Leonardo Consulting Process Days is on in Sydney from July 26 to July 29. It is at the Masonic Centre; which was a great venue last year.

You will find an overview of the program on the Process Days website. I am really looking forward to seeing Alec Sharp in person and to hear presentations from our peers across industries. The Global Discussion Panel will definitely be worth while.

Process Idol is going to be interesting. Anyone want to warm up your signing voices and join me for some fun?

The website is now open for registrations, please let me know if you are attending as the real value is the catch up and discussion between sessions!

p.s. Have a close look on the website and see if you can find me?

Why do we need to include the Customer?

Think of a typical Business Process where a customer is making a request of your organisation, maybe they are filling in an application for credit.

The current (as-is) process is considered inefficient as customer contacts the Accounts department and an Accounting Clerk collects all of the relevant information from the customer and then faxes the customer a nearly completed form to finalise and return. It is decided that implementing a self-service web-site will improve efficiency and save the company several staff years in the Accounting department.

The new (to-be) process is implemented, at the start everything looks good, the customers are able to fill in the form on-line and easily print, sign and send the form in. The form is also easy for the Accounting department to process as the information is already available in the accounting system.

However, the Accounting department is busier than ever, the phone seems to be ringing more and staff morale is down. What happened?

The customer is not part of the process. A key part of this process, getting and completing the customer application form, has been pushed out and is no longer considered part of the process; however customers are taking longer to complete the information required, they often don’t understand what is require and they are ringing up for help to complete the form. Once submitted a high percentage of forms are rejected back to the customer because they are incorrectly completed, causing re-work and unhappy customers.

If the customer part of the process was measured, then it would show that the end-to-end process is now less efficient at achieving its customer driven goals than it was previously. The process design may be more efficient from the Accounting department’s perspective; however that is the wrong way to look at it – unhappy customers and staff is a guaranteed recipe for failure.

Another example of this concept is in Gary Comerford’s e-book, The Perfect Process Project; In Chapter 6 there is a great customer perspective story relating to a call centre. Call centres (ironically they are often called customer service centres) are always a good source for processes examples that do not include the customer!

Finally, Michael zur Muehlen has written a great article on the BPTrends site, Service Processes: The Customer at the Centre.

Can you think of one of your Business Processes that does not include the customer? What difference could you make if it did?

I was not surprised by the result, however it is interesting that out of 20 organisations there was not 1 recognised BPM Framework that had been adopted; and comments were even made that they are not necessary. I think this last comment related to the terminology being used.

I have recently added a new page to the Executive Guide to BPM explaining what a BPM Framework is and why they are needed. See the Process of Process Management. For me, implementing BPM is implementing a Business Process and therefore you need a guide on how you are doing it!

What BPM Frameworks are there?

The challenge is finding and evaluating a Framework. There are three main sources;

1. Books
2. Training
3. Vendors

I was introduced to my first Framework by Roger Burlton of the Process Renewal Group. The Process Renewal Group Framework is based on Roger’s book, Business Process Management: Profiting From Process; however the best understanding of the Framework and the techniques to implement it came from attending Roger’s training course and being mentored by the Group.

There are other Frameworks that come from similar sources, and consequently I have not had the opportunity to review any of them, I just know that they exist from web research. Frameworks from BPMInstitute.org and Management By Process are examples of training / consultant led offerings.

Another option is to adopt the processes recommended by your BPMS vendor. The advantage of this option is that the framework is tailored to the tools you have available. This can also be a disadvantage if you do not already use the tool as the training seems to be inherently linked, even if the framework is generically good. An example of this may be the framework promoted by Appian.

There may be some more generic options, such as the Association of Business Process Management Professionals (ABPMP) Common Body of Knowledge. As I am not a member I have not reviewed this framework; however there is a good summary presentation available, see Guide to BPM CBOK.

The Round Table also attempted to develop a common methodology which was called The Process of Process Improvement (TPPI). The output of the exercise can be found on the BPM-Collaboration TPPI Wiki (registration is required).

At the moment I am evaluating the BPTrends methodology that is based on the book Business Process Change by Paul Harmon. This methodology is supported in Australian by Leonardo Consulting who have written an excellent summary of the methodology and the certification program that they offer; see Achieving Process-Based Management.

I am sure there are many BPM Framework offerings that I have not covered here. If you know of one or you have a framework or methodology to offer – please leave a comment to let me know. I am also keen to collect or create reviews of the Frameworks that are available.

What Framework are you using or considering?

I usually start by describing the attributes that change an ordinary process into an effective Business Process. I have added a page to the Executive Guide to BPM on this very topic, see Business Processes Explained.

A key aspect of Business Processes is to have a perspective that stretches across all of the steps that need to be completed to achieve the right successful outcome. All too often functional managers only focus on their part of the process, missing the end-to-end perspective of what really needs to be done.

The perspective chosen can have a dramatic affect on the design of the process, for example:

Scoping the Recruitment Process

A typical recruitment process will concentrate on, and be measured by how efficiently the Human Resources department responds to requests to advertise positions, find and collate candidate responses and finish off the paperwork. I think you would have to visit many organisations before you would find a recruitment Business Process that actually measured how successfully the right candidate was selected.

As a candidate and as a recruiting team lead, I have had far more experiences where the process has been very inefficient (taking much more time that it should), has caused serious concern to candidates and frankly has not selected the most suitable person for the actual role, when they were required. Why do you think this is the case?

Generally this is because the process is not designed and measured, end-to-end. It is the difference between the Human Resources department being responsible for just their bits of the process, compared to being responsible for the end-to-end result; which in my example may be the performance of the successful candidate once they are in the position they were recruited for.

If one executive was held responsible for the performance of all new recruits, then the design of the process, especially in the steps of initial job design and the conduct of the selection panel would be done very differently. No longer would Human Resources blame the business for a defunct process or the other way around!

I could go on with many similar stories, in fact I would bet that you have a story of your own that you could share?  Please do…

A second look at the Customer Perspective will follow in a future post – Does the Customer have a place in our Process?

The Executive Guide to BPM provides some basic information about Business Process Management and what I see as being key to implementing BPM. This page will also be a springboard to a number of artefacts that I will be creating about Process Management and how to implement it!

While writing the guide, I realised that many of the concepts will require further explaining, along with a few good stories to support them. This is a story about Process Thinking and understanding Customer Value.

Eating out in Canberra

A few years ago I was in Canberra for a training session ran by Roger Burlton, a large group from the class went to dinner at a local restaurant. At the end of the evening we all pooled our money and went to the counter to pay.

One of our group was visiting from overseas and needed to separately pay for and get a receipt for their meal to be able to claim a refund from their organisation.

The restaurant had a “We do not split bills” policy, we asked nicely if we could pay for this one meal separately and explained why. The proprietor was serving us and he was sticking to his policy. After some back and forth conversation he was heard to say “It is my restaurant – I set the rules”. By the end of the conversation, he had finally agreed to separately charge for this meal – if we agreed to pay a very small processing fee (we are talking $1 added to a $500 bill).

This is a great example of a policy that is focussed on efficiency, however it clearly destroys customer value – which do you think is better for the business long-term?

The first sessions are entitled “Creating Business Process Success”. They are scheduled for March and involve the trio of Andrew Spanyi, Michael Roseman and Roger Tregear himself. The sessions sound very interesting and very practical – an opportunity to learn the real BPM and how to Engage, Improve and Sustain. For more information go to the Leonardo Education website.

Following on from the upcoming ProcessDays conference in July, Alec Sharp will be visiting Australia. I am looking forward to seeing Alec in person after our short exchanges during the “live” session at last years event.

Thanks to Roger and Leonardo Education for organising these great sounding sessions!  Let me know if there are any other events coming up in Australia – we don’t get that many good BPM seminar opportunities in Australia. The more we can support them, the more international experts we can talk into visiting (I know they really enjoying coming down under

1. Gather requirements from the business
2. Design and validate a process model
3. Implement the new process with the business
4. Move on ..

What will this look like in the world of Process 2.0?

I recently asked the BPM Collaboration community about Process and Google Wave (check out the forum thread to follow the discussion). Bernie Clark provided me with a link to a great YouTube video prepared by the SAP Research centre, it is titled “Gravity, the best example of Google Wave”. This is well worth 7 minutes. Well done to the research team for a quality presentation.

Using this kind of collaborative process development, the Business Analyst becomes more of a facilitator and educator about the way to build processes, without needing to get too involved in the business. With this kind of approach, an organisation would be capable of developing and deploying Business Processes in record time!

Add to this, adhoc process modelling. This concept, introduced to me as a new feature in the webMethods 8 product suite, provides the ability for knowledge workers to model processes as they are being executed. Generally there is marginal value in mapping a complex process that is not executed regularly, especially where human judgment is involved!

However, if you can capture the process as it is completed, then you can measure what has been done and learn from the experience in the future.

My first reaction to adhoc processes was, “It is hard enough to get people to map processes and execute them, what incentives would be needed to encourage adhoc mapping?”.

What if we mixed both collaborative and adhoc process modelling?

Firstly I thought it would be good to have a simple list of all of the available tools, so I have compiled a list, see the Process Tools (Free) category on my Process on the Web page.

Secondly, it would also be good to compile reviews of these tools, as I have found it difficult to assess the value that I am going to receive using one of these tools. Therefore, I will be looking for existing reviews, or to review some of the tools myself, in upcoming posts.

Do you know of any free tools that I should add to the list?  Or do you have any good reviews (maybe one you wrote yourself) of a free Process Tool?

However I have recently said goodbye to BHPBilliton to take up a BPM Consultant role at APA Group. This means that I will be back to thinking process. The better for you!

During the last few months I found it very difficult to keep track of all the different BPM postings across the internet. Jamie at BPM Collaboration had a great idea to create a page that displayed a summary of BPM blog sites; however you have to open his page directly to read it. I was looking for an aggregated source that could be accessed easily during my day, on the train, on my phone!

So I created BPMBlogs. BPMBlogs is a Twitter account that provides a summary of BPM blogs postings. You can follow this account on Twitter and see what is being posted to the BPM Blog space as part your regular reading.

You can also access the combined BPM Blogs as a Yahoo Pipes Feed, if you want to read the entries directly or import the feed into your own RSS reader.

Check it out!  It is still a work in progress, so let me know what you think – What sites should I add to the list?

note: I did have to remove some sites that I originally wanted to add as their RSS feeds were not compatible with Yahoo Pipes!

I am really looking forward to this conference and I would love to share a drink and a story with you. You can register now on the Leonardo website. Let me know if you are going; as I would like to share our thoughts and expectations leading up to, and after the event.

Are you going?  Add a comment to let me know what you would like to get out of the conference or why you may not be attending this year?

Last week I had my first “And they call that a process!” moment since I started this blog, it has only taken a few weeks for this to happen.

There I was, minding my own business, doing my daily check of my Post Office Box. One of the contents was a non-descript – window faced envelope. Thinking it was a bill, or boring government mail I did not open it and left it for later processing. (Coincidentally I also dropped into the bank that day to deposit a cheque, something that I don’t do very often – why is this relevant? You will see)

Later that night I opened the letter to find a Remittance Advice and attached cheque for $3.70. It was from the South Australian Government, Motor Registration Office (note that the last time we paid car registration was over 6 months ago).

There was no letter explaining the remittance, the description did not tell me anything, it just said “Other”.

My question for you (especially if you work in a process area at Motor Registration) is, Where is the customer in this process? Why did you send me a cheque for such a small amount, putting me through the effort to bank it and the associated intrigue, definitely reducing the value that I get from your processes?

The unfortunate part is that no-one will probably be very surprised by this example. Do you have a similar story to share?

As-is modelling can also be quite hit-and-miss as the analysts try to decipher what the current process actually looks like, this can often be because there is not a single as-is process, there are many.

The main purpose of an as-is model is to give a Process Project the information it needs to work out where improvements are needed and what is the starting point for change?

On the other hand, to-be modelling is a description of future desired processes. To-be modelling requires analysts to be creative in solving problems and designing processes to achieve business outcomes, often with not so perfect information about what the organisation wants to achieve.

I find it fascinating to sit in a room and watch a selection of staff have a to-be model presented to them, you can see the defences rise – and everyone thinks it is not going to work – for different reasons.

So it doesn’t sound like either will work? not true.

My approach is to start with high-level to-be modelling. This often involves developing a future state, Process Architecture – aligning the organisations strategic goals with it’s process management goals. Further detail can be added about key processes in the form of IGOE Process Scope models  (more on these in future posts).

When agreement has been reached on the future state, then we can go back and look at the as-is. This is limited to the processes that will transition into the new architecture and only to the level of detail required to find the areas of process improvement and develop the change plan to implement the new to-be models.

With this approach there are plenty of stops along the way to make sure that everyone is in agreement.

When you do Process Modelling, which type of analysis do you do first? How effective is it?

I will have a handy collection of information that I used to store in link sites, browser bookmark bars and on little scraps of paper, and I don’t mind if you use it too. Even better, if you have a link you would like to share – let me know and I will add it to the collection.

I want to make a special mention of the link I added today. ARIS BPM Blog, although a vendor sponsored site, contains really good general information about BPM, however my favourite thing is ARIS TV – a (so far) short video series on BPM which incorporates ARIS’s great slogan “We ♥ BPM”.

Episode 6 of the ARIS TV series includes an interview with Professor Michael Roseman from QUT. I am a fan of the work that Michael and his team have done on BPM Maturity and developing BPM strategy. (more on this later..)

The new front page will feature profiles of the BPM practitioners who use the site: I volunteered to go first. You can check out My Profile, however you will have to join the site first if you are not already a member.

In the next couple of days I will also post an idea / request to undertake research into the understanding of BPM at different levels of organisations. I will post more details on The Process Executive when it is up.

Well done Jamie, and the rest of you – check it out.

The first thing that became obvious is that non-profit means different things, true it can be a reference to government organisations or large not-for-profit organisations, however my curiosity was more related to an organisations limited capacity rather than it’s motive.

That said, some of the responses I received were very well thought out and practical. A demonstration of how many volunteer organisations have a high calibre of people within their ranks, which reminds me of how these organisations are usually not very good at capitalising on this!

There were a number of key theme’s that came out of the responses;

1. Alignment with strategy and executive sponsorship is as critical (if not more critical) as it is in more commercial organisations. Without a well driven strategic link, process management efforts are not likely to get started. This is closely tied into the funding imperative, as often there is a high level of scrutiny put on administrative funding (especially for organisations that are run from donations).
2. It can often be difficult to find the right people to undertake process management in these organisations as projects are often performed at a discount. For me, this emphasises the need to recruit people with the right background, including managers that understand the importance of process thinking. I also believe this is important as processes are often cobbled together very quickly (especially in emergency management scenarios).
3. There is a lot of value to applying process management techniques in these environments. Small improvements can often provide a significant improvement, especially when you are working with two very valuable commodities, donated funds and volunteer hours.

Craig from The Process Ninja reminded me about the many BPM groups on LinkedIn which I had neglected to mention. This is probably because I agree with Craig’s analysis that the response rates to questions in the groups is low, mainly because there is not the same rigor and reward around questions in groups as there is in the Q&A section.

The BPM groups on LinkedIn are a good way to associate with like minded LinkedIn members or make contacts and share information about BPM. You can have a regular e-mail sent to you with a summary of new discussions in each group, I find I can quickly scan the e-mail for interesting content and then go to the group directly if I find something worthwhile.

You can see the groups that I am a member of by opening my LinkedIn Profile.  Some of the interesting groups are;

BPM Australia – Small group, not much discussion, good for finding local (to me) connections.

BPM Group – Mainly international job ads.

BPM Guru – Fair bit of Q&A, quite interesting.

Business Process Professionals – Quite good Q&A, good links to resources.

Lean Enterprise Australian and New Zealand – Reasonably new group with lots of activity and interesting people discussing Lean.

LinkedBPM – Another BPM Group

There are many others that I have not mentioned or joined, this is mainly because a fair amount of the discussion is repeated across the groups. I find this collection gives me more than enough to be interested and informed.

The Question and Answer section is quite simple, you post a question and anyone can provide you with answers. If you are lucky and you have written an interesting question, you will get lots of answers.  After you have received your answers you can also choose the person who gave you the best answer, they are then credited on their profile as being a bit of an expert on the topic!

The first thing I noticed when looking at the Q & A section was that there was no category relating to Business Process Management, or anything similar. The closest match I could find was, “Business Analytics”.  However, I did get some good responses to my questions.

The best way to use the Q&A section is to get in and answer some questions. So go on – give it a go!

I will be featuring a review of the answers to questions I ask on the blog.  If there is a particular topics that you are interested in asking about (and don’t want to do it yourself), add a comment here and I’ll post it up.

If you are interested in learning more about using LinkedIn, I recommend listening to Stan Relihan’s podcast, The Connections Show.  Stan covers a range of practical topics on using LinkedIn for business and networking – as well as other interesting internet and business related areas. A great listen!

Yes, that’s me. I can join the club, I’m a Process Tragic!

In this article Roger describes his interest in process-based management, a passion that I share. I have spent many hours developing a message to describe the process centric view of management behaviour.  Sometimes I find someone who grasps the concepts and is enthusiastic, more often confusion or disagreement is the result.

Roger suggests that we need to build a body of knowledge about the compelling reasons why organisations would benefit from adopting a process-based culture.

I have my own Compelling Reason Body of Knowledge to build, to strengthen my message and help organisational managers not only get enthusiastic, but influence them to join the club!

Let me know if you are a process tragic (or would like to be convinced). There are plenty of us around – another Craig is a good example, the Process Ninja.

1. It is important to understand the fundamentals of the business and it’s strategy – common-sense management.

2. It is vital to understand how the business creates value for it’s customers. Customer surveys often focus on the products or services offered, not the experience that created the real value for the customer. Quite often organisations are not very clear about who their real customers are!

3. A good understanding of strategy and customer value leads to the ability to select to improve the processes that will be critical to achieving the organisations aims.

4. Detail this in a Purpose Statement, a practical communication about What we will do, How we will do it and What the outcome will be, including what the Critical Success Factors are and are we measuring the right metrics to achieve them?

Now the Process Improvement work can begin -

5. Understand the problem, what is the root cause and what opportunities exist to improve.

6. Ensure you have the right level of support. If Senior Managers are not behind the initiative and eager for success, then sucess is always going to be a big challenge.

Overall, a great session.

Peter’s presentation covered a case study, demonstrating how a company used Lean Thinking to create a new strategic direction, execute organisational change and redesign their processes for greatly improved outcomes.

What struck me during the discussion was that the analysis and decision making techniques used were not ground-breaking, not proprietary and definitely not special. The techniques used were mainly common sense strategic management – understanding vision, setting goals, performing the analysis and executing change.

The only difference to what I got taught in the MBA unit on Strategic Management was to start the strategic process with obtaining a clear idea of how the organisation could create real value for their customers.

So the question for me was, has the wave of Process Management ideologies, tools and systems led senior managers to think they can achieve all the benefits of a Process Centric organisation without undertaking common sense strategic management?

Every Business Process Management project should be part of a Strategic Management initiative to assist the senior manager to change their organisation or business unit. The senior manager still needs to lead the development of strategy and execute organisational change, Process Improvement methods simply provide a new efficient and effective way to help achieve the desired outcomes.

Peter has setup a Lean Enterprise group on LinkedIn – “Lean Enterprise Australia & New Zealand”. I was very impressed with Peter’s presentation. Thanks to Ben Haigh (BPTrends Adelaide coordinator) and the University of South Australia for organising the event.