Bridging the Gap with UI - Part 1

It is tempting to go on and on about the relationship between business and IT. Here at Lombardi we like to instead talk about effective cross-functional teams that can build the end-to-end process together. And we practice what we preach - this is why we have BPM Analysts, Consultants and Developers on our delivery teams. Note this does not mean companies have to fundamentally re-organize, but they do need to be able to create dedicated cross-functional teams if they are going to be successful.

That being said, I think that user interfaces are key to how these cross functional teams can work together effectively. This is something that I touched on briefly in my previous post about Web2.0 and “making BPM cool again.”

First let’s provide some context — traditionally, in the BPM world, UI development occurs in the design phase of a process, building on top of what has been accomplished with the flow, integration metrics and controls stages, etc.

But one of the things that I like about Lombardi is how we are structured. Our design group is part of our product management organization, and we work closely with the product manager and our clients from the very beginning, which is untraditional. We’re really the first consumers of any information.

More specifically, we work closely with the product team to make sure we understand what the goals/tasks of the users are, from the start. We use personas here - for example we have businesspeople and IT technical developers and architects that we refer back to, always thinking about what each person wants and needs from a UI perspective. We also do site visits, spend lots time with our customers, doing plenty of onsite testing, customer calls with sales people to demo the product and more. We want to understand what our clients are thinking. We try to get an idea of what is going on at every stage, which helps inform our design decisions. We get as deep and engrained as we possibly can, and it’s worth every bit.

That is, in order to effectively utilize a cross-functional team, you first have to first understand on the most granular level what the needs of each constituency are, at each stage of the process. This might sound obvious, but it isn’t so simple in practice. You can’t fake the knowledge that you need - you have to go out and get it, aggressively if need be. I can’t say enough how much research and user studies are an integral part of how we think about interfaces.

Quickly you’ll realize that in that hand-off between the two organizations, there is a lot of stuff that an IT role might, for example, want to hold onto because it involves what they do well, and there’s a bunch of stuff that IT needs to hand off to a business role on the team, but typically can’t because the UI doesn’t support it. A good UI allows each user to focus on what s/he does best, and this is Rule #1. Trying to find the right way to solve this problem is what keeps us going from a design perspective, and is why we start work at such an early stage. And if you’re evaluating UI’s from a purchasing perspective, for any software category really, it is imperative that a given solution do just that - allow users to focus on doing what they do best and not get in the way.

Now, given a deep understanding of the needs the cross-functional team (and roles), what comes next?

Ed: We’ll continue this post next week with Part 2, in which Craig talks about how to get IT and business on the same page by making careful decisions about the interface(s) through which these two groups interact.

Questions? Leave a comment!

The Right Team for Your BPM Rollout, Part 2

Ed.: In a previous post about staffing your BPM rollout, Rainer discussed the difference between “point project” and a ‘transformational initiative”; and the need to staff either approach effectively.

Remember that a transformational BPM project unites all parts of the business and IT in a shared commitment to change or improve the way a company operates. And that a point project is a specific BPM initiative with a defined end point and ROI associated. In a point project, you may or may not involve all parts of IT and business. The point project is less disruptive, but also very contained in the benefits that it provides.

But regardless of the approach, you have to be careful to avoid personalities that can sink your BPM cruise before it even leaves the harbor. Personalities like the Bench Player, the Corner Case Master, The Overwhelmed IT Manager or the Overwhelmed Business Manager. (All discussed in my last post.)

Below are techniques that I’ve found useful in building a strong BPM team.

Read the rest of this entry »

Process People Q&A with Rachel Aukes, Wells Fargo

Recently we sat down with Rachel Aukes, a member of the Wells Fargo Financial Information Systems Continuous Improvement Team. Rachel, who plays an active role in the use of BPM at Wells Fargo, shared how Wells Fargo got started with BPM. In February, Wells Fargo received the Global Award for Excellence in BPM and workflow.

Process People: Describe in as much detail as possible the problem or need on a project level that first made you consider BPM and/or Lombardi as a viable solution.

Rachel Aukes: Our BPM program came about as a solution to organizational level needs - in fact we selected our BPM solution (Teamworks) and began to implement it before deciding on a specific project. We were challenged with increasingly complex, paper-intensive processes that had a large number of manual steps and handoffs. That was obviously inefficient and meant there was room for errors (such as bad typing, misplaced files, etc.). The idea of what BPM offers became prevalent in 2006 when most of our development staff was focused on maintaining our legacy systems while building our future systems of record. This effort was strategically important to our company; however, the business had immediate tactical needs that must continue to be met. We asked ourselves what we should do to best support our business partners, and we determined that BPM was a good solution for this. We haven’t looked back.

Read the rest of this entry »

Q&A With Amy Carr of the Center for Child Protection

Since it is Friday, we’d like to share a story that is a bit off track from our regular focus on process. This past weekend, Lombardi participated in the Austin Cup, a bowling tournament that benefits the local Center for Child Protection. Lombardi has experience working with non-profits in a BPM capacity, and it was nice to collaborate with the CCP outside of the office. Below is a Q&A with the CCP’s Amy Carr, who was an absolute pleasure to work with, and who has a lot of valuable information to share below.

• Tell us a little about the CCP and what the organization does. The Center for Child Protection, an accredited children’s advocacy center, is the first stop for children in Travis County who are suspected victims of sexual abuse, serious physical abuse and for children who have witnessed a violent crime. The Center is a child-friendly, specially equipped facility where children go for recorded forensic interviews, medical exams, counseling and intervention during the investigation and prosecution of child abuse cases. All of our services are provided to children and their protective caregivers at no charge. In 2007, the Center served more than 1,400 children and 900 adults.

Read the rest of this entry »

SaaS BPM - For Real

I’ve been seeing a bit of blog postings lately on the reality of SaaS on Demand or SaaS BPM.

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.

Read the rest of this entry »

The First 180 Days, Part 2

Ed.: In this second post in the series (see our previous coverage here), Fahad is focusing specifically on the Enterprise Plan Program. Think of this as the plan for rolling out a BPM initiative across the company in the first 180 days and beyond.

Enterprise BPM initiatives require well-defined operating procedures for selecting projects, governing delivery, staffing teams and managing infrastructure requirements. We call these procedures the Four Pillars of Enterprise BPM. The Enterprise Plan is therefore comprised of 4 corresponding sub-plans, including the:

• Strategy Plan
• Governance Plan
• Capability Plan
• Infrastructure Plan

Read the rest of this entry »

Blueprint Best Practices Webinar

By now, you’ve probably experienced how simple it is to document a process with Blueprint. But we know creating detailed diagrams takes a significant portion of your time. So, we made Blueprint even better! The Spring ‘08 Release of Blueprint is here and it is the next evolution of diagramming. Based on user feedback, we’ve streamlined diagramming and added many requested features to make it even easier & simpler to document your process.

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.

Check Out Bruce Silver’s BPMS Watch Rankings!

The selection process for choosing a BPM vendor can be pretty daunting. BPM is a rapidly evolving space, and there seems to be a different philosophy on process at the core of each vendor’s solution set. Usually the first step an organization takes is to read some of the research that’s out there. While Gartner and Forrester do provide world-class research on our corner of the software world, I think it’s also worth mentioning another place to look for an in-depth look at the major players in business process management.

Bruce Silver’s recently published BPMS report provides one of the most thoughtfully composed product rankings in BPM. I would also like to quote and commend him on his methodology for the research, which I think is an admirable approach:

Read the rest of this entry »

The Right Team for Your BPM Rollout, Part 1

In my BPM career, I’ve encountered a broad cross section of approaches when it comes to staffing an initial BPM implementation. I have found that some approaches function better than others, and that there are some clear mistakes to avoid.

One of the key points to recognize is that not all BPM projects are created equal. It is critical that you recognize whether or not your BPM project is a ‘point project’ or a ‘transformational initiative.’ If you start with a project approach and the first BPM projects are successful, it is highly likely that you will have a transformational initiative on your hands. Good news.

Read the rest of this entry »

Process People Q&A with Jeremy Kraybill, Boundless Network

Process People will be conducting a series of periodic interview sessions with Lombardi customers to provide useful insight into the BPM issues that they faced at their company, guidance for how to overcome obstacles, and to share the lessons learned during their process improvement journey. These real-world interviews will be posted regularly, so be sure and check back frequently. . .

In this Process People interview, we welcome Jeremy Kraybill, CIO for Boundless Network.

Process People: Describe in as much detail as possible the problem or need on a project level that first made you consider BPM and/or Lombardi as a viable solution.

Jeremy Kraybill: At Boundless Network, we were undergoing a business process re-engineering project at our business. We initially set out to document and analyze manual process changes that would reduce our company’s cash cycle and help us scale our back office. After the first couple weeks of the project, we realized that there were a whole set of business processes held in individuals’ heads that we could benefit from automating. Nobody at the company had previous BPM experience, but after looking at the first BPM vendor’s demo we knew that a BPM solution had great potential for our business pains. After a 3-month evaluation process we selected a BPM solution and have been very happy with the decision and how the implementations went.

Read the rest of this entry »

Chronological Is Not That Logical

When you’re tasked with documenting your department’s processes, it can be overwhelming. Often times the project is so hard to approach that the gut reaction is to rely on everyone’s favorite method for doing anything: start at the beginning, and take it one step at a time.

Unfortunately, this approach just doesn’t work when documenting business processes. It’s not the processes themselves that present a problem — it’s the people. When you try to document each step chronologically, the inevitable result is a trip down rat-hole lane. Rat-holing is when you get caught up with the minor details and exceptions that occur in any process. I’ve seen documentation sessions go on for hours with little to show for the effort because each stakeholder in the room was preoccupied with the subtle exceptions to the steps that they themselves were most passionate about.

Read the rest of this entry »

Drive the Path (process and data flow)

Any tools can be used in the wrong way, and I believe that’s the reason many developers hate BPM. They just don’t know how the BPM tools should be used. . .and I’d love to rectify that situation right now.

If you grok Process Driven Development you will love BPM. If you don’t, then you’ll try to use your BPM tools like a traditional application development environment and you will end up with a mess.

It’s all about the Process. . .before you begin development, discover the answers to these questions in this order:

1. What are the steps?
2. What are the possible paths through the steps?
3. What data controls the path through the process?
4. What data flows through the process.

Read the rest of this entry »

Governance? What the heck is that?

The Spring ‘08 release of Blueprint is now live & kickin’. You might think Blueprint is a cool process modeler, but there’s much more to it. There is no better BPM governance tool on the market.

Governance? What the heck is that?

Isn’t this just another buzzword? And how does something like Blueprint help with governance?

The term “governance” is often used but little understood. And yet if we think about our customers’ successful BPM projects, they always succeed because of tangible leadership from somewhere in the business. A BPM project is not application development, it is a different type of technology-based project. One that is not aligned with the business, but instead one that is integrated into the business. The foundation for business integration isn’t a shared model, it’s a shared understanding.

Read the rest of this entry »

The First 180 Days, Part 1

In this series of two posts, we’ll lay out the development of what we call the Enterprise Plan Program. Think of this as the plan for rolling out a BPM initiative across the company in the first 180 days and beyond.

The objective of the Program is to develop the plan for how the enterprise BPM program needs to be rolled out and managed past the “startup” (or Pilot) phase. This includes a consideration of strategy, governance, organizational capability and infrastructure impact. In many cases, the team driving this deliverable must also answer how the enterprise BPM initiative fits with other business and technical initiatives that may already be in progress.

Read the rest of this entry »

Notes on User Experience and Design – Web2.0 and Making BPM Cool Again

A few weeks ago we were having a conversation at SXSW here in Austin that is worth relaying.

There has been a good deal of talk about making BPM more engaging to users via Web 2.0 and Ajax, which is ultimately part of the whole Enterprise2.0 conversation. It makes me laugh, though, because Ismael Ghalimi was talking about making BPM cool again way back in 2006 – was it ever cool?

Well, anyway, we’ve obviously come a long way since then, and certainly Lombardi has been at the forefront of the UI/UE innovation since the very beginning. We recently announced the Spring 2008 release of Lombardi Blueprint, which incorporates our most evolved thinking about usability and experience.

Read the rest of this entry »

The Blueprint Spring ‘08 Release Is Here!

I’m very happy to announce that the Spring ‘08 release of Blueprint is now live. A quick rundown of the new features is below. But don’t take my word for it: log in now and check it out. Sign up for a your own account now if don’t have one yet.

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.

Read the rest of this entry »

Spring Release Preview

I’m happy to announce that the Spring release of Blueprint is nearly here. We’ve been working on this one for a while and I think it makes Blueprint hands down the best process modeler on the block, online or off. We’re really excited about it and I think you will be too.

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.

Read the rest of this entry »

Blueprint at the GWT: Voices That Matter conference

Last month Blueprint’s Director of Engineering, Alex Moffat, spoke at the GWT: Voices That Matter conference. Alex talked about how we built the product and the tradeoffs we made along the way. His talk was really interesting and provides a great peek behind the veil into the development process.

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

Improving Blueprint

One of the best parts about working on an application such as Blueprint is the ability to continuously improve the product based on real customer feedback (a usability engineer’s dream). That said, we’ve got some GREAT things queued up for release this year - so keep posted here for updates. As always, we welcome your comments & feedback on how you’re using Blueprint and what we can do to help make you more successful.

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

Tips for viewing and printing diagrams

When you click the Print button, Blueprint generates a PDF version of your diagram. The great part about the PDFs is that they’re extremely scalable–you can view them on screen or print them on any sized printer (or plotter!). Here are a few tips for working with them:

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.

Read the rest of this entry »

Moving Processes Between Projects

Need to reorganize your processes? Over the weekend, we added a feature that a lot of people have been asking for: the ability to move processes between projects.

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.

Announcing A New Blueprint Release!

The Blueprint product team is continuously improving the product based upon customer feedback. We’ve recently made some exciting usability improvements and introduced some new features that we’d like to tell you about…

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.

Read the rest of this entry »

Feature preview: Undo

Ever make a mistake and wish you could go back in time and fix things? I do. All the time. That’s why we’re adding the ability to undo changes in the next version of Blueprint.

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…

Coming Soon: The Blueprint Forums

As the Blueprint community has grown, we’ve gotten many requests for a place to interact with other people that are discovering and documenting their processes. People have asked for a place not only to ask questions about Blueprint, but to also share best practices and find solutions to common problems when undertaking a process improvement project.

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!

New Feature: Butcher Paper Printing

When we were initially researching Blueprint, we saw one thing over and over again: process diagrams hanging on the walls. If you’re trying to teach the details of a process to someone or just trying to get a bird’s eye view of things, it’s hard to beat a big printout pinned to the wall. We even had one customer tell us that they measured the complexity of their process in terms of the length of butcher paper required to draw it!

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.