Announcing the October ‘09 Blueprint Update

The October ‘09 update is now available on blueprint.lombardi.com! This release has some exciting enhancements that I think will make Blueprint an even more valuable tool for discovering and sharing your processes. We’ve added a new process analysis mode, several new properties to the Blueprint documentation template, email notifications for changes happening to your processes, and a many more improvements based upon your feedback.

Let’s take a look the enhancements in detail:

• Enhanced Process Analysis: We’ve introduced a new analysis mode in today’s release that allows you to instantly highlight the areas of your process that need attention and improvement. When you switch to analysis mode, Blueprint heat maps both the discovery map and process diagram with the data you’ve entered in the details for each activity. This allows you to instantly see which parts of your process have problems, excessive cost or cycle time, or that are risk points. It substantially increases the visibility you have into all of your processes, and is an excellent tool to help you make a business case for improvements.

  You can find the Analyze button in the toolbar whenever you’re viewing a process. Give it a try and let us know what you think!

• New Properties: One of Blueprint’s great strengths is that it’s always offered a template for documenting the important information about your processes — who’s involved, what’s required and created at this step, and the like. We’ve heard from you that there are a few other key pieces of information that you need to catalog at each activity, and today we’ve added the most valuable and frequently requested ones:
  • Systems
  • Cycle Time:
  • Cost
  • Value Added / Non Value Added
  • Risk
  • Supplier and Customer (SIPOC)

  All of these new properties can be heat mapped onto the diagram using the new analysis mode, which can be extremely powerful. Need to highlight areas of your process with unaddressed risk points? How about the areas that will be affected when you decommission one of your legacy applications? What about the non-value added parts that are wasting money? Analysis mode can make answering all of these questions a snap.

• Email Notifications: The Blueprint activity feeds are an extremely valuable tool for tracking and discovering changes that happen to your processes and the processes that you depend on. Since we introduced them a few months ago, we’ve heard from many customers that they’ve helped increase involvement and visibility across the organization, which has in turn led to many improvements that would have been lost previously. Today we’re introducing the ability for Blueprint to proactively push these changes to your organization via email. You can subscribe to a weekly digest of your activity feed, a daily digest of all the changes to your favorite processes and projects, and instant notifications of replies to the comments and feedback you’ve left.

  You can choose which emails you’re subscribed to on your user settings page, which you can bring up by clicking your name at the top of the page in Blueprint. Give them a try and let us know what you think!

In addition, this release also features many smaller improvements based upon what we’ve heard from you — everything from a better way to link to related processes to enhanced performance when working with large numbers of processes. 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.