lombardi Blueprint for process mapping, groups had been using, Visio, Exel and Power Point.
• PRC has a group of people who are visually oriented and a group who are narrative oriented. As Rachel explains, “Blueprint’s ability to marry picture to narrative has been fantastic and, I’m not going to say life altering, but certainly business altering.”
• Her excitement over the latest Blueprint release and how the addition of participants will help PRC break down silos and take their process initiative to the next level.

I caught up with Devin to learn about process improvement at Symantec and how his team was using Blueprint.

>>My talk with Devin (11:53): Take a Listen

Devin Rickard of Symantec's Business Process Improvement team

Some of the topics Devin tackles:

• Symantec has grown through rapid organic growth as well as acquisition.  This has led to processes being executed in islands. Devin’s group works with the islands to try and “pull them together into a single continent.”
• The team practices “stealth six sigma.”  They have adapted the processes and tools from Six Sigma so that they fit the Symantec corporate culture.
• What started as a nice tool for the practitioners has ended up becoming the core catalyst that brings together individuals and helps them to visualize what they are trying to improve upon for Symantec customers and partners.
• As business owners or process managers become engaged they are becoming aggressive adopters of Blueprint.  They find it gets them a picture of their business that they’ve never had before and they want to find the areas within their own processes that they can make improvements to.
• The interest/involvement of the business has noticeably shortened the time to improvements.
• Some of the projects Devin and team have used Blueprint for: transforming the quote to cash process and the procure to pay process (Blueprint helped to cut the time to pay employee expense reports from 3-5 weeks to 2-3 days) as well as working on ways to make the process of integrating acquisitions smoother.

Take a look at this screencast for a quick rundown or see the full details after the break.

Let’s take a look at the improvements in depth:

• Autocomplete Revamp: We’ve heard from you loud and clear that the autocomplete lists in Blueprint needed some work and we think you’ll be really happy with them now. They look nicer, work faster, search more intelligently, and are less intrusive. More importantly, they now only contain active assets. So if you archive a process, you won’t have to see all of that process’s obsolete artifacts cluttering up your lists anymore. Misspelled the name of an input? No problem–just delete it in your process and it won’t show up in autocomplete popup again either. These improvements have already made us quite a bit more productive internally here at Lombardi. Try them out for yourself and let us know what you think.

  

• Swimlane Improvements: If you haven’t set a participant on an activity in Blueprint, it will end up in the “Unassigned” swimlane on the Process Diagram. In this release, we’ve made a couple of nice tweaks to the way that special swimlane works. First, when it’s empty, it will automatically hide itself so it won’t take up space unnecessarily either on screen or in your printouts. Second, you can now double-click the Unassigned swimlane and rename it. This can be a huge time saver if you want to give a bunch of activities to the same participant in one go.

  

• File Attachments and the Word export: We introduced file attachments in the Year End ‘08 release and they’ve been a huge hit. The biggest request we’ve heard is that you’d like to see your attachments show up in the Word and Excel exports for your processes. Well, now they will; each attachment will be listed with a hyperlink back to Blueprint that you can click to securely download it.

  

What’s next? We’ve got some really exciting things we’re working on right now that will debut at our Driven 2009 user conference. Between now and then, be sure to follow us on twitter to keep up with all the latest!

Karen Tricomi, who is Systems Engineer, Enterprise Methods & Processes, for a major financial services organization, wrote a wonderful in-depth review of Lombardi Blueprint for BPMInstitute.org.

Entitled “The Process Practitioner: An Independent Evaluation Of Lombardi’s Blueprint,” the piece attests to how easy and useful Blueprint is for people of all skills levels. It also discusses each of the major product areas.

Karen writes:

“Documenting processes is the first – and in my opinion, the most important – step in the improvement cycle. When Lombardi recently offered to demonstrate Blueprint, their web-based documentation and collaboration product, I approached the demonstration as a business professional with processes that need improvement, rather than an IT analyst or industry expert. Criteria for evaluation were ease of use, a short learning curve, and good collaboration features.”

And:

“Overall, business users will find the application intuitive, easy to use, and helpful.  For those still using an unstructured graphical program, or trying to describe their processes in text form, this tool has advantages over both. . .companies trying to get a handle on their process will find this tool worth the price.”

It’s one thing of course for us to tell you that Blueprint is great, but as with the Intelligent Enterprise award that we announced recently, it is particularly gratifying to see our products achieve solely based on merit.

If you want to give Blueprint a spin, you can sign up for a free 30-day trial here.

I recently learned that Joyce introduced Lombardi Blueprint as a tool within her class and had a lot of success.  I called her up to learn more.

>> Take a listen (6:11)

Some of the Topics we tackle:

• Who are the students that make up her class and what are their backgrounds?
• Mixing concepts with hands-on exercises
• Replacing Visio/Word/Excel in the classroom
• How the strongest Visio advocates at the beginning of the term became the biggest Blueprint champions at the end of the course.

Blueprint Educational Program

Lombardi provides free Blueprint subscriptions for educational use.  If you are teaching or taking a course where you think Blueprint would be appropriate, please contact us at blueprint@lombardi.com to learn more.

Be vewy, vewy quiet, we’re hunting pwocesses

Dan is clearly sold on the value of business processes and BPM:

For large and small firms, the business process is the right way to think of what to do and how to do it better, whether or not it is automated or supported with technology. BPM puts the focus where it should be–on what you must do to make your company successful, not on the capabilities you happen to have.

What he wants to know however is how are these processes captured in the first place?  If the processes being submitted aren’t of quality, how can you expect the BPM results to be?  Garbage in, garbage out.

Incremental and Collaborative…that’s the ticket

Dan argues that developing the processes incrementally is the only way you can be assured of solid inputs.  The three approaches he advocates are: Wiki-based process discovery, Task-based process discovery and Mash-up based process discovery.  And this is where the Blueprint shout out comes in:

Lombardi Software has recognized this trend and recently launched a Web-based service called “Blueprint” that allows for collaborative brainstorming and definition of processes. Using this service, you start with a bunch of ideas and can end up with a nice diagram. The JargonSpy imagines such a system could be used as the scratch pad for capturing and refining the processes that emerge in the other three methods.

Thanks for the mention Dan, and thanks for pointing out the importance of iterative and broadly inclusive input collection up front.  For without that, are we not building our BPM castles on diagrams of sand?

Stacie and I discussed how she worked over the last year to help create a small commercial offering which, before BPM and process mapping, had not been practical to offer.

We also discussed the role that process mapping played in the recent IT department re-org, helping to streamline processes and breakdown silos.

My talk with Stacie (7:17)

West Bend BA, Stacie Kenney

Some of the Topics we tackle:

• West Bend’s “Smart Business” offering and how it leverages new technologies like services, content generation tool and Teamworks.
• Given that the “Smart Business” premiums were small, the goal was to de-complicate the process so that the agencies could set up the policy with very little time up front.
• Before Blueprint, the BA’s leveraged Visio for flows along with a “mammoth” spec doc in Word.  The biggest issue with this approach was keeping the content in sync.
• West Bend was drawn to Blueprint by its collaboration and document generation capabilities.
• The “Road To Excellence” and the IT re-org, breaking down silos and centralizing the BA’s.
• Using process mapping to document the flow of work coming into the BA group from the business, categorize it and then deliver it back on a monthly basis.

Take a look at this screencast for a quick rundown or see the full details after the break.

Let’s take a look at the improvements in depth:

• File Attachments: In addition to the structured information that Blueprint already helps you collect –inputs, outputs, opportunities for improvement, stakeholders, and the like–we’ve heard the need from customers to be able to keep related assets alongside and in context with the process. Those might be spreadsheets containing data that’s been collected about the process, Word documents and templates used by participants during the process, or perhaps even screen shots of systems and services that are interacted with.Therefore we’ve added the ability to attach files to any process or activity inside Blueprint. You can upload any type of file or asset that you’d like to keep track of along with your process. And just like all the other types of content in Blueprint, it’s a snap to share with other people in your organization and it’s all covered by a full audit trail and revision history.

  

• Easy Invites: Our design team is always looking for ways to improve the user experience in Blueprint, and one of the issues we found with previous releases was that it was harder than necessary to invite additional people to collaborate with you in the product. To that end, we’ve cleaned up the home page and given you the ability to send an invitation to collaborate right there. Just enter your colleague’s email address, hit return, and they’ll be up and running in two shakes.We’re so excited about this change that we’ve given all new accounts the ability to invite an unlimited number of users during the 30 day free trial period. So don’t hesitate to start sharing your processes… tis’ the season!

  

• Password Rules: Process documentation can be some of the most sensitive information an organization creates, so we understand that the security of your data is a paramount concern. Especially as more and more people begin using Blueprint in your organization, ensuring that everyone keeps their login information secure becomes increasingly important. To that end, we’ve added the ability to configure password strength policies for everyone on your account. You can set minimum lengths, content rules, expiry dates, and all the other rules that you need. And we’ve made it dead simple to configure.

We update Blueprint every 6 weeks, so keep an eye out for some more neat stuff coming in February. And if you want the inside scoop and some sneak peeks along the way, be sure to follow us on twitter!

Since the story was a great example of tackling a process documentation effort that involved the whole org, rather than just IT, we decided to turn it into a webinar.  We worked with ModernAnalyst.com and created a 35 minute webinar which you can check out here (note that it takes a few seconds to load).

Enjoy!

Check out the video below. Nachi does a great job explaining what makes Blueprint is different how it makes your job of documenting processes easier. And just like the product, the video is quick and easy to understand!

Last week I chatted with Gary Faulkner of Morphis about how they found themselves unexpectedly leading process mapping sessions for customers or, as Gary likes to describe the turn of events, “A funny thing happened on the way to the software business.”

Take a listen:

My talk with Gary (6:59):

Blueprint enabled a pair-o-dime shift for this currency manager.

Some of the Topics we tackle:

• Conundrum: Morphis is meant to be customized to fit a customer’s process but if a customer can’t describe their process how can Morphis be customized?
• Being new to process mapping they were looking for something that was intuitive and easy to use.
• The power of seeing the process laid out visually and the importance of working on the exercise collaboratively.
• How Morphis’s implementations are all done virtually over Webex around the globe

My belief is that if you draw on compute resources, be they apps or platforms, from a source you don’t own or manage and that you can scale up or down as needed and you are billed accordingly… that’s cloud computing. The biggest advantages of this as a customer are the ability to get started immediately, no software to load and maintain, expand as needed and even turn the service off if its not useful.  Also because there is not a big Capex outlay to get started, you are not bogged down in approval cycles.

What do some of the experts in the field think?  I went to the Rackspace customer event a couple of weeks ago to find out.  (In case your wondering, Lombardi Blueprint, our cloud-based process modeling tool is hosted by Rackspace and will soon be making use of its cloud files in its next release.)

This is what I learned about the past, present and future of Cloud Computing:

• My podcast with John Engates, Rackspace CTO and John’s presentation
• My podcast with Lanham Napier, Rackspace CEO
• My podcast with Jonathan Bryce, Mosso (Rackspace’s cloud division) founder

BTW, if you don’t recognize the building in the clouds above, its the Alamo located in San Antonio where the event was held.

It was Steve Burge who was tapped to put together a Process Management Model to lead the collection and documentation of the company’s processes.  I gave Steve a call and we talked about his challenge and how he and a core team mapped all of Tillamook’s processes within six months.

Take a Listen:

My talk with Steve (7:06)

More Info

Let’s take a look at the improvements in detail:

• User Management: In today’s business environment, it’s more important than ever to ensure that you’re getting maximum utilization of your software. One of the great benefits of Blueprint’s SaaS model is that you can add users to your account just in time when they need access to the tool. When they’re done, you can remove or reuse their license so you’re not paying for software that isn’t being used. This can save you a ton of money compared to traditional desktop tools like Visio that require a big upfront investment and then only get used a few times a year by many people.

  In this release, we’ve greatly enhanced our user management capabilities. You can now see at a glance who has access to your account, when they last used Blueprint, and how many seats you have available. If someone doesn’t need access anymore, it’s just one click to archive them and make their license available to someone new.

  

• Invitations: Blueprint’s greatest strength is facilitating collaboration around process discovery and documentation. We think your team will have a great experience inside the product working together on the process. But what about stakeholders that don’t yet have access to Blueprint? It’s now a lot easier to get them involved. With this release, it’s just one click to have Blueprint send an email to invite someone new to join you.

  

• Instant Upgrades: In the previous release, we made the initial signup experience for new Blueprint accounts far quicker and easier. Now we’ve brought the same improvements to the upgrade process. Need to upgrade your free account to the professional edition? Or add more seats to your pro account? It’s never been faster or more painless.



• Perfect Printing: Once you’ve documented a process, you’ll almost always want to print out your process diagram so that you can share it with all of the other stakeholders in your organization. We often see customers use a plotter to print their diagrams on one large roll of paper and previous releases of Blueprint enabled that. But what if you don’t want to go through the hassle of running to the nearest plotter in the next building or driving to the neighborhood Kinko’s? Now you can have Blueprint format your diagram to print on standard paper sizes. Shrink it down to one page or tile it across many: the choice is yours.



• Word Export of Process Documentation: We’ve made some nice improvements to the Microsoft Word documents that can be created from the Documentation View. All of your inputs, outputs, problems, and stakeholders are now included in the generated Word document. We’ve also made some tweaks to make the formatting look even better. It’s a great way to share training material and processes and procedures with the end users of your processes.

Make sure you log in now to check out the new release. If you don’t have an account yet, you can sign up now for free.

A few weeks ago, we announced our latest release which included improvements to the process documentation view. Since then, we’ve received several emails and forum posts asking for more information on the new features and questions about things we’ll be adding in the future. All objects in your process diagram (e.g. activities, sub-processes, events, even the process object itself) have their own process documentation section, and details captured in the mapping and diagram views are rolled up into this consolidated view. This process documentation includes structured information such as the participant, business owners, experts, inputs, outputs, and problems associated with that specific object. A commonly overlooked detail is the fact that these items can be easily edited and modified from the larger process documentation view. For example, to add an additional input, just click the green “+” button next to the input row to dynamically add a new item. Most items in this structured section behave this way, making it very easy to quickly capture and compare details across multiple items. This is one of my favorite new features in Blueprint because it really helps you quickly document the details or narrative of your process without having to open separate dialogs.

For process information and details that don’t map to the structured sections, we’ve included a free-form, rich text editor area for each object. In addition to the standard text editing capabilities found in the tool (e.g. formatting, font settings, bullets), you can also use the RTE to embed images and hyperlinks to additional details and documentation. For example, we have several customers who store and manage their collateral documentation on SharePoint systems and use Blueprint to set up hyperlinks that open the documents in separate browser windows. I’ve also seen customers who have used the insert image control to embed a screenshot of a supporting Web page or form. The ability to attach and open another document directly from an activity in Blueprint is extremely powerful.

Because all the process information you capture is shared, you can access the same details from both the discovery map and process diagram views as well. Just pop open the details dialog for a specific object and select the documentation tab. Changes made here are pushed throughout the other views. We also realize that the information you collect is valuable and something you might want to share with other users (or just hang up on the wall), so we’ve recently added a few key features that make that easier. At the top of the process documentation view, you’ll notice a print button which generates a printer-friendly version of your complete process documentation, including both the structured and unstructured content you’ve added. We also recently added the ability to export your process documentation directly to Word format. The first version of this feature lacked the ability to export the object details, but we’ve added that to the new version of Blueprint that’s shipping in a couple of weeks.

So what’s next? We’re very excited about the changes we’ve made, but we’re certainly not done. We currently have several new features related to documentation that are “in design” including the ability to upload, store and share file attachments. We’ve had many customers ask us about this feature, so we are looking at the options now and expect to start posting more details to the forums soon. We also have been looking at ways to further streamline the printing and exporting of a process and ways to make it even easier to invite, share and collaborate with other users across your organization.

Let’s take a look at the improvements in detail:

• Structured Documentation View: The documentation view in Blueprint has always been a place to record the “narrative” behind your process–the procedures, training material, KPIs, and the like. But we’ve also heard from you that it’s important to be able to see all of the inputs and outputs, stakeholders, and opportunities for improvement that you’ve recorded in context on that view as well. As of today, the documentation view is your one stop shop for viewing and editing all of the details behind your process.

  This has been one of my favorite improvements to Blueprint so far. We’ve been using the updated interface internally for the last few weeks and it’s already made us much more productive at capturing and disseminating information about our processes inside Lombardi, and I think it will do the same for you and your team. Let us know what you think on the Blueprint forums!

  

• Streamlined Signup Process: During this release we also looked at the entire Blueprint signup experience for new customers. We found a couple of problems: first, we were asking for too much information up front. Who wants to take the time to fill out a form so long that it would make the IRS blush before getting access to the product? I certainly don’t. Second, we weren’t giving you enough feedback during the process to let you know how close you were to getting your account. You could submit the signup form, but it wasn’t clear after that how long it would take to get your login information to get up and running.

  With today’s release, I feel we offer a best of breed experience for obtaining a new account. We’ve got a new easy to use and quick signup form and we make sure to provision your account for you right away. The whole process should take 30 seconds or less end-to-end for a free account. Try it out for yourself!

  

• Reliability and Performance: We tweak many, many little pieces of Blueprint in each release, and this one is no different. We’ve tackled several of the smaller issues that some of our Blueprint veterans may have run into over time. A couple of my favorite improvements are that intermediate events are now labeled on the diagram and the milestone reordering experience has been considerably enhanced. Performance and reliability across the board has gone up again and I can say with pride that this is the best release of Blueprint we’ve done so far.

Make sure you log in now to check out the new release. If you don’t have an account yet, you can sign up now for free.

Please contact us if you are a current Blueprint or Teamworks customer and are willing to participate in a product usability study. Most sessions last between 30 and 60 minutes and can be done remotely using Web conferencing software. During the sessions, you will be shown aspects of the product and asked to provide feedback. Your comments are valuable ways we ensure we’re building tools that fit your needs.

A perfect example of this direct customer feedback is our new rich text editing environment found on the documentation view in Blueprint. For those of you who have been using the product for a while, you may remember that our first pass at rich text was a bit limiting – allowing users to apply simple formatting such as bold, italic or underline styles. To be honest, we weren’t entirely sure how our customers were going to use the documentation sections of the product or the types of information they’d want to store there. So we put it out there, watched, and listened to the feedback. And boy did we get a lot of feedback – in fact we quickly found that the documentation section was considered one of the most important sections of the product. Over the course of a few releases, the text editing sections evolved to support things like advanced formatting, custom font styles, lists, indenting, hyperlinks, images, and colors. We also heard from customers that they needed better integration with their existing documentation, so we included support for things like copying from Word, direct export and printing.

We’re obviously not done yet. We have big plans for improving the existing doc features and adding a few new ones (check out the forums for a few hints). We’re also looking for more feedback from you. We’re 100% committed to making Blueprint THE BEST process discovery and modeling tool available. Tell us what you need… We’re listening!

Visio importing has long been the “holy grail” for process modeling tools.  If I had a dollar for every time someone asked me if a particular BPM product could import Visio models directly I would be rich!  However, Visio import into a process execution environment isn’t always all its cracked up to be.  Visio diagrams tend to be quite unstructured, whereas BPMN is very structured, and executable BPMN is even more structured in form.  Moreover, Visio models don’t have enough information attached to them to be immediately executable.  It is possible to run into issues of “who owns this model” once you import the Visio (the business may have the expectation that they can keep making modifications and “reimport” into Teamworks, for example).  At some point, the implementors must take over the model and own it to produce something executable.  I’ve been working on some models for OMG certification and I thought they would be a fun (albeit simple) set of examples to import into Blueprint for a test drive.  Blueprint imports these easily and accurately.  I went back to the archives and tried importing some really awful process diagrams circa 2004.  The results weren’t pretty (the original wasn’t pretty), but Blueprint imported the models nicely (a visio diagram with 10 tabs and one process per tab).  Going to the Diagram View I was able to sort out the diagram into swimlanes and go from there.  Interestingly, when I imported a diagram WITH swimlanes defined, Blueprint created those swimlanes and participants for me.

But my favorite quote had to be:

I actually like the diagramming portion better than Teamworks!  And collaborating on the same process isn’t just possible, its actually cool.  You almost look for an excuse to try to be logged into the same process at the same time so you can try to step on each other.  Blueprint handles all the conflicting edits really well.  I’m impressed!

We’re very proud of Blueprint’s collaboration and diagramming capabilities as well because we believe that there’s no tool that’s easier to use or can make you more productive, online or off.

Take a look at Scott’s full review when you get a chance.

Let’s take a look at them in detail:

• Microsoft Word Export: Blueprint now gives you the ability to automatically generate a Microsoft Word document containing all the details of your process. This is a great way to communicate your process to stakeholders that don’t have a Blueprint account. For example, we’ve been using this feature internally to generate “specifications” for our processes when we need to interact with outside vendors.

• Archive Projects: Got a bunch of old projects that you need to clean up? Well, now you’ve got an easy solution. We’ve added the ability to archive projects to get them and their (associated processes) out of your hair.

  

• Updated UI: You’ll also notice some substantial user interface improvements that we’ve made in this release. In particular, the Project Details screen has been completely redone to be more intuitive and usable. I think you’ll agree that it’s quite a bit easier on the eyes as well!

  

As always, the best way to experience Blueprint is to dive right in and get your hands dirty. Log in now to check out the new release. If you don’t have an account yet, sign up now for free.

Of the twenty-four teams surveyed, not a single team was in complete agreement on its boundary: who was and who was not a member of the team. In fact, the average level of agreement within the sample was only 75 percent, such that any given team member was likely to disagree with the rest of his or her team on one-quarter of potential team members. 

We see this all the time in real world BPM projects. Agreeing on what the process is is often the easy part. Identifying the who is can seem nearly impossible, especially if a single team is attempting to define a process that is executed in many different locales all over the world.

A distributed, collaborative environment such as Lombardi Blueprint is key to solving this challenge. Having a structured repository to identify and maintain the players and relationships involved in a business process promotes visibility and knowledge sharing among those involved. Discovering the who in a process becomes far easier when all those that are involved can both document their own role and see how where they fit inside the grand scheme of things regardless of what office or time zone they happen to be working in at the particular moment.

For those of you who have been using the product for a while, you’ll remember that our first design for adding items to the process diagram was very Visio-like, with drag and drop capabilities from an application menu:

Technically the solution worked, but we found a few key problems:

• The drag and drop design was influenced by more traditional thick clients, leaving the experience feeling a bit out of place inside a modern Web application such as Blueprint
• The control menus were hard to find – they sort of blended in with the rest of the UI
• Several of the more advanced modeling shapes were being overlooked since many users didn’t think to expand the menus, or completely missed the grayed-out chevron
• Users found it confusing to drag from a menu, it required several clicks to get this just right
• Dragging in milestones and swimlanes seemed unintuitive and hard to align
• The drop zone target was too small, you had to drop EXACTLY on an existing line for it to work properly

Our initial thought was to create a better drag and drop interface, making the menus more obvious and the drop zones bigger, and to use color to reinforce the interaction. We created a quick prototype and tested it.

The new design helped a bit, but we still found users were having the same general issues. The user had to click to expand the menu, but select and drag was still too difficult. Also, because the interaction model was so similar to other thick client modeling tools, we were constantly being compared against these (and their features). We knew it was time to find a better way, so we decided to scrap the entire approach and go back to the drawing board. The first step was to do some usability testing with current users to really understand the problem and what they were trying to accomplish. For me, the “a-ha” moment came when one user told me “I just want to put my new activity here”, pointing at a line on the diagram. If we could find a better way to interact directly with the model, we could avoid the cumbersome drag and drop interaction all together.

We quickly stepped through a series of low-fidelity mockups which were tested and refined:

Taking some to higher-fidelity to iron out the kinks and test out potential visual styling:

The final design incorporated pieces from several of the early protoytpes – resulting in the “+” insert menu that we’ve all come to love! Click below to see a brief clip of it in action.

The day began with CEO Rod Favaron’s keynote, which was all about how we are now at “the end of the beginning.” The secret is out about BPM, attention and visibility are soaring to new heights, and we are now entering a new phase of adoption and maturity.

A big part of this progression is the move from Project to Program to Culture, as Rod put it — in the early days of course it was all about getting your first BPM project up and running successfully, and then it became all about growing that project into a full-fledged program. But the next phase that Lombardi customers and partners are moving into right now is one in which BPM begins to truly impact the culture of any and every part of the organization that it touches, indeed the organization as a whole. This is the true value proposition of BPM ultimately — the idea that BPM becomes part of your DNA, that process becomes an integral part of what your company does every day.

Rod also went on to share some awesome momentum numbers and growth metrics, including:

• Lombardi now has 225 Teamworks customers
• There are now over 3,000 Blueprint accounts
• Lombardi has a corporate presence in 24 countries
• Blueprint is now being used in more than 95 countries
• And Lombardi now has over 50 partners worldwide

The photo below is of a display in our offices that has a flag from every country in which Blueprint is actively being used — the growth has been phenomenal, and we’re really excited continue taking the product to new and exciting places (and to this end, Dave Marquard has a piece up today about the Summer 2008 release).

Additionally, Sandy Kemsley has been here blogging the individual sessions, and her posts are well worth checking out:

• Lombardi Driven: Rod Favaron and Phil Gilbert Keynote
• Lombardi Driven: Executive Roundtable
• Lombardi Driven: Blueprinting Business Processes
• Lombardi Driven: BPM Project Delivery Panel
• Lombardi Driven: Day 1 Wrapup

And finally, here are some photos from throughout the day for your viewing pleasure!

• Rich Wiki Editing Of Process Documentation: Blueprint now provides a rich, wiki-style experience for filling out the details of your process. You can link to external documents, embed images, and format your documentation any way you please. Already have something written up in Microsoft Word? No problem. Just paste it in and we’ll leverage what you’ve already done.

• Printable Documentation View: Once you’ve gotten all of your standard procedures entered into Blueprint, you need to be able to effectively leverage them. You can now generate an attractive printed version of your documentation with a click of the “print” button.

• Improved Process Details: We’ve take the process details pop up windows and completely revamped them to improve their usability. We think you’ll find them much easier to both edit and use to present your content. And they look great too!

• Process Data Export to Excel: Once you’ve entered your data into Blueprint, it’s important to be able to leverage it in any way you see fit. Now you can export your process data in a tabular format to Excel so you can slice and dice it, create PivotTables, or just share it with your friends in the finance department.

• Improved Diagram Layout: In the past, we wasted countless hours in Visio making sure our boxes and lines were all straight on our process diagrams. With Blueprint all of that tedious layout work is handled for us automatically. In this release, we’ve made some tweaks here and there to make your diagrams look better than ever.

We’re constantly working to improve Blueprint. Try out the new release and send us some feedback. Your input helps us shape our future releases and enables us to build the best tool possible for your needs. And if you don’t already have an account, make sure you sign up today!

This should be a very interesting deployment that we’ll review later after their initial playback and first round of results.

The company will use Lombardi to support sales of business services in Finland, as well as its activation and provisioning and other core business processes. We expect to be able to help them increase their service levels and improve customer satisfaction by designing and automating their business processes so they can be easily controlled and managed.

We expect to be able to show measurable benefits in operational efficiency by eliminating re-work, reducing hand-offs and shortening time delays. As part of the deployment, the company will implement process scoreboards and performance metrics that will deliver visibility across operations, including sales volume, activation efforts and provisioning backlog.

Bottom line, management will be able to easily identify when and where delays are occurring, as well as refine the processes as needed. As soon as we can, we hope to be able to share TeliaSonera’s successes with you.

Last week, Jason Stamper at CBR included some commentary on a beta product that he had heard about through the Process Factory. And couple of weeks ago, Jack van Hoof - who writes on SOA and EDA, posted a well thought-out blog entry about the marriage of BPM and SaaS, including the possibilities and the complexities at hand.

I love seeing this kind of dialogue on the Web because SaaS BPM is extremely popular with our customers right now. However, despite the aspiration of many developers, SaaS and BPM is NOT an easy combination. Nor is it likely that the two will ever be completely married in the traditional integrated form.

We launched Lombardi Blueprint a little over a year ago. It’s a SaaS-based modeling tool that integrates with Lombardi Teamworks, which operates behind the firewall. What worked so well in this case was that anyone in an organization could access the modeling tool to help shape a BPM project during the discovery stage. It doesn’t need to be integrated into legacy systems and it doesn’t require IT to deliver company data to the hosted model outside the firewall.

In short, we extended what made sense over the SaaS delivery model and maintained what didn’t behind the firewall. With that model, we now have more than 2,400 organizations using Lombardi Blueprint.

Why this approach? Well, the web services standards, scalability, performance and the standardization across platforms like J2EE, .Net, WebSpere and other SOA platforms just aren’t ready yet.

The remaining challenge revolves around the question of how you will connect your processes to the legacy systems behind the firewall. This isn’t a technical question, it’s a business question: Are you really going to ship your data to shared space on the Internet? Will you really ever trust anyone with your data, whether it is banking or health records? Even if you did, would the data be protected enough to meet the standards of regulations like SOX and HIPAA?

Real processes require interfaces to systems that companies are simply not ready to expose their data to. Real BPM is about visibility and the management of end-to-end processes, some of which you execute and some you don’t.

Watch this space because as more customers get a taste of BPM on SaaS, developers – including ours – will push to make more sense of the proper balance and integration of the two. Please keep up the conversations. And keep it real.

I’ll be leading a webinar on Tuesday, April 29, 2008 at 10:00-10:30 a.m. CST on best practices for process mapping and modeling with Blueprint. The topics I’ll be covering include:

• Effective utilization of the process map for simplicity and clarity
• Fast and efficient techniques for diagramming
• Using subprocesses to reduce complexity and encourage reuse
• Leveraging existing work that you’ve done in Microsoft Visio

Update: The webinar is now available on demand. Check it out now. For the Blueprint veterans out there, the webinar focuses on the features we just introduced and I’ll think you’ll find it very informative. But if you don’t have an account yet, don’t feel left out! Sign up for one now and join us on Tuesday.

Improvements in the Spring ‘08 release:

• Improved usability in the diagram view : Significant ease of use and productivity improvements have been made in the diagram based upon customer feedback and testing. The toolbar in the diagram view has been replaced by the Blueprint “plus sign”, which allows you to click where you want to insert an item and have it show there immediately. New Blueprint users will be able to get started quicker and experienced users can get their job done a lot faster.

• Improved drawing functionality in the diagram view : Based upon customer feedback, we’ve closed the remaining gaps in Blueprint’s diagramming functionality. Blueprint now supports multiple end points inside a single diagram as well as loops and parallel flows beginning and ending at any activity. Blueprint should now be able to represent nearly any process flow that you can dream up.

  

• Expand / collapse sub-processes to show the appropriate level of detail : Sub-processes inside Blueprint can now be collapsed to simplify the diagram view, or expanded to show more detail. The diagram view now allows you to tailor the level of detail shown to best suit your audience.
• Link and “refactor” processes for reuse : Sub-processes can now be extracted from existing Blueprint models and placed into new high level processes. Processes can then link to those common processes to enable reuse of common processes throughout an enterprise. This feature can also be used to organize processes within Blueprint — for example, you might create a process map representing a functional view of your company; each box within that map could in turn be a link to an existing process inside blueprint that a particular department uses.
• Panning and zooming to view large diagrams : Larger diagrams are now easier to view and edit due to the new zoom capability in Blueprint. Users can now easily zoom out to fit the entire process inside their screen at once, or zoom in to focus only on a particular section.
• Copy/duplicate processes : Blueprint processes can now be copied and duplicated within the application. This is a great way to get started on a new version of a process–just make a copy of the “as-is” version, then begin working on that as the “to-be”.
• Links : Blueprint now supports the use of standard BPMN “link events” to make cleaner and easier to understand diagrams. Long flow lines can now be replaced by a pair of links. This not only improves the printed view of the diagram, but also improves interactivity since double clicking on a link inside Blueprint instantly pans your view over to its target at the opposite end of the flow.
• Visio Import: Have existing Visio diagrams that you’d like to leverage in Blueprint? No problem! Blueprint can now automatically import files from Microsoft Visio.

Watch a preview video now.

Here’s a quick peek at what’s coming:

• Improved usability in the diagram view : Significant ease of use and productivity improvements have been made in the diagram based upon customer feedback and testing. The toolbar in the diagram view has been replaced by the Blueprint “plus sign”, which allows you to click where you want to insert an item and have it show there immediately. New Blueprint users will be able to get started quicker and experienced users can get their job done a lot faster.
• Improved drawing functionality in the diagram view : Based upon customer feedback, we’ve closed the remaining gaps in Blueprint’s diagramming functionality. Blueprint now supports multiple end points inside a single diagram as well as loops and parallel flows beginning and ending at any activity. Blueprint should now be able to represent nearly any process flow that you can dream up.

• Expand / collapse sub-processes to show the appropriate level of detail : Sub-processes inside Blueprint can now be collapsed to simplify the diagram view, or expanded to show more detail. The diagram view now allows you to tailor the level of detail shown to best suit your audience.
• Link and “refactor” processes for reuse : Sub-processes can now be extracted from existing Blueprint models and placed into new high level processes. Processes can then link to those common processes to enable reuse of common processes throughout an enterprise. This feature can also be used to organize processes within Blueprint — for example, you might create a process map representing a functional view of your company; each box within that map could in turn be a link to an existing process inside blueprint that a particular department uses.
• Panning and zooming to view large diagrams : Larger diagrams are now easier to view and edit due to the new zoom capability in Blueprint. Users can now easily zoom out to fit the entire process inside their screen at once, or zoom in to focus only on a particular section.
• Copy/duplicate processes : Blueprint processes can now be copied and duplicated within the application. This is a great way to get started on a new version of a process–just make a copy of the “as-is” version, then begin working on that as the “to-be”.
• Links : Blueprint now supports the use of standard BPMN “link events” to make cleaner and easier to understand diagrams. Long flow lines can now be replaced by a pair of links. This not only improves the printed view of the diagram, but also improves interactivity since double clicking on a link inside Blueprint instantly pans your view over to its target at the opposite end of the flow.

Google was nice enough to record the presentation. It’s embedded below.

Also, in case you missed it, Blueprint is featured on Google’s GWT blog. Make sure you check it out & tell your friends!

Viewing Diagrams On Screen
Zooming
By default, Adobe Reader scales the diagram so that the entire picture fits on one screen. If you’re going to present your diagram to other people, you’ll want to zoom in:

Choose Actual Size from the zoom menu to view the diagram as it will appear when printed.

Panning
After you’ve zoomed in, it’s easier to navigate around your diagram using the Hand Tool. Just right-click the diagram and select it from the context menu:

Save a Copy
Need to email a copy of the diagram or just keep it for later? Just click the Save a Copy button in the toolbar and save it to your computer. You can then email it off or file it away for the future.

Printing Diagrams
Printing on a standard printer
When using a standard printer, you’ll need to use several sheets of 8 1/2″ x 11″ (or A4) paper to display your diagram without reducing its scale. To do this, you’ll need to use “tiling”; where you set this option changes depending on the exact version of Adobe Reader you have installed and what printer you are using.

The first place to look is in the Adobe Reader print dialog. You should select Tile All Pages from the Page Scaling drop down if it is available to you:

If you don’t see that option, instead click the Properties button at the top of the dialog. The setting name again varies by the manufacturer of your printer, but it should be called something like “tiling” or “poster output”. For example, on my Dell laser printer:

Printing to a Plotter
Blueprint’s diagram PDFs are formatted for a plotter by default, so you shouldn’t have to change any settings when printing. Your diagram will print on one continuous sheet of “butcher paper”.

To take advantage of it, go to the Projects page and find the process that you’d like to move:

Then just click the Change Project link and pick the project you’d like to move it to:

Try it out and let us know what you think.

Multi-level Undo
Made a mistake? Blueprint views include a new action toolbar with a one-click access to easily undo your recent changes. You can also print your process diagrams and export to Powerpoint for sharing with others.

It Should be Easy
We’ve made numerous changes to improve the ease of use and usability of Blueprint. These changes include improved help, guided wizards for creating processes, search capabilities, improved process lists, and easier navigation.

Diagram Labels
Gateways and splits now include text labels for improved readability and legibility of diagrams. Blueprint also supports having labels on flow lines as shown below.

Printing Diagram Views
We recently added the ability to export and print out your BPM process diagrams. The latest release of Blueprint includes numerous changes that improve the speed, legibility, and quality of those print outs.

Snapshots and Revisions
Saving snapshots of your process is even easier, with autosnapshots and one-click access to creating revisions. Using the Revision History view, you can also easily compare snapshots and roll back changes by selecting the Restore link next to each snapshot.

Forums
The new Blueprint forums are a place to discuss best practices, share tips and tricks, and find solutions to common problems. Whether you have questions about your process improvement project or Blueprint itself, it’s all fair game.

As always… We invite you to try out these new features and give us your feedback. Have an idea for a new feature you want to see added to Blueprint? We’d love to hear that too.

Watch a demo

Soon you’ll be only a control-Z away from making amends for that accidental touch of the delete key. Eagle-eyed readers may also notice a few other user interface improvements we have on tap for the next release in the video…

We’ve heard your requests, so we’ll be opening up The Blueprint Forums very soon. Here’s a quick screenshot to whet your appetite…

Update: The forums are now online. Check them out now!

Then again, once it comes time to change what you’ve got drawn out on the wall, things get a little hairier. That’s why we recently added the ability to print scalable versions of the diagrams you create in Blueprint. Now you’ll be able to utilize the collaboration and change history features in Blueprint to keep your processes up to date easily and quickly, while still retaining the ability to create over sized diagrams to put on the wall. Better yet, since we generate a PDF version of your process, it’s your choice whether you want your process to fit in your Moleskine or on 30 feet of butcher paper.

Haven’t tried Blueprint yet? Then sign up for a 30 day free trial today! Just a few of the benefits Blueprint has to offer:

• Secure, on demand access from anywhere in your web browser. No software to install.
• Zero-training process mapping and modeling. Collaborate on documenting your processes, whether you’re in the business or in IT.
• Automatic generation of process roadmap presentations in PowerPoint.
• Seamless execution of processes mapped in Blueprint through integration with Lombardi Teamworks 6.
• and much, much more…