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.
Ed.: This is the fourth and last post in a series of Q+A sessions focusing specifically on playback session best practices, with our in-house expert, Kris Komassa. See our previous coverage here.
Anyone besides the BPM team, subject matter experts, and business managers that you’ve had involved in a playback session? Who do you usually suggest be present?
It varies. I’ve had CIOs CEOs, end users, it runs the gamut. Ultimately, you want to have a true cross-section of the organization present.
I always like to have my core project team and IT staff involved of course, but again when it comes to the playback, a diversity of roles and perspectives is important. For example, one bank we work with has a very diverse set of processes, so within their playbacks I have had a bank teller, a bank CSR person, a bank loan officer, a bank loan manager, an executive approver and then the core project team on top of that.
For me if you follow that process from a linear prospective, you need to have someone who can weigh in on every part of the process. I like to have people in the room to say “yes” or “no” each step of the way — and in that sense you need to think long and hard and do your best to anticipate the questions that are going to be asked at every stage. You learn over time, of course, too, and I’m always happy to talk in greater depth about specific industries or situations, just leave a note in the comments.
The other day SearchCIO published a feature on BPM that included two Lombardi customers, Wells Fargo and NACCO Materials Handling.
The piece is notable as a case study because of the quantifiable successes it reports – for example, the $250,000 savings realized on a project with the centralized loan disposition group at Wells Fargo, and the cost authorization system that Bob Shallow and his team over at NACCO implemented in an unprecedented 15 days.
The author, Sarah Varney, is right in pointing out the many challenges companies face along the way – everything from internal politics, to an inherent distrust of IT tools on the part of the business, to issues of bandwidth and a lack of resources. But as Wells Fargo and NACCO have shown, anything is possible with the right team and the right solution.
Thinking about different ways to explain BPM to your co-workers? Check out the video below – produced by NACCO Materials Handling Group. They make REALLY big forklifts. Bet you never thought you could use Benny Hill to explain why your company needs BPM?
For the more serious side of this BPM initiative, check out Bob Shallow (Director of Global Product Development) on a recent webinar that highlights lessons learned from his initial process improvement efforts. Note that you will have to register with eBizQ. Here is the link.
This short, 3-minute podcast features Peter Schoof, the editor of ebizQ, and Gene Rawls, VP of Continuous Improvement at Wells Fargo (a Lombardi customer). It was recorded last week at the Gartner BPM Summit in Washington, D.C., where Gene gave a talk titled “How Wells Fargo Built a Cross-Organizational BPM Capability.”
In the podcast, Gene goes over the three categories of gains that the company is pursuing with its BPM initiatives:
Cost take-out, i.e. improving processes where the company doesn’t need to spend at the level at which it is currently spending
Cost avoidance, i.e. where the company can avoid an expense altogether
Revenue increase, which is self explanatory, but just as important as the other two categories, and in some cases even moreso
BPM project durations are usually measured in weeks-to-months – not months-to-years. With this velocity, you can’t afford to get stuck in the rut of traditional “define & design” techniques based on multiple rounds of 1-on-1 analysis meetings. In fact, I’d go so far as to label this as rework which increases a project’s cycle time!
I’m an enthusiastic supporter of the workshop format, where not only speed, but also quality, visibility and buy-in are greatly enhanced compared to the 1-on-1 approach. You could say it’s a way of applying process improvement methods to the way we carry out process improvement itself (or “PI2” as I like to call it).
In a previous blog, I shared some secrets of success for the “2 x 6 workshop“. One of the critical success factors is utilizing a facilitator – “an impartial, objective analyst to run the session, keep it crisp and in-focus”. Let’s dive into that a bit more. Why do we need the facilitator role, how does it add value to the process of process improvement, and how can it be done well?
The Lombardi team is gearing up for the Gartner BPM Summit next week, Sept. 10 – 12 in Washington to D.C. If you can make it there, the event will showcase some very interesting and compelling Lombardi customer stories.
Bob Shallow, director of global product development at NACCO Materials Handling Group will share his experiences on a BPM case study panel session during the conference. And Gene Rawls, vice president of continuous improvement at Wells Fargo Financial will present his company’s BPM experiences in a Lombardi-hosted case study session.
From Lombardi, Phil Gilbert, president, will present during a luncheon keynote. During his presentation, “Governing an Enterprise-Wide BPM Program” Phil will share insight into new structural capabilities in chartering and governance needed to make BPM an internal competency to scale the delivery of BPM projects. He’ll also propose five “Charters for BPM Governance” to help companies make the move from “project to program.”
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.
For their recent InformationWeek Analytics 2008 Tomorrow’s CIO Survey, the well-known trade publication quizzed 720 corporate managers, including CEOs, CFOs, and COOs, as well as CIOs and VPs of IT-level executives, about the attributes most desirable for future business technology leaders.
IW’s John Soat then posted an excellent write-up of the survey’s findings, and I’ve been thinking about it ever since. John writes:
“Whether they know it or not–and most do–companies need an executive leader well versed in both technology and business processes. The CIO position is tailor made to take that role. . .the question is, which CIOs will step up to it?”
This chart (also below) based on the survey’s findings isn’t surprising if you’ve been looking at things from a process point of view as long as we have, but it’s not trivial that respondents noted “Need to manage or optimize business process” as the #1 priority as the CIO continues to strive to become more of a business leader.
Getting started with BPM makes many people nervous, and for good reason. Change can bring uncertainty and fear – and hence often generates resistance. In response to this type of internal skepticism and unrest, I frequently recommend conducting a 2×6 workshop when initially analyzing your processes to engage and excite the people who live the processes every day.
But before I tell how to run a 2×6 workshop, I would like to put it in context:
BPM is first and foremost a discipline to improve the efficiency, effectiveness and agility of a business, from a process viewpoint, to deliver real business value. That being said, you have to do a certain amount of rewiring PEOPLE and your organization before you can start worrying about the software.
To really drive BPM in your organization, you need strategies in place to make the shift a bit easier for your workers to consume. People don’t want change to be forced upon them. But if you present them with an opportunity to help drive that change, then they can become fully invested as participants who help shape their own future. So when you begin your initiative and need to take stock of where you are, you do some process analysis. How do you get started?
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