I want to talk a little bit about what is, in my mind, the most interesting part of having exposure to BPM initiatives across a wide range of industries.

This is in fact one of the great advantages that we at Lombardi have as a pure-play solution provider, and it’s something we’re going to continue to capitalize on, especially from a services perspective.  It’s also one of the things that I love most about my job - the opportunity to solve process problems in an array of different verticals, taking and sharing best practices and key learnings among them.

BPM folk love to talk about agility. And it is less and less a secret that BPM is one very important way that organizations can future-proof themselves against the inevitable. In today’s case, for example, it’s rising fuel prices, the mortgage meltdown, and unstable capital markets, each of which is having a unique effect on our customers.

Read the rest of this entry »

I’ve talked a little bit about change management in previous posts, and I’ll continue on that theme here. This post is about talking it out, pure and simple — and in the process establishing important relationships that weren’t there before. I’ve also touched on how it is common to just throw things over the wall and not know what happens after that — it is really important to get in the habit of walking around to the other side of that wall and having regular conversations with the other people involved in a given process. This is an extension of that same idea.

Note: the best practices that I describe below usually come into play at a more mature process stage where we’re trying to jump-start some new initiatives or reinvigorate old ones, but it also applies to the beginning stages as well.

Overall, it is of the greatest importance that you first make sure that other people in the room or on the phone hear the larger story or narrative of the process, and understand where they fit into that bigger picture. This is always where we start. A lot of times when you give people this kind of perspective, the floodgates will open — as a result, colleagues start sharing their own experiences and other anecdotal pieces of information and ultimately this is how you get to reality. Perception is reality when you are working with process, and talking it out helps you to start putting some of that picture together. They say a picture is with a thousand words — from a process perspective it is usually worth another million once we start collecting information. Much of what we learn, in fact, can remain hidden, again, without the proper perspective as to why it does or does not matter. You’d be surprised what people bottle up because they feel it isn’t applicable to the project as a whole or they don’t think you’ll actually listen to what they have to say.

Read the rest of this entry »

So far on this blog we’ve had a lot of important conversations around getting started — the first 180 days, putting your BPM team together, that first playback, etc. Today I want to focus a little bit more on the optimization piece of the puzzle. What do I mean by optimization? Imagine that you’re already effectively using BPMS and you’re doing pretty well all in all, but you’re not seeing the kinds of fireworks that you did when you got that first process up and running. The question is, essentially, what are some the of the advanced topics that that come to mind in terms of things that companies can do that really optimize and take process excellence to the next level? This will continue to be a theme for me in subsequent blog posts, but I’ll share some initial high level thoughts as well as a few best practices here.

I’ll begin with where I come in as part of our Services group. It often starts with a happy customer telling us that they are slowly starting to stall. That is, they got through those first multiple iterations, but now the question is — where do we go from here, how do we know whether we should add on another process or move to an area that is totally separate?

From an optimization perspective, we are going to go in and do a review and an assessment of what the customer has, what they are doing, and what kind of returns they are seeing. For example, is this process more customer-impacting, is it employee-impacting, and most importantly are we really understanding what the true value proposition is for each?  We decide how and where we want to focus, and determine whether we are doing a good job of tying into strategic objectives within the organization. Ultimately, optimization is all about alignment and realignment, that’s the first take-away.

Read the rest of this entry »

This post is all about the cultural changes that BPM can (and needs to) drive within an organization. But it’s also about some of the ways in which processes don’t live in the clouds — they live on the ground, in real situations, with real people. I think it’s really important to remember this fact in our day-to-day work. I like telling this story because it’s from a long time ago when technology was quite different — and yet there are stark similarities to the challenges that we face today.

When I started at Sprint (my former employer), I was among the people who just assumed that when you picked up the phone, there would always be a dial tone — to me this was no big deal. I didn’t really understand all the technology, all the incredible things in the background that happen to actually put phone service in your home. This was of course ten years ago, so cell phones were popular, but everybody still had a landline, and the company overall was still focused on the latter market.

One of the first things the company did was send me out to a call center. This was part of my “process discovery” phase in my new role (though we didn’t call it that) — my goal was to see and document how things actually worked, and then find ways for us to improve.

Read the rest of this entry »