Dave Angelow, adjunct professor at Texas State University just finished teaching a semester long course in Production and Operations Management. The course, which focuses on the supply chain and value chain as well as some production methods, is a core requirement in the school of management.
I talked with Dave to hear how the course went and how BPM fit into the syllabus.
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.
PRC, based in Ft. Lauderdale, Florida, manages 14 domestic call centers and a handful of centers offshore. In January of last year this 25-year-old company declared bankruptcy. Six months later, after a massive restructuring they emerged from Chapter 11.
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.
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.
Devin Rickard is a Senior Director of Business Process Improvement at Symantec, the company best known for its Norton line of security products. The team that Devin belongs to acts as internal process consultants at the company and they’ve adopted Lombardi Blueprint as the common process modeling tool for the group. What they found however is that Blueprint has a wide appeal beyond their group.
I caught up with Devin to learn about process improvement at Symantec and how his team was using Blueprint.
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.
As an application that leverages all the agility and reach that the cloud provides, we thought it only appropriate that Lombardi Blueprint help sponsor Cloud Camp Austin 2009.
Along with lesser known companies like Microsoft, Sun and Rackspace :-) , Lombardi Blueprint is a gold sponsor of the event (actually since I took the screenshot to the left, Aserver, Rightscale and Zeus have also joined the golden ranks).
As a gold sponsor we get to deliver a 5-7 minute lightening talk at the beginning of the event. The only restrictions are that it be cloud related and it can’t be a product pitch. I will be talking about the cloud and democratization of information.
What, When, Where…
The event takes place next Saturday, April 25th from 10AM – 4PM down at Austin City Limits on the UT campus.Here’s how the webpage sums up the event:
CloudCamp is an unconference where early adopters of Cloud Computing technologies exchange ideas. With the rapid change occurring in the industry, we need a place we can meet to share our experiences, challenges and solutions. At CloudCamp, you are encouraged you to share your thoughts in several open discussions, as we strive for the advancement of Cloud Computing. End users, IT professionals and vendors are all encouraged to participate.
(Here are a few more thoughts regarding the event from co-organizer and Red Monk analyst Michael Cote.)
Free for All
The cost of the event is FREE and all you need to do is register online so they know how many folks are coming (heck, I bet if you showed up that day they probably wouldn’t turn you away.) So come on down next Saturday and enjoy and learn. And remember, since its an unconference that means anyone can propose and lead a session and we all learn from each other.
For those who will be in the Austin area then, hope to see you there!
Last week I came across an article in NetworkWorld.com that listed today’s “Top 10 Technology skills.” The list was based on work done by Foote Partners, which conducts quarterly assessments of IT pay trends in the US.
Foote Partners’ CEO David Foote says “what’s unique about this downturn is that IT departments are hiring talent in certain areas – such as business process modeling and project management – while laying off in others connected to weak product lines.”
And, indeed, coming in at the top of the list was Business Process Modeling:
1. Business Process Modeling
Business process management, methodology and modeling is one of the few IT niches that saw pay gains in the fourth quarter of 2008, according to the quarterly IT salary survey compiled by Foote Partners. In particular, companies were willing to pay for workers with ITIL IT best practices and CobiT IT governance experience. Pay for these skills was up 10.3% from a year ago and 5.6% from the previous quarter, the Foote report says.
Kevin Faughnan, director of IBM’s Academic Initiative, says business process modeling is one of the key skills that business majors should be studying. “It’s about how does our business work, what are the business processes and how do we analyze them,” Faughnan says, adding that this is a key issue for companies to consider before applying IT to solve business problems.
This seems to make sense to me. It is always important to know your business processes in order to be able to modify and refine them to keep pace with change… and today there is an extra helping of change that we all must not only keep pace with but get ahead of. Business Process Modeling is a key first step.
Last week I attended the Web 2.0 expo in San Francisco. In case you thought that social media was just for web 2.0 start-ups and teenagers, one of the cooler talks I saw was given by Scott Monty, the head of Ford Motor’s Social Media efforts. I was so intrigued that I thought I would grab him for an interview. He graciously agreed and here’s the result. Enjoy
To watch in High Quality: after clicking play, click the “HQ” button that will appear on the bottom.
Some of the topics Scott tackles:
Ford’s goal of becoming one of the world’s leading social brands.
Setting content free.
Innovation is made up of small tweaks on existing platforms that build value over time.
How did Ford come to decide they needed a head of social media and how did they pick Scott.
The two things coming up that Scott is most excited about: the Fiesta Movement and the evolution of Fordstory.com into Ford’s social media hub.
BTW, If you want to follow Scott on Twitter, its @scottmonty.
A few weeks ago I blogged about the Forrester review of Blueprint that was published in early February.
We recently purchased licensing rights to the report, “Vendor Snapshot: Lombardi Blueprint Bridges Gap Between Process Discovery And Execution” and it is now available here.
Quotable Quotes
Here are some of my favorite quotes from the report:
Blueprint provides a process modeling and discovery platform that blends collaboration and documentation capabilities into an easy-to-use, low cost, software-as-a-service offering that can be used by beginner to expert process analysts.
Blueprint combines the best of both worlds for analysts: the “ready-to-use” feel of office productivity tools and the comprehensive knowledge repository found in traditional BPA tools.
Lombardi Blueprint represents a new way of developing, delivering, and interacting with software — the combination of SaaS, Web 2.0, and business process.
From the very beginning, BPM suite vendors sold business and process analysts on empty promises of easy-to-use modeling capabilities. Lombardi is one of the first BPM suite vendors to deliver on the promise of ease of use for process analysts. Lombardi Blueprint combines collaboration, ease of use, and a centralized process repository into an inexpensive and elegant SaaS-based offering.
But don’t take Forrester’s word for it…
And if those quotes don’t get you to sign-up for a free 30-day trial of Blueprint, I don’t know what will. :-) Check Blueprint out for yourself. Sign-up for a free trial here.
Last month we held our company kick off where all of our employees from all around the world gathered here in Austin for meetings to get set for the upcoming year. One of the highlights of the three days was the 4th annual Lombardi Science Fair.
Each year, people are given a couple of weeks during work time to work on a project that extends the base platform of Blueprint or Teamworks in some cool new way. As the official Science Fair rules state: “Anyone at Lombardi can enter… all you have to do is think up a project, register the project on the wiki page build the project, and show up ready to pitch your project on January 27!”
Two of the four winners, Scott and Allison and M.C. (and Lombardi President) Phil Gilbert previewing the grand prize.
This year there were close to 40 projects and awards were given in three different categories as well as one project that was picked as “Best in Show.” The winners received iPod Nanos and the Best in Show was the recipient of cold hard cash. Not only that, but all of the winners will be show cased at Lombardi’s upcoming customer event, Driven.
The Fair commences.
Everyone Wins
The real cool thing for customers, Lombardi and the entrants is a that lot of these out-of-the box projects find their way into the products over the coming year.
This was my first time at Science Fair and I was really impressed with how elaborate the whole shebang was. Nice way to keep innovation pumping.
At the end of last year, Blueprint Product Manager Dave Marquard and I had a call with Forrester analyst Clay Richardson to brief him on Lombardi Blueprint. The result of that call and a considerable amount of further research was a 6-page report that debuted last Friday — “Vendor Snapshot: Lombardi Blueprint Bridges Gap Between Process Discovery And Execution.”
Austin-based Lombardi Software’s latest offering, Blueprint, positions the vendor to extend its leadership in human-centric business process management (BPM) and takes direct aim at Microsoft Word, PowerPoint, and Visio as the tools of choice for process analysts. Blueprint provides a process modeling and discovery platform that blends collaboration and documentation capabilities into an easy-to-use, low cost, software-as-a-service offering that can be used by beginner to expert process analysts. To stay ahead of the pack, the platform needs to continue extending its collaborative Web 2.0 functionality as other BPM suite vendors play catch-up by introducing similar offerings. Consider Lombardi Blueprint if you need a collaborative and lightweight process discovery tool that is tailored to support geographically dispersed process discovery teams.
We are in the process of licensing this report and as soon as we do, we will be making it available on the lombardi.com site. If you are already a Forrester client, you can log in access the report here.
If the above has piqued your interest, you might be interested in signing up for a 30-day free trial of Blueprint and seeing for yourself. :-)
Yesterday I chatted with Dr. Joyce Statz who has been teaching a course at St. Edwards University in its school of management and business. Her course, “Multiple project and portfolio management” is offered as part of the Masters of Science in Project Management degree, and teaches how to manage multiple portfolios of project work in an organization.
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.
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.
As an application that leverages all the agility and reach that the cloud provides, we thought it only appropriate that 
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