Last week we held our Driven Online virtual conference. It was the first time we hosted our user conference online. The conference ran three days with a mix of speakers from Lombardi, our customers and partners. We worked with eBizQ to leverage the Unisfair virtual conference environment. They both did a great job for us – but more on that in another post.

Here are a couple of interesting thoughts/takeaways that came up during the conference.

The BPM Talent Gap

As companies really try to ramp up their BPM initiatives, they often encounter a “BPM talent gap” in their own organizations as well as in the partners they typically use for solution delivery. Phil Gilbert, Lombardi’s President, talked about how this talent gap is found in multiple roles – from Business Analysis to Program Management to Business Leadership. The good news is that this gap can be readily addressed – often with the team you have at hand. Its just a matter of recognizing the gaps and developing a known set of skills. In fact, Toby Redshaw, CIO at Aviva, talked about the fact that anyone who wants to work in IT over the next few years must be focused on gaining the skills and capabilities required to succeed with BPM. This talent gap issue was also discussed at Gartner’s BPM Show in San Diego this Spring as well as in a great research article called “IT’s Unmet Potential” in the McKinsey Quarterly. Definitely recommended reading.

The Importance of Success Stories

The best way to launch a BPM Center of Excellence (COE) is with success stories. Sometimes the inclination is to focus only on defining standard templates, governance bodies, org structures and the like. In his session, Paul Tazbaz, Enterprise Architect from Wells Fargo talked about how they focused on documenting a set of BPM success stories at the beginning of their COE initiative. These success stories formed the basis of their early conversations with lines of business and corporate IT as they championed BPM across the company. Note that these success stories were about BPM – and many of the success stories predated the formation of the COE. No matter – Paul’s group is focused on getting business units to take advantage of BPM. No better way to do that than to tell them 10 stories about groups in Wells Fargo benefiting from BPM today. Sure makes for a more interesting first meeting with your lines of business than “This is BPMN and you WILL use it.”

Stay tuned for more tales from Lombardi Driven Online. Note that the conference is still available on-demand. If you are a customer or partner and missed the live event, you can still register for access here.

Our own Phil Gilbert was in the spotlight yesterday when CIO magazine posted an opinion piece with Phil’s thoughts on corporate bailouts. In Phil’s opinion, many people incorrectly think that a bailout is the only way to solve the liquidity crisis for the automotive world and other industries.

And that they are equally wrong when they blame blue collar workers, runaway salaries or lack of technology innovation as the only problems to plague corporate America. In this piece, he argues the real problem lies deep in the white collar ranks, where large inefficiencies and enormous risks are created by a lack of visibility.

Take a minute to read the piece and let us know your thoughts.

Frederick Winslow Taylor is known as the father of scientific management.

In the late19^th Century, FWT studied the gainful organization of work within the corporation, from a structured, ordered perspective.  In his view, there were two types of people engaged in this endeavor. Those who do the work, and those who manage the work.  Put simply, the work of the workers is to do. And the work of the managers is to think.  Managers do not work; they control work.  And workers do not think, they do.  Managers = Brains. Workers = Brawn.

Here is a Taylor quote from Wikipedia that nicely illustrates the viewpoint:

“I can say, without the slightest hesitation, that the science of handling pig-iron is so great that the man who is physically able to handle pig-iron and is sufficiently phlegmatic and stupid to choose this for his occupation is rarely able to comprehend the science of handling pig-iron.”

Now don’t get me wrong.  I have a lot of respect for FWT’s pioneering efforts in the field of business theory and as a management consultant.

But now, BPM, a Three-Letter-Acronym, has killed him dead.

How did BPM inflict this fatal blow?

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I recently attended a Lean Six Sigma conference. It’s always interesting to hear evangelists from various industries in different countries sharing their experiences with improving efficiency, effectiveness, and moving towards a culture of high performance and continuous improvement.

It never fails to surprise me how dogmatic many are about their particular flavor of methodology. Within the Lean Six Sigma camp there are Six Sigma purists who will partake of no Lean. There are Lean gurus who speak not of Six Sigma. Then there are the fusionistas, who happily take the best bits of both. (Personally, I’m willing to utilize any tools that get results within a structured framework.) Some proudly advertise their allegiance, while others refuse to be pigeonholed and embrace a more neutral term such as Process Improvement or Operational Excellence. As a pragmatist I tend towards the latter – in my experience, for every person out there in a position of influence who is pro a “Big M” methodology, there will be another who is equally (or more!) anti that same methodology. So why provoke resistance to change over a mere label? Well, that’s just my two cents!

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I’d like to share with you a little set-piece that I often use with clients as a learning aid.  I call it (rather unimaginatively!) my “Google Maps exercise” and it makes some very neat points with regards to process decomposition and modeling best practices.

A common challenge I encounter is that people get bogged down with figuring out the level of detail they should go to. This isn’t because of the lack of a definitive standard for process levels – I think the root cause of the difficulty is simply that process modeling is not an exact science.  In fact, much of it is quite subjective.

So, the exercise usually goes something like this…

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Like all enterprise software solutions, the person implementing a BPM strategy must contend with a chasm between the business and IT. The two speak different languages, have different priorities and tend to justify results in a different light.

So which side do you approach first?

There’s a tendency for enterprise software to gravitate to IT. And why not?  IT gets it, right? They understand the technology and the inherent benefits it brings to the table. And IT is constantly justifying new software, hardware and services through the annual budget reviews. So it seems natural for anyone wishing to see a BPM solution deployed to look at IT first.

I believe this is a mistake.

Despite conventional thinking, the right place to begin conveying the benefits of a BPM deployment is on the business side of the house. That’s because BPM has to be looked at not for the technology, features and specs, but for its ability to change and improve the business.

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Yesterday SearchCIO and Accenture published a new webcast with Bob Shallow, who is the Director of Global Product Development Processes, Systems and Operations at NACCO Material Handling Group, a $2.8 billion dollar company that engineers and manufactures Hyster and Yale Material Handling Equipment (lift trucks, aftermarket parts, etc.).

NACCO is also a Lombardi customer, and you can read more about them here.

In the webcast Bob talks about what exactly has been accomplished using BPM at NACCO, demonstrating an architectural step-through of how their processes have changed, with a particular focus on ROI. It’s exciting that so many Lombardi customers like NACCO are passionate about their BPM successes and want to share their best practices.

You’ll need to register on the SearchCIO site to view the webcast.

Do not be alarmed. This post is not an instruction manual on the finer points of BPMN. For those of you who wish to indulge, this should provide you with many hours of entertainment.

Rather, I want to reflect upon a few thoughts about process modeling, and share some practical hints.

And whilst Blueprint is my favorite modeling tool in existence, the following comments are equally applicable whether you’re using sticky notes, a white board, or the back of an envelope. (I’ve also seen bits of string used quite creatively!)

Process modeling is a process in itself. Therefore, like any other process, we can aim to improve its efficiency, effectiveness and flexibility. So instead of approaching modeling in an ad-hoc manner, how can we make it more repeatable, reduce the cycle time, raise quality and customer satisfaction?

To me, process modeling is fundamentally an exercise in communication. A model may be generated in order to share information between members of a project team about the way the process currently works. Or to share information between the project team and the stakeholders. Or with vendors. Or between a business expert and a business analyst. Or a business analyst and a developer. In all of these instances, the process modeling is not meant to be an end in itself, but a means to identify, verify, and inform interested parties about the way the process is, could or should be.

If we accept the model as an abstraction of reality, a visual representation of various process attributes, then the question arises not so much as to whether a process model is right or wrong, but, like a conversation between two people – is it effective or ineffective? Does it convey useful meaning to the intended audience, or not? A meaningful communication forms a sound basis for action – but a confusing, misleading or ambiguous one cannot be expected to yield a high quality outcome. Garbage in, garbage out.

How then, to create effective, clear, useful communication about a process?

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There’s a great piece up on Forbes right now, titled “The ABC’s of BPM.”

The article is part of the very well-informed “JargonSpy” series, whose goal is to educate the publication’s audience about the business value behind some of the technology world’s more opaque acronyms (let’s be honest, BPM isn’t exactly swimming in sex appeal is it?)

The author is Dan Woods, who is also the CTO at Evolved Media and the author of the book Process First: The Evolution of the Business Process Expert.

In the article, Dan talks in depth about the coming of age of the process expert, especially vis-à-vis the translation task that is “needed constantly between the business as it defines the process and the IT staff as it communicates what functionality is needed.”

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In today’s economic environment, it is as important as ever to be able to provide hard metrics as proof of a successful BPM project.  This is not to mention that in general, metrics are the icing on the cake when making a case for further, organization-wide process initiatives (and to executives in particular).  Today, I want to dive further into that topic and discuss some of the common metrics businesses use, as well as the tangibility issues inherent to each.  The more familiar you are with presenting the value of a BPM project, the more likely you will be able to get executive buy-in.

Efficiency - How quick can we get it done?

Reducing the cycle time on a process, whether it is a new hire process or loan origination, provides value.  You can quantify the amount of time it took before the project and quantify how long each cycle takes after the process improvements.  Efficiency has a high tangibility factor, it’s measurable, and therefore remains the strongest, or most useful selling point when trying to achieve buy-in from other units in the organization.

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