Occasionally, the default positioning may not have the results that you expected to see. As a trick, in some cases you may use Relaxed Layout to help position your process more to your desired layout and to help change line routing to be more as expected.

First I want to describe what Relaxed Layout is. Relaxed layout is the ability to move one object to a relative position around a 2nd object.

Take a look at this example (Click on Image to Enlarge)

Notice the process is written as

A > B > C

where > represents a line drawn from one Activity to Another

The rule for relaxed layout is you are allowed to move Activity2 around Activity1 if a line directly connects Activity1 to Activity2.

So in this example

• One can position Activity B ABOVE or BELOW Activity A because a line directly connects A to B
• One can position Activity C ABOVE or BELOW Activity B because a line directly connects B to C
• One CANNOT position Activity C ABOVE or BELOW Activity A because a line does NOT directly connect A to C

To observe this, click on B and drag it BELOW A. Notice a grey dropline bar appears. The grey dropline bar appears telling you that the drop is allowed. If a position is in use, then a drop may not be allowed. Seeing the dropline tells you that are allowed to position an object relative to another object the dropline appears around (in this example Activity A). 

 After you let go, the diagram in Relaxed Layout appears as this

Notice now how you have moved Activity B to have relative position to be BELOW Activity A. This is called Relaxed Layout because the positioning changes the behavior of the layout of the diagram from it’s default positioning. Seeing the dropline appear when you reposition objects on a diagram shows you that you are invoking relaxed layout on your diagram.

In this simple example, the Relaxed Layout demonstrated how you can position objects relative to each other. If you had wanted to make C have some relative position with A, you could have draw a line from A to C, position C appropriately and then delete the line from A to C.

Here is another example of a more complicated process now where it may not seem obvious how Relaxed Layout may be able to change line routing in your favor.

Before you perform Relaxed Layout, as a BEST PRACTICE, always take a MANUAL snapshot BEFORE you do relaxed layout in complicated processes. In case the layout is not working as you want it to, it will be easier to revert back to an original snapshot. You can also press UNDO within the same session, but a manual snapshot is safer to have before beginning the edits.

Here is a part of a process that is using ALL default layouts from Blueprint

Notice on this process that the “End” event comes out from A1 Activity. In this example, I want to delete the End Event. When I do, this change occurs

As you can see from the image above, by deleting the End event, the line from A1 is now crossing over the other line that goes to A2. This would not be the desired result here.

Each process will require your own “trial and error” tests, which is why having the “original snapshot” is good so you can revert changes if you want to.

Looking at this process, I can see that IF I made A2 have relative position under A1, that the line from A1 may be drawn more directly to A2. By making A2 have relative position BELOW A1, it will make the default line go under A1 to A2.

To do this I will do these steps

1)  Make a manual snapshot of my process (“v1 – original layout”)

2) Now I drag A2 so it is in the same swimlane / milestone cell as A1 is, just so I can do the positioning.

3) Position A2 so it is explicitly positioned under A1. You will see the grey dropline appear showing this re-positioning is possible

4)  After you let go, the diagram will look like this

5)  What this now does is it has added a relative position for A2 to be BELOW A1. When you move A2 out now it keeps some of that relativity in between swimlanes and milestones. This is what will allow the line to get a more direct path to A2.

Move A2 back to its original position

 6)  Now delete the End event again from A1. Notice now the line doesn’t overlap with the line for A2 because a relative positioning was added.

Using relaxed layout can be a powerful trick to get your processes to look more like you want them to.

In closing here is a summary of what to keep in mind when using this trick

• Always make a manual snapshot of the process BEFORE you do relaxed layout. For very complicated processes, relaxed layout may be tricky to get as you want after your 1st attempt, so having a manual snapshot to revert your changes is a good practice
• Getting your results will require a “trial and error” approach, so you may have to try a few tests to see if the layout is what you wanted. Using UNDO during ONLY the same editing session is a good way to quickly back out the changes you made (DO NOT refresh your page, or your undo stack will be lost and you won’t be able to undo your steps anymore)
• Always try to create as much of your process using Blueprint’s default layout 1st before using relaxed layout. Using relaxed layout will be best used when you are just tweaking the final layouts of your diagram vs using from the BEGINNING of creating your process or when you have  a lot of your process left to create.
• Be patient. When you initially shuffle things around especially with very complicated processes, your process may start to look “messed up”. You may need to move things around a bit to eventually get the layout that you desire.

Hope this may help you in some of your layout issues. With some patience, you can usually get a layout that you want in most cases.

So go ahead and upload your picture today and let us know what you think!

As always, this release also features improvements based upon what we’ve heard from you such as

• Ability to restrict inviting users as an admin security feature
• Improving the export to Microsoft Word to use headers better to support the creation of a table of contents in the Blueprint Microsoft Word Export

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. And if you want to hear the latest inside info on what’s coming next, make sure you follow us on Twitter.

No Diagram Created

If no diagram is created for your process, the ordering on the diagram view is more predicatable. You can see this from the example of the image below

On the Discovery Map for a process with no diagram one can see this (Click on the image to enlarge)

On the Documentation View it looks like this (Click on the image to enlarge)

Notice how the order seems pretty reasonable going down each Milestone.

Diagram Created

The complexity occurs when you create a diagram in your process.  Once a diagram is created, the order on the Discovery Map and Process Diagram are no longer linked together. The reason for this is because the Discovery Map does not display some objects like in the Process Diagram like (events, decisions) which may make the ordering not logical if they were still linked together.

Once a diagram is created, the ordering for the Documentation View is controlled by the Process Diagram and not the Discovery Map. You have to go to the Process Diagram to change the order on the Documentation View once a diagram is created for the process.

The numbering on the Documentation View will follow a single path through a Milestone to the next milestone 1st. If there are decisions that cause branches  in a milestone, the 2nd branch will be numbered next out of the milestone first before numbering will start on the 2nd Milestone. All the paths / branches will be followed out within one Milestone before the numbering begins for a 2nd milestone.

Look at the example below

On the Process Diagram for a process one can see this (Click on the image to enlarge)

The corresponding Documentation View will look like this (Click on the image to enlarge)

Notice in Milestone 1, that the order is like this

A1 > A2 > Decision >A3 > A4

then there is a branch in the Decision that is

Decision > A7 > A8

In Milestone 2 the order is this

A5 > A6

When you look at the Documentation View,  the ordering is like this

A1

A2

Decision

A3

A4

A7

A8

A5

A6

The ordering for the milestone occurs like this because in Milestone 1, the 1st thing that happens is a simple path is made from the one end of the milestone to the end of the Milestone

This is why A1 > A2 > Decision A3 > A4 is in a logical order.

After A4, one may think A5 in Milestone 2 would come next. This doesn’t happen because the Decision in Milestone 1. Before the numbering will start in Milestone 2, all flows out from Milestone 1 must be traversed. The ones not traversed yet in Milestone 1 is A7 and A8. This is why these come next in the numbering vs A5 and A6 in Milestone 2

The trick to keep in mind is to be aware that numbering is going to have to finish everyting in a Milestone 1st before it will start numbering things in the 2nd Milestone.

So if your process is being logical across Milestone and a Decision exists, you need to be aware that the order may not be as you expect.

Some recommendations to make, is if a process diagram is not necessary for your discovery, try not to create one. This will make the order more predictable on the Documentation View.

If you need to have a diagram, then you have to be aware that numbering is grouped by Milestones with all the paths traversed 1st BEFORE it will start numbering in the next Milestone.

One can also see an example with in Blueprint using the Template library. To find this example

1. Click on Template Library grouping on the left side
2. In the drop down select Process Patterns
3. Click on Parallel Flow with a Simple Split

This shows an example of a join.

Look at the following video to show how one can create a join when diagramming in Blueprint.

Let’s take a look at the enhancements in detail:

• Follow Me: Unfortunately, our responsibilities usually don’t fall neatly within the bounds of a single process. If you’re the owner of a critical IT system, how do you know what are all the processes that depend on you? How do you know when they change? Similarly, if you’re in a role that often has cross functional responsibilities, how do you know when there’s a process change that requires your attention?

  The solution: follow the items that you’re responsible for or interested in inside Blueprint.

  Let’s take a look at how it works:
  

  

  You can follow nearly anything in Blueprint — an entire project, process, activity, or individual piece of data such as a role, input, output, system, or problem — simply by clicking the star next to your desired item. Once you’ve followed something, you’ll receive updates in your news feed every time the item is used in a new process, removed from a process, or updated.

  We’ve also taken this opportunity to make the What’s New feed on the home page both more focused and more detailed. You can now choose to narrow down your list of updates to only your followed items, which can help keep your attention centered on what’s most valuable to you. Additionally, we’ve added Recent Changes links to the entries in the feed; these allow you to drill in and see the nitty gritty details behind each transaction.

  The redesigned home page and ability to follow items in Blueprint has already greatly raised the level of visibility of process changes for us internally on the team here at IBM. Please try it out and let us know what you think!

• Redesigned Project Page: The project details page has also gotten some great changes for this release. Based upon your feedback, we’ve streamlined the page, removing parts that weren’t valuable and surfacing other information that was. As a result, you’ll notice that we’ve traded the old project maturity status bar for a new changes section. The changes section instantly shows you what’s happening across your entire project and even gives you the ability to drill down and see the complete details of each modification. Whether you’re running a process improvement effort or just want to see what your coworkers are doing, the new project page is a simple and quick way to get a handle on what’s happening on your team.

As always, this release also features many smaller improvements based upon what we’ve heard from you — including reliability and formatting improvements to the process documentation editor and a cleaner theme for generated PowerPoint presentations. 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. And if you want to hear the latest inside info on what’s coming next, make sure you follow us on Twitter.

So far it has been great, in fact, we just wrapped up our Guest Executive Forum where we had Lincoln Trust Company speak on our behalf about their successful implementation of Lombardi BPM.  Speakers included Bonnie Lewis, VP of Business Operations and Bill Garner, Senior IT Director of Solutions and Innovation.

Lincoln Trust Company (LTC) took advantage of our BPM capabilities to go beyond their main challenges of standardizing their document management and workflow processes,  to bridging the gap between their IT and Business side of the house.  Session attendees learned not only about the great results achieved by LTC (120% ROI in year 1 and 90% reduction in customer complaints),  but also about the lessons learned by LTC throughout their BPM journey (don’t over analyze, build the right team capabilities), along with tips on how to get started on the BPM journey.

As you have heard from us time and again – the success of our customers is what drives us to innovate and deliver products that can help solve crucial business problems.  Special thanks to Bonnie and Bill for a wonderful presentation as well as to the session attendees for the insightful questions!

Welcome Keynote

We kicked off the week with Lombardi Day, a special Lombardi Driven event specifically for Lombardi customers and partners. Lombardi and IBM leaders  were on-site to provide an executive update on the state of Lombardi as well as a status on the acquisition and how Lombardi will fit within the IBM WebSphere portfolio.

IBM, Lombardi Executives at Lombardi Day

As the week progressed, Lombardi was recognized as the leader in BPM technology with exposure in multiple main stage keynotes, conference sessions, meet the expert demos and open labs often resulting in larger than expected turnouts.  Perhaps the best highlight was when Beth Smith, WebSphere VP of Development, gave a live demo of Blueprint during the Day 2 Keynote.

Visit Impact’s YouTube site to see the excellent keynote sessions!

Keynote Session: Nancy Pearson, Vice President, BPM, SOA, & WebSphere Marketing, SWG

As always, what makes Lombardi unique is our extremely talented and successful customers.  Special thanks to:

• Paul Nussbaum, Ford Motor Company
• Richard Ward, Blue Cross Blue Shield of Michigan
• Erik Keller, SIRVA
• Farrukh Humayun, PNC Bank
• Paul Tazbaz, Wells Fargo

If you were unable to attend, don’t worry…Impact Comes To You!  The first IMPACT comes to you event will be held in London.

Lombardi would also like to take this opportunity to thank all of our customers who attended Impact 2010 – it was great seeing you!  And last, but not least – Thanks to the Impact Planning Team for a wonderful event – we’re looking forward to next year!

The May 2010 update is now live on blueprint.lombardi.com! We have some exciting changes in this release that I can’t wait to tell you about.

First things first — we’ve changed our name! We’re now called IBM BPM Blueprint and our sister product, Teamworks, is now WebSphere Lombardi Edition. You can read all about it in the announcement here. We’re now officially part of the IBM product portfolio, and you’ll see us leveraging more and more of IBM’s capabilities to make you more productive over the next few weeks and months.

We also have two great enhancements for you. The first is our new Template Library, which has a wealth of processes that represent industry and functional best practices to help you get your documentation efforts jump started. Second, we’ve introduced the Blueprint API, which allows you to integrate Blueprint more closely with your existing systems.

Let’s take a look at the enhancements in detail:

• Template Library: There’s no need to reinvent the wheel. No matter what kind of document you’re creating, it’s always quicker to start from a template than a blank slate. If I need to send a fax or create a newsletter, Microsoft Word comes with many options that just require me to fill in a few blanks and hit save. Why should documenting processes be any different?

  That’s why today we’re introducing the Blueprint Template Library. It’s stocked with a wealth of process models that represent best practices across different industries and functions that you can leverage to get a head start on your documentation efforts. You’ll find templates for the HR and finance functions as well as common process patterns that span industries. We’ve also made some of the great content from the BPM BlueWorks community available as well, including the APQC Process Classification Framework. We’ll be adding more and more content in the future, so be sure to drop us a line and let us know what other types of process templates would be useful for you.

  And one more thing: we think you’ll find the Template Library interface a joy to use to browse, search for, and preview your processes. Check out the tutorial video from Craig Moser, our head of design, for a quick peek.

• Blueprint API: We’ve also made it easier for you to integrate Blueprint with your existing systems. For the technical audience, we’ve created a REST API that allows you to access your processes, attachments, and account activity feeds. Check out the API documentation in the help section for all the details.

  The Blueprint API opens up a ton of possibilities — it’s now possible to embed content from your account on other websites, or even make it available on your mobile device. Give it a try today and let us know what you think.

As always, this release also features many smaller improvements based upon what we’ve heard from you — including additional security controls for invitations and better time zone support in printed output. 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. And if you want to hear the latest inside info on what’s coming next, make sure you follow us on Twitter.

It all started Monday evening at the Austin Music Hall with an interesting presentation by Phil Gilbert at the Opening Reception.  This was followed by the 2010 Lombardi Science Fair, an event that has been at Lombardi for 5 years now and is something we hope IBM will continue well into the future.

Phil's presentation during Science Fair

Science Fair Passport and Program

Science Fair is a place where innovation is really unleashed throughout the company.  This year, 20 creative and talented teams competed for a $1,000 cash prize and the honor of winning the most votes from their colleagues.  The rules are simple - teams of up to 3 people can join forces to build something bigger and better, and projects can be anything that isn’t in our product road-maps for the next 12 months.

Gathering and admiring projects

Matt Howitt placing his vote via iPhone

We all had the chance to vote electronically for whom we thought presented the best new idea.  Voting took place at laptop stations or on smartphones – the electronic voting system was designed using Teamworks of course!  There were definitely a lot of really cool projects to choose from.  Congratulations to this year’s winner – Team BAM (Bryan Campbell, Allison Lura and Morten Moeller).  Hopefully we’ll see their project in a future release of Teamworks, but for now they hold the coveted Golden Beanie.

Science Fair Winners!

The night ended with a fantastic live performance by The Band of Heathens.

The Band of Heathens

The rest of the week, events were  held at the Hyatt Regency in downtown Austin. There were many different sessions including keynotes by:

• Rod Favaron – CEO of Lombardi
• Craig Hayman – GM Application & Integration Middleware at IBM Software Group
• Phil Gilbert – President and CTO of Lombardi

We also had breakout sessions for the whole company, as well as for each division, in which Lombardi and IBM came together as a team to discuss joint strategies moving forward.  In addition, the Networking Cocktail Reception and the Awards Dinner was a great way to unwind, spend time with friends and make some new ones!

Fahad Osmani receiving his award from Rod and Phil

Enjoying the Awards Dinner

Overall, it was an awesome week – one that I’m sure we will all remember.  Thank you to everyone who put Kickoff and Science Fair together, as well as to everyone who attended for making this year’s event truly remarkable.

Todd Plunk receiving his award from Rod

The Golden Beanie.

• First, Paul Swinson, CREWS Programme Manager, Homeloan Management Ltd. (HML) will present a solution provider session detailing how the Company used BPM to improve the control and efficiency across its customer’s Credit Management Processes.  Attendees will discover how organisations can get the most BPM value from the 2009 ‘Global Excellence in BPM & Workflow’ award winner.

 Time: Monday, March 1, 14:30 – 15:00 in Westbourne 3

•  Next, Tukka Heinonen, Head of Business Process Management, Business Services Finland(part of TeliaSonera) will share his BPM experiences in an end-user case study – “Implementing BPM to Streamline Sales Process in TeliaSonera Finland.”

 Time: Monday, March 1, 15:25 – 16:05 in Westbourne 1

• Also,  Neil Francis, Head of Business Operations Support Services, Euler Hermes UK, will present an end-user case study entitled: “Beware – BPM Tools Are Very Seductive!” 

Time: Tuesday, March 2, 11:50 – 12:30 in Westbourne 1

Additionally, Jim Rudden, our global VP of marketing, will be participating in a Premier Sponsor panel discussion on the main stage. That panel, entitled “Speed Predicting,” is being moderated by Daryl Plummer, Managing VP and Gartner Fellow & Jim Sinur, Research VP, Gartner. The panel format is guaranteed to be unlike any you’ve seen in the past, so you won’t want to miss it.

Time: Monday March 1, 11:30 – 12:00 in Wesbourne 3. 

While you are at the conference, come by to meet the Lombardi team as well as our new IBM brethren in the Solution Showcase located in the Nine Kings Suite on the ground floor of the hotel.  As an added treat, we will be serving a sampling of Champagne, Chocolate and Strawberries on Monday night.

We hope to see you there!

WebSphere Business Modeler has some of the most advanced simulation capabilities on the market, so it’s a great option for taking the analysis of your process to the next level. Blueprint’s speed and simplicity combined with WBM’s deep capabilities make a great match.

You’ll find the new option for WebSphere Business Modeler on the Export Data screen. Try it out and let us know what you think!

A recent study by Staffing.com revealed that 70% of applicants and 28% of hiring managers are dissatisfied with how their hiring processes work; and that is just one of the many critical processes in your company. Effective documentation of your HR processes can lead to impressive savings and a large reduction in your company’s overhead.

Optimizing your HR processes is critical for saving time, avoiding errors and reducing company overhead. The absolute best way to save time and money is through process documentation. If you are interested in finding out how to quickly document and streamline your key processes, there is a simple next step. Just click the link below to download the full white paper.

Get the White Paper: A Simple Approach to Documenting Your HR Process

Ready to start documenting your processes now? To effectively document your processes, you will need the right tool. Click here for a free trial of Lombardi Blueprint, the easiest process documentation tool on the market.

• NACCO Materials Handling Group – 2009 CIO 100 Award for automating several processes and introducing the capability to track core processes in real time, eliminating the risk of defective designs entering production.
• WE Energies – Honorable Mention – Gartner “Out of the Box BPM Delivery” Award for improving efficiencies and customer service of their Low Income Pilot Project which helps low income customers change their long term approach to managing their energy consumption and their energy bill.
• Homeloan Management Ltd. UK – 2009 Silver BPM Excellence Award for Europe for their Credit Management Project which has significantly improved the efficiency of the process and also added a much greater level of control.
• Lincoln Trust Company – 2009 Gold BPM Excellence Award for N. America for delivering the most tangible results and benefits to its users which have generated firm metrics including reduced staffing costs, reduction in cycle-times for internal and external stakeholders, and substantial increase in employee productivity.

Congratulations to these and all of our customers for their continued success with BPM – As Lombardi joins the IBM family, we certainly look forward to another remarkable year of customer successes in 2010!

Rachel recently sat down with Jim Rudden, VP of Marketing with Lombardi to record a webinar on how Blueprint has helped her company restructure, document and standardize their processes. To listen to the full webinar, click here.

In the webinar, Rachel explains that one of the biggest challenges they faced was that everyone had their own way of doing things. Documents were in piles all over people’s desks and everyone was doing their processes differently. There was no standardization within their processes, which was costing them time and money. PRC needed to be able to take a narrative of their situation and see it in a visual manner.

Blueprint, Lombardi’s business process mapping tool, was able to help PRC turn text based documentation into graphical diagrams to identify process opportunities. Once PRC was able to visualize their processes and see the loopholes, the light bulbs went on!

The results of mapping out their processes in Blueprint was the ability to clearly centralize and standardize business processes across separate groups, saving them both time and money.

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.

Let’s take a look at the enhancements in detail:

• Refined Process Analysis: We’ve gotten some excellent feedback since we introduced Blueprint’s new analysis mode in October. If you haven’t tried it for yourself yet, in analysis mode Blueprint heat maps your diagram with the information you’ve collected about your process. Areas of waste, high cost or cycle time, and opportunities for improvement instantly stand out. It allows you to have insight and visibility into your process that would have been difficult and time consuming to get previously.

  Today we’ve added several improvements based upon your feedback. First, we’ve made both the diagram and the analysis list show much more information presentably. The diagram now shows more detail on the dimension of your process that you’re viewing through a combination of badges on the activities as well as interactive tooltips. Likewise, the analysis list also shows each of the activities in context with the value that’s being heat mapped to them. Want to see the systems your activities leverage while viewing your process as a BPMN diagram? That’s now a very easy task.

  One more thing: everything you see in the analysis view is now printable.

• Flexible Printing: Some of the most frequent questions I hear from customers revolve around how to most effectively present their processes to their audiences. While the best answer is to invite them to collaborate online and offer their feedback as participants, that’s not always possible. Sometimes a 19th century hard copy is the best answer. To that end, we’ve greatly enhanced the flexibility you have when creating PDFs of your information in Blueprint. You can now choose to fit your process to any number of pages — from “as many as it takes” at 100%, to just one, to anything in between. Don’t have legal paper in your printer and would rather use two pieces of letter size instead? Not a problem.

• User Administration Streamlined: One of Blueprint’s greatest strengths is that it’s easy to scale up or scale down the number of people in your account as often as you like. Have a big project coming up? It’s easy to give access to your new team members for just the period of time they need. You don’t have to worry about making a big investment in a piece of software that someone will use for a month and then never look at again.

  Along those lines, we’ve made user administration in Blueprint simpler than ever. You can export a report of all your users and the last time they logged in, which makes keeping track of activity easier than ever. You can change an invited user’s role with the click of button.  Performance — especially when you have hundreds of users — has also been substantially improved.

As always, this release also features many smaller improvements based upon what we’ve heard from you — including an improved editing experience in the documentation view and improved performance across the board. 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.

Aviva currently has 23 live BPM projects. One, the “Joiners, movers and leavers” system, tracks staff across their time with Aviva, from both an HR, and an information and systems access point of view. It was built in less than 12 weeks using Lombardi’s BPM tools.

In the podcast, Mr. Redshaw claimed that BPM is the single-most important technology he has seen for helping to improve the business in his 28+ years. We couldn’t agree more!

To listen to the entire interview (7:05), go here

In February of 2009 SEARHC launched the ALERT Emergency Department Information System, becoming one of the first and largest tribal health organizations in the country to begin implementing this comprehensive electronic medical record (EMR) system.  The ALERT EMR is interconnected to ancillary systems (Novarad for diagnostic imaging, Mediware for pharmacy, Orchard for laboratory, etc) using the Health Level  Seven (HL7) messaging protocol.  HL7 facilitates a standard language between systems, but SEARHC recognized the need for process mapping and documentation in the messaging methodology since every vendor accepted and passed along data such as x-ray orders, lab reports and billing information in slightly different ways.

SEARHC’s use of Blueprint wasn’t just about process mapping and documentation, but really about communicating and collaborating with their external vendors.  SEARHC subscribes to Blueprint as Authors, where they can define and document processes. They then supply their vendors with Participant seats for viewing and providing feedback.  In this way, processes mapped out by SEARHC can be easily viewed and commented on by vendors.  Blueprint process diagrams are treated as working documents, providing SEARHC the ability to discuss HL7 workflow proposals and to negotiate changes on the fly.  Blueprint serves as a great collaborative tool as it allows for effective communication between SEARHC and its vendors.

SEARHC’s internal processes have also become more efficient after the concept of swimlanes was so easily demonstrated with Blueprint – now the right task is done by the right person at the right time!  According to Peter,  SEARHC staff have found the product to be very useful and are impressed with the updates – I’m sure they are excited about the latest Blueprint release!

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.

Let’s take a look the enhancements in detail:

• BPMN 2.0 Exports: We’re committed to ensuring that you can use your processes in whatever way you’d like with whichever system that works best for you. To that end, we’re delivering the first shipping implementation of the BPMN 2.0 export format. We expect BPMN 2.0 to quickly become the de facto standard for exchanging process diagrams among modeling tools. The BPMN 2.0 specification just reached beta status, and as Bruce Silver pointed out there are areas where it still could be improved. We hope that our implementation can help further the discussion and serve as a reference for others in the industry. We think that well designed and supported standards are hugely beneficial for our customers and we’re committed to making BPMN 2.0 just that.

  And don’t forget: Blueprint also supports XPDL 2.1 to give you the maximum flexibility with your models today.

• Full Text Search: Blueprint’s search feature now indexes all of the content in your account — project and process documentation, inputs, outputs, and all of the other assets you’ve entered. Have a question about the onboarding process in your company? You’re just a search away from the answer. Need to see everywhere your legacy CRM system is leveraged in your organization? Not a problem. We’ve been using the enhanced search at Lombardi for the last few weeks and it has hugely increased the visibility of our internal processes already. You’ll wonder how you ever lived without it.

• What’s New Feed Improvements: Blueprint’s What’s New activity feeds give you instant notifications and visibility into the information you care about to do your work more effectively. The feeds are very powerful — just like social networking sites like LinkedIn and Facebook do for you for updates from your circle of friends, Blueprint lets you know about changes to processes that are important to you at your company.

  Our design team has been listening to your feedback and as a result we’ve introduced significant improvements to the usability of the feeds. They are much more readable now, making it even easier to skim them for the information you need. Similar entries are rolled up to save space and reduce clutter, the times of updates are always visible to give you better context, and filtering options have been expanded and improved. Try it out and keep the feedback coming!

On top of that, there are many, many small improvements that we’ve added during this release — everything from tweaks to “where used” to longer process names. 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.

FCE, which is a subsidiary of the Bank of Ireland Group, provides a broad range of currency conversion products and services to wide range of industries and uses both Blueprint and Teamworks as an alternative to traditional application development. Using BPM lets them deliver projects an eye-popping 50% faster than traditional  approaches.

Some important take-aways discussed in the webinar include:

• How they became self sufficient after their very first project
• How they gather business requirements in a much more collaborative way
• How they recevied valuable feedback during development, not waiting until after it’s 80% built
• How to engage the business to take ownership in their business applications

To listen to the FCE webinar, go here (you will need to register) or alternately you can listen to a podcast version of the interview here.

Let’s take a look the enhancements in detail:

• Model Portability With XPDL: We’re committed to ensuring that you can leverage the processes you create in Blueprint in anyway you like. That includes giving you the ability to seamlessly execute the processes in Lombardi Teamworks, but also any other tool that you choose. To that end, we’re committed to supporting the BPMN 2.0 specification when it is released. However, we know that you need a way to use your models today, so we’ve introduced the ability to export your processes to XPDL 2.1 format in this release. You never need to feel “locked in” when using Blueprint — you can get your information out in any format you’d like, whether that be as a PowerPoint presentation, Word document, or in XPDL.

• Enhanced Security And Access Controls: As you get more and more of your organization using Blueprint, it becomes increasingly important to make sure that you have the right controls, security, and governance procedures in place. To that end, you now have the option to restrict by IP address the places from which your account can be accessed. For example, this allows you to choose to only allow your users to log in from within your corporate network. Additionally, you also now have the ability to ensure that only people from an authorized set of email domains can be invited to your account. The combination of these two new security features allows you to ensure that only your employees and your trusted partners can see and collaborate on your processes.

• Top Customer Requests: One of the great benefits of Blueprint’s quick release cycle is that we’re able to quickly respond to your feedback. We made a bunch of small enhancements to address the requests we’ve heard most often. That includes improvements like making swim lane names more readable, making the user administration interface sortable and more usable, and much, much more. We think you’ll find this is the fastest and easiest to use version of Blueprint yet!

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.

It’s a good report for you to send to those colleagues in your company who are interested in 3rd party takes on BPM technology.

The bottom line – excerpted from the report:

“Teamworks 7 is a full-featured BPM solution, with all the functionality expected of a market-leading solution. It really differentiates itself from its competitors in two distinct areas, one technical and one non-technical. By using a shared-model architecture, Teamworks ensures that the process model is always up to date, regardless of where and when changes to the model are made. Thus, changes to a running process instance can be reflected back to the high-level model. From a non-technical point of view the major focus has been on ensuring ease of use for any and all of the participants of process lifecycle management. This ensures that the people involved in the process are able to help in optimising the process, which makes far more sense than handing off the task to a ‘process expert’.

Allied to Teamworks is the Blueprint solution which creates a collaboration and communication environment that further empowers the process participants in all aspects of process management. A final factor worth highlighting is the graphical nature of the product – not just in process design terms, but in having the ability to graphically represent KPI and/or SLA non-compliance on the process map.”

We couldn’t agree more!

Butler customers can access the full Technology Audit report here, or you can also get it compliments of Lombardi here (if you have not registered with us before, you will be asked to do so).

I talked with Dave to hear how the course went and how BPM fit into the syllabus.

>>My talk with Dave (5:12): Take a Listen

Prof. Dave Angelow of Texas State in action.

Some of the topics Dave tackles:

• 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.

Let’s take a look the new features in detail:

• See Changes and Discover Relationships: Social networking sites like Facebook and LinkedIn can tell you when a colleague switches jobs or a long lost friend gets married. It’s news you wouldn’t have heard otherwise, or perhaps even known to ask about. Blueprint now does the same for process in your enterprise. The new Activity Feeds show you changes happening to your processes and helps you discover relationships between what you do and the rest of the company. Now you’ll know when something changes two steps upstream from you that will affect your job, or that the person in the next building over does something similar that you leverage.

• Involve Every Desktop In Process Improvement: You have core teams of people modeling your processes in the business, but how do you involve the tens, hundreds, or thousands of people that participate in those processes? We’ve introduced a new “participant” role in Blueprint that allows people at the desk level to reference, review, offer feedback on, and participate in discussions about their work.

• Share And Control Access To Processes: Once you start involving a larger audience in your process improvement efforts, it becomes essential that you ensure that the right people have access to the right information. To that end, we’ve added the ability to set access controls for each of your Blueprint projects that allow you to choose to grant full edit privileges, review only access, or no access at all to the appropriate audience. This allows you to keep sensitive information private, or even share a limited set of processes with your customers or vendors. And just like the rest of Blueprint, we’ve given you this power in an interface that doesn’t require a degree in rocket science to understand!

• Understand Relationships At A Glance: How many times have you been asked, “who is affected if we were to shut this legacy system down tomorrow?” or “who else in the organization depends on the work we do in this process?” Blueprint can now let you answer those questions with a single click. The new Where Used view can show you everywhere a person or system is involved in processes, where your inputs and outputs are used, or even where you see the same risks, problems, and opportunities for improvement.

• Better Usability And Experience: The Blueprint design team has been listening to your feedback and doing research on ways to make using the product even easier and more productive. To that end, we’ve redesigned the home page to make it far more personal–Activity Feeds and Favorites put information that’s relevant to you at your fingertips. We’ve studied your navigation patterns and made it easier to get to the view of the process you need with fewer clicks. We’ve made the Discovery Map better than ever by adding panning, zooming, and printing to PDF just like the Process Diagram. Finally, we developed the participant / read-only view for processes from the ground up to make sure the highest value information is viewable on the screen at all times.

What are you waiting for? 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.

Lombardi announced major advances in all three areas that determine success or failure in BPM:

1. The need to communicate — you have to make business improvement personal
2. The need to automate — you have to drive productivity and re-use
3. The need for talent — you need to be able to assess risk, plan, and lead

Forget about simplistic approaches to driving transformational change based solely on whether your BPMS (or “BPP” or “PAAS”) has a given feature. The so-called “Business Process Platform” as a sole-sourced technological salvation is a hoax. It’s a solipsistic approach by technologists to once again say “if I have a better tool, I won’t be as big a fool.” Go on, stare at your image in the water and try to pawn all this off on simply another development tool or architecture. Instead, you need to take to heart what Toby Redshaw, CIO of Aviva, said a couple of weeks ago (paraphrasing here): “If you’re in IT and not doing BPM, three years from now you won’t have a job.”

He wasn’t talking about a tool. He was talking about change and changing everything: how we relate IT to the business, how we use tools, and how we manage, nay, lead, change in our businesses through the use of BPM tools and methods.

Yesterday Lombardi re-defined what a BPM platform needs to be; three specific vehicles: Blueprint (Spring ’09), Teamworks 7, and Lombardi University.

Together, these 3 pillars — communication, automation and leadership — combine to form the basis for the platform for BPM’s second decade. Lombardi is that platform.

Editor’s note: The above is excerpted from Phil’s personal blog. Follow this link to read the full post, including a discussion of each of Lombardi’s new products.

Usually only a relatively small number of people inside an organization do real modeling of processes. The vast majority of us have “day jobs” and don’t necessarily think of things in terms of flow charts, activities, and decision points. How do we participate in the process improvement discussion?

Blueprint now leverages social networking technology similar to sites like Facebook and LinkedIn to build a community around business improvement that everyone–modeler or not–can participate in. “Participants” can reference and offer suggestions and feedback on their processes without the need to know any mapping or diagramming  techniques. “Authors” can have threaded, two way conversations with the participants in the business and leverage Blueprint’s existing easy to use modeling capabilities to rationalize and improve processes. Tying this all together is a Facebook-style activity feed that proactively notifies you when your processes or the conversation about them changes.

We’re announcing the Spring ’09 release today and it goes live on blueprint.lombardi.com on Saturday morning. Want to see more? Make sure you attend the introduction webinar tomorrow at 10 AM central.

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.

My conversation with Rachel (11:19)  Listen

Some of the topics Rachel tackles:

• 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.

I caught up with Devin to learn about process improvement at Symantec and how his team was using Blueprint.

>>My talk with Devin (11:53): Take a Listen

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.

Take a look at this screencast for a quick rundown or see the full details after the break.

Let’s take a look at the improvements in depth:

• Autocomplete Revamp: We’ve heard from you loud and clear that the autocomplete lists in Blueprint needed some work and we think you’ll be really happy with them now. They look nicer, work faster, search more intelligently, and are less intrusive. More importantly, they now only contain active assets. So if you archive a process, you won’t have to see all of that process’s obsolete artifacts cluttering up your lists anymore. Misspelled the name of an input? No problem–just delete it in your process and it won’t show up in autocomplete popup again either. These improvements have already made us quite a bit more productive internally here at Lombardi. Try them out for yourself and let us know what you think.

  

• Swimlane Improvements: If you haven’t set a participant on an activity in Blueprint, it will end up in the “Unassigned” swimlane on the Process Diagram. In this release, we’ve made a couple of nice tweaks to the way that special swimlane works. First, when it’s empty, it will automatically hide itself so it won’t take up space unnecessarily either on screen or in your printouts. Second, you can now double-click the Unassigned swimlane and rename it. This can be a huge time saver if you want to give a bunch of activities to the same participant in one go.

  

• File Attachments and the Word export: We introduced file attachments in the Year End ’08 release and they’ve been a huge hit. The biggest request we’ve heard is that you’d like to see your attachments show up in the Word and Excel exports for your processes. Well, now they will; each attachment will be listed with a hyperlink back to Blueprint that you can click to securely download it.

  

What’s next? We’ve got some really exciting things we’re working on right now that will debut at our Driven 2009 user conference. Between now and then, be sure to follow us on twitter to keep up with all the latest!

Karen Tricomi, who is Systems Engineer, Enterprise Methods & Processes, for a major financial services organization, wrote a wonderful in-depth review of Lombardi Blueprint for BPMInstitute.org.

Entitled “The Process Practitioner: An Independent Evaluation Of Lombardi’s Blueprint,” the piece attests to how easy and useful Blueprint is for people of all skills levels. It also discusses each of the major product areas.

Karen writes:

“Documenting processes is the first – and in my opinion, the most important – step in the improvement cycle. When Lombardi recently offered to demonstrate Blueprint, their web-based documentation and collaboration product, I approached the demonstration as a business professional with processes that need improvement, rather than an IT analyst or industry expert. Criteria for evaluation were ease of use, a short learning curve, and good collaboration features.”

And:

“Overall, business users will find the application intuitive, easy to use, and helpful.  For those still using an unstructured graphical program, or trying to describe their processes in text form, this tool has advantages over both. . .companies trying to get a handle on their process will find this tool worth the price.”

It’s one thing of course for us to tell you that Blueprint is great, but as with the Intelligent Enterprise award that we announced recently, it is particularly gratifying to see our products achieve solely based on merit.

If you want to give Blueprint a spin, you can sign up for a free 30-day trial here.

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.

>> Take a listen (6:11)

Some of the Topics we tackle:

• 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.

Be vewy, vewy quiet, we’re hunting pwocesses

Dan is clearly sold on the value of business processes and BPM:

For large and small firms, the business process is the right way to think of what to do and how to do it better, whether or not it is automated or supported with technology. BPM puts the focus where it should be–on what you must do to make your company successful, not on the capabilities you happen to have.

What he wants to know however is how are these processes captured in the first place?  If the processes being submitted aren’t of quality, how can you expect the BPM results to be?  Garbage in, garbage out.

Incremental and Collaborative…that’s the ticket

Dan argues that developing the processes incrementally is the only way you can be assured of solid inputs.  The three approaches he advocates are: Wiki-based process discovery, Task-based process discovery and Mash-up based process discovery.  And this is where the Blueprint shout out comes in:

Lombardi Software has recognized this trend and recently launched a Web-based service called “Blueprint” that allows for collaborative brainstorming and definition of processes. Using this service, you start with a bunch of ideas and can end up with a nice diagram. The JargonSpy imagines such a system could be used as the scratch pad for capturing and refining the processes that emerge in the other three methods.

Thanks for the mention Dan, and thanks for pointing out the importance of iterative and broadly inclusive input collection up front.  For without that, are we not building our BPM castles on diagrams of sand?

Stacie and I discussed how she worked over the last year to help create a small commercial offering which, before BPM and process mapping, had not been practical to offer.

We also discussed the role that process mapping played in the recent IT department re-org, helping to streamline processes and breakdown silos.

My talk with Stacie (7:17)

West Bend BA, Stacie Kenney

Some of the Topics we tackle:

• West Bend’s “Smart Business” offering and how it leverages new technologies like services, content generation tool and Teamworks.
• Given that the “Smart Business” premiums were small, the goal was to de-complicate the process so that the agencies could set up the policy with very little time up front.
• Before Blueprint, the BA’s leveraged Visio for flows along with a “mammoth” spec doc in Word.  The biggest issue with this approach was keeping the content in sync.
• West Bend was drawn to Blueprint by its collaboration and document generation capabilities.
• The “Road To Excellence” and the IT re-org, breaking down silos and centralizing the BA’s.
• Using process mapping to document the flow of work coming into the BA group from the business, categorize it and then deliver it back on a monthly basis.

Take a look at this screencast for a quick rundown or see the full details after the break.

Let’s take a look at the improvements in depth:

• File Attachments: In addition to the structured information that Blueprint already helps you collect –inputs, outputs, opportunities for improvement, stakeholders, and the like–we’ve heard the need from customers to be able to keep related assets alongside and in context with the process. Those might be spreadsheets containing data that’s been collected about the process, Word documents and templates used by participants during the process, or perhaps even screen shots of systems and services that are interacted with.Therefore we’ve added the ability to attach files to any process or activity inside Blueprint. You can upload any type of file or asset that you’d like to keep track of along with your process. And just like all the other types of content in Blueprint, it’s a snap to share with other people in your organization and it’s all covered by a full audit trail and revision history.

  

• Easy Invites: Our design team is always looking for ways to improve the user experience in Blueprint, and one of the issues we found with previous releases was that it was harder than necessary to invite additional people to collaborate with you in the product. To that end, we’ve cleaned up the home page and given you the ability to send an invitation to collaborate right there. Just enter your colleague’s email address, hit return, and they’ll be up and running in two shakes.We’re so excited about this change that we’ve given all new accounts the ability to invite an unlimited number of users during the 30 day free trial period. So don’t hesitate to start sharing your processes… tis’ the season!

  

• Password Rules: Process documentation can be some of the most sensitive information an organization creates, so we understand that the security of your data is a paramount concern. Especially as more and more people begin using Blueprint in your organization, ensuring that everyone keeps their login information secure becomes increasingly important. To that end, we’ve added the ability to configure password strength policies for everyone on your account. You can set minimum lengths, content rules, expiry dates, and all the other rules that you need. And we’ve made it dead simple to configure.

We update Blueprint every 6 weeks, so keep an eye out for some more neat stuff coming in February. And if you want the inside scoop and some sneak peeks along the way, be sure to follow us on twitter!

Since the story was a great example of tackling a process documentation effort that involved the whole org, rather than just IT, we decided to turn it into a webinar.  We worked with ModernAnalyst.com and created a 35 minute webinar which you can check out here (note that it takes a few seconds to load).

Enjoy!

Check out the video below. Nachi does a great job explaining what makes Blueprint is different how it makes your job of documenting processes easier. And just like the product, the video is quick and easy to understand!

Last week I chatted with Gary Faulkner of Morphis about how they found themselves unexpectedly leading process mapping sessions for customers or, as Gary likes to describe the turn of events, “A funny thing happened on the way to the software business.”

Take a listen:

My talk with Gary (6:59):

Blueprint enabled a pair-o-dime shift for this currency manager.

Some of the Topics we tackle:

• Conundrum: Morphis is meant to be customized to fit a customer’s process but if a customer can’t describe their process how can Morphis be customized?
• Being new to process mapping they were looking for something that was intuitive and easy to use.
• The power of seeing the process laid out visually and the importance of working on the exercise collaboratively.
• How Morphis’s implementations are all done virtually over Webex around the globe

My belief is that if you draw on compute resources, be they apps or platforms, from a source you don’t own or manage and that you can scale up or down as needed and you are billed accordingly… that’s cloud computing. The biggest advantages of this as a customer are the ability to get started immediately, no software to load and maintain, expand as needed and even turn the service off if its not useful.  Also because there is not a big Capex outlay to get started, you are not bogged down in approval cycles.

What do some of the experts in the field think?  I went to the Rackspace customer event a couple of weeks ago to find out.  (In case your wondering, Lombardi Blueprint, our cloud-based process modeling tool is hosted by Rackspace and will soon be making use of its cloud files in its next release.)

This is what I learned about the past, present and future of Cloud Computing:

• My podcast with John Engates, Rackspace CTO and John’s presentation
• My podcast with Lanham Napier, Rackspace CEO
• My podcast with Jonathan Bryce, Mosso (Rackspace’s cloud division) founder

BTW, if you don’t recognize the building in the clouds above, its the Alamo located in San Antonio where the event was held.

It was Steve Burge who was tapped to put together a Process Management Model to lead the collection and documentation of the company’s processes.  I gave Steve a call and we talked about his challenge and how he and a core team mapped all of Tillamook’s processes within six months.

Take a Listen:

My talk with Steve (7:06)

More Info

Let’s take a look at the improvements in detail:

• User Management: In today’s business environment, it’s more important than ever to ensure that you’re getting maximum utilization of your software. One of the great benefits of Blueprint’s SaaS model is that you can add users to your account just in time when they need access to the tool. When they’re done, you can remove or reuse their license so you’re not paying for software that isn’t being used. This can save you a ton of money compared to traditional desktop tools like Visio that require a big upfront investment and then only get used a few times a year by many people.

  In this release, we’ve greatly enhanced our user management capabilities. You can now see at a glance who has access to your account, when they last used Blueprint, and how many seats you have available. If someone doesn’t need access anymore, it’s just one click to archive them and make their license available to someone new.

  

• Invitations: Blueprint’s greatest strength is facilitating collaboration around process discovery and documentation. We think your team will have a great experience inside the product working together on the process. But what about stakeholders that don’t yet have access to Blueprint? It’s now a lot easier to get them involved. With this release, it’s just one click to have Blueprint send an email to invite someone new to join you.

  

• Instant Upgrades: In the previous release, we made the initial signup experience for new Blueprint accounts far quicker and easier. Now we’ve brought the same improvements to the upgrade process. Need to upgrade your free account to the professional edition? Or add more seats to your pro account? It’s never been faster or more painless.



• Perfect Printing: Once you’ve documented a process, you’ll almost always want to print out your process diagram so that you can share it with all of the other stakeholders in your organization. We often see customers use a plotter to print their diagrams on one large roll of paper and previous releases of Blueprint enabled that. But what if you don’t want to go through the hassle of running to the nearest plotter in the next building or driving to the neighborhood Kinko’s? Now you can have Blueprint format your diagram to print on standard paper sizes. Shrink it down to one page or tile it across many: the choice is yours.



• Word Export of Process Documentation: We’ve made some nice improvements to the Microsoft Word documents that can be created from the Documentation View. All of your inputs, outputs, problems, and stakeholders are now included in the generated Word document. We’ve also made some tweaks to make the formatting look even better. It’s a great way to share training material and processes and procedures with the end users of your processes.

Make sure you log in now to check out the new release. If you don’t have an account yet, you can sign up now for free.

A few weeks ago, we announced our latest release which included improvements to the process documentation view. Since then, we’ve received several emails and forum posts asking for more information on the new features and questions about things we’ll be adding in the future. All objects in your process diagram (e.g. activities, sub-processes, events, even the process object itself) have their own process documentation section, and details captured in the mapping and diagram views are rolled up into this consolidated view. This process documentation includes structured information such as the participant, business owners, experts, inputs, outputs, and problems associated with that specific object. A commonly overlooked detail is the fact that these items can be easily edited and modified from the larger process documentation view. For example, to add an additional input, just click the green “+” button next to the input row to dynamically add a new item. Most items in this structured section behave this way, making it very easy to quickly capture and compare details across multiple items. This is one of my favorite new features in Blueprint because it really helps you quickly document the details or narrative of your process without having to open separate dialogs.

For process information and details that don’t map to the structured sections, we’ve included a free-form, rich text editor area for each object. In addition to the standard text editing capabilities found in the tool (e.g. formatting, font settings, bullets), you can also use the RTE to embed images and hyperlinks to additional details and documentation. For example, we have several customers who store and manage their collateral documentation on SharePoint systems and use Blueprint to set up hyperlinks that open the documents in separate browser windows. I’ve also seen customers who have used the insert image control to embed a screenshot of a supporting Web page or form. The ability to attach and open another document directly from an activity in Blueprint is extremely powerful.

Because all the process information you capture is shared, you can access the same details from both the discovery map and process diagram views as well. Just pop open the details dialog for a specific object and select the documentation tab. Changes made here are pushed throughout the other views. We also realize that the information you collect is valuable and something you might want to share with other users (or just hang up on the wall), so we’ve recently added a few key features that make that easier. At the top of the process documentation view, you’ll notice a print button which generates a printer-friendly version of your complete process documentation, including both the structured and unstructured content you’ve added. We also recently added the ability to export your process documentation directly to Word format. The first version of this feature lacked the ability to export the object details, but we’ve added that to the new version of Blueprint that’s shipping in a couple of weeks.

So what’s next? We’re very excited about the changes we’ve made, but we’re certainly not done. We currently have several new features related to documentation that are “in design” including the ability to upload, store and share file attachments. We’ve had many customers ask us about this feature, so we are looking at the options now and expect to start posting more details to the forums soon. We also have been looking at ways to further streamline the printing and exporting of a process and ways to make it even easier to invite, share and collaborate with other users across your organization.

Let’s take a look at the improvements in detail:

• Structured Documentation View: The documentation view in Blueprint has always been a place to record the “narrative” behind your process–the procedures, training material, KPIs, and the like. But we’ve also heard from you that it’s important to be able to see all of the inputs and outputs, stakeholders, and opportunities for improvement that you’ve recorded in context on that view as well. As of today, the documentation view is your one stop shop for viewing and editing all of the details behind your process.

  This has been one of my favorite improvements to Blueprint so far. We’ve been using the updated interface internally for the last few weeks and it’s already made us much more productive at capturing and disseminating information about our processes inside Lombardi, and I think it will do the same for you and your team. Let us know what you think on the Blueprint forums!

  

• Streamlined Signup Process: During this release we also looked at the entire Blueprint signup experience for new customers. We found a couple of problems: first, we were asking for too much information up front. Who wants to take the time to fill out a form so long that it would make the IRS blush before getting access to the product? I certainly don’t. Second, we weren’t giving you enough feedback during the process to let you know how close you were to getting your account. You could submit the signup form, but it wasn’t clear after that how long it would take to get your login information to get up and running.

  With today’s release, I feel we offer a best of breed experience for obtaining a new account. We’ve got a new easy to use and quick signup form and we make sure to provision your account for you right away. The whole process should take 30 seconds or less end-to-end for a free account. Try it out for yourself!

  

• Reliability and Performance: We tweak many, many little pieces of Blueprint in each release, and this one is no different. We’ve tackled several of the smaller issues that some of our Blueprint veterans may have run into over time. A couple of my favorite improvements are that intermediate events are now labeled on the diagram and the milestone reordering experience has been considerably enhanced. Performance and reliability across the board has gone up again and I can say with pride that this is the best release of Blueprint we’ve done so far.

Make sure you log in now to check out the new release. If you don’t have an account yet, you can sign up now for free.

Please contact us if you are a current Blueprint or Teamworks customer and are willing to participate in a product usability study. Most sessions last between 30 and 60 minutes and can be done remotely using Web conferencing software. During the sessions, you will be shown aspects of the product and asked to provide feedback. Your comments are valuable ways we ensure we’re building tools that fit your needs.

A perfect example of this direct customer feedback is our new rich text editing environment found on the documentation view in Blueprint. For those of you who have been using the product for a while, you may remember that our first pass at rich text was a bit limiting – allowing users to apply simple formatting such as bold, italic or underline styles. To be honest, we weren’t entirely sure how our customers were going to use the documentation sections of the product or the types of information they’d want to store there. So we put it out there, watched, and listened to the feedback. And boy did we get a lot of feedback – in fact we quickly found that the documentation section was considered one of the most important sections of the product. Over the course of a few releases, the text editing sections evolved to support things like advanced formatting, custom font styles, lists, indenting, hyperlinks, images, and colors. We also heard from customers that they needed better integration with their existing documentation, so we included support for things like copying from Word, direct export and printing.

We’re obviously not done yet. We have big plans for improving the existing doc features and adding a few new ones (check out the forums for a few hints). We’re also looking for more feedback from you. We’re 100% committed to making Blueprint THE BEST process discovery and modeling tool available. Tell us what you need… We’re listening!

Visio importing has long been the “holy grail” for process modeling tools.  If I had a dollar for every time someone asked me if a particular BPM product could import Visio models directly I would be rich!  However, Visio import into a process execution environment isn’t always all its cracked up to be.  Visio diagrams tend to be quite unstructured, whereas BPMN is very structured, and executable BPMN is even more structured in form.  Moreover, Visio models don’t have enough information attached to them to be immediately executable.  It is possible to run into issues of “who owns this model” once you import the Visio (the business may have the expectation that they can keep making modifications and “reimport” into Teamworks, for example).  At some point, the implementors must take over the model and own it to produce something executable.  I’ve been working on some models for OMG certification and I thought they would be a fun (albeit simple) set of examples to import into Blueprint for a test drive.  Blueprint imports these easily and accurately.  I went back to the archives and tried importing some really awful process diagrams circa 2004.  The results weren’t pretty (the original wasn’t pretty), but Blueprint imported the models nicely (a visio diagram with 10 tabs and one process per tab).  Going to the Diagram View I was able to sort out the diagram into swimlanes and go from there.  Interestingly, when I imported a diagram WITH swimlanes defined, Blueprint created those swimlanes and participants for me.

But my favorite quote had to be:

I actually like the diagramming portion better than Teamworks!  And collaborating on the same process isn’t just possible, its actually cool.  You almost look for an excuse to try to be logged into the same process at the same time so you can try to step on each other.  Blueprint handles all the conflicting edits really well.  I’m impressed!

We’re very proud of Blueprint’s collaboration and diagramming capabilities as well because we believe that there’s no tool that’s easier to use or can make you more productive, online or off.

Take a look at Scott’s full review when you get a chance.

Let’s take a look at them in detail:

• Microsoft Word Export: Blueprint now gives you the ability to automatically generate a Microsoft Word document containing all the details of your process. This is a great way to communicate your process to stakeholders that don’t have a Blueprint account. For example, we’ve been using this feature internally to generate “specifications” for our processes when we need to interact with outside vendors.

• Archive Projects: Got a bunch of old projects that you need to clean up? Well, now you’ve got an easy solution. We’ve added the ability to archive projects to get them and their (associated processes) out of your hair.

  

• Updated UI: You’ll also notice some substantial user interface improvements that we’ve made in this release. In particular, the Project Details screen has been completely redone to be more intuitive and usable. I think you’ll agree that it’s quite a bit easier on the eyes as well!

  

As always, the best way to experience Blueprint is to dive right in and get your hands dirty. Log in now to check out the new release. If you don’t have an account yet, sign up now for free.

Of the twenty-four teams surveyed, not a single team was in complete agreement on its boundary: who was and who was not a member of the team. In fact, the average level of agreement within the sample was only 75 percent, such that any given team member was likely to disagree with the rest of his or her team on one-quarter of potential team members. 

We see this all the time in real world BPM projects. Agreeing on what the process is is often the easy part. Identifying the who is can seem nearly impossible, especially if a single team is attempting to define a process that is executed in many different locales all over the world.

A distributed, collaborative environment such as Lombardi Blueprint is key to solving this challenge. Having a structured repository to identify and maintain the players and relationships involved in a business process promotes visibility and knowledge sharing among those involved. Discovering the who in a process becomes far easier when all those that are involved can both document their own role and see how where they fit inside the grand scheme of things regardless of what office or time zone they happen to be working in at the particular moment.

For those of you who have been using the product for a while, you’ll remember that our first design for adding items to the process diagram was very Visio-like, with drag and drop capabilities from an application menu:

Technically the solution worked, but we found a few key problems:

• The drag and drop design was influenced by more traditional thick clients, leaving the experience feeling a bit out of place inside a modern Web application such as Blueprint
• The control menus were hard to find – they sort of blended in with the rest of the UI
• Several of the more advanced modeling shapes were being overlooked since many users didn’t think to expand the menus, or completely missed the grayed-out chevron
• Users found it confusing to drag from a menu, it required several clicks to get this just right
• Dragging in milestones and swimlanes seemed unintuitive and hard to align
• The drop zone target was too small, you had to drop EXACTLY on an existing line for it to work properly

Our initial thought was to create a better drag and drop interface, making the menus more obvious and the drop zones bigger, and to use color to reinforce the interaction. We created a quick prototype and tested it.

The new design helped a bit, but we still found users were having the same general issues. The user had to click to expand the menu, but select and drag was still too difficult. Also, because the interaction model was so similar to other thick client modeling tools, we were constantly being compared against these (and their features). We knew it was time to find a better way, so we decided to scrap the entire approach and go back to the drawing board. The first step was to do some usability testing with current users to really understand the problem and what they were trying to accomplish. For me, the “a-ha” moment came when one user told me “I just want to put my new activity here”, pointing at a line on the diagram. If we could find a better way to interact directly with the model, we could avoid the cumbersome drag and drop interaction all together.

We quickly stepped through a series of low-fidelity mockups which were tested and refined:

Taking some to higher-fidelity to iron out the kinks and test out potential visual styling:

The final design incorporated pieces from several of the early protoytpes – resulting in the “+” insert menu that we’ve all come to love! Click below to see a brief clip of it in action.

The day began with CEO Rod Favaron’s keynote, which was all about how we are now at “the end of the beginning.” The secret is out about BPM, attention and visibility are soaring to new heights, and we are now entering a new phase of adoption and maturity.

A big part of this progression is the move from Project to Program to Culture, as Rod put it — in the early days of course it was all about getting your first BPM project up and running successfully, and then it became all about growing that project into a full-fledged program. But the next phase that Lombardi customers and partners are moving into right now is one in which BPM begins to truly impact the culture of any and every part of the organization that it touches, indeed the organization as a whole. This is the true value proposition of BPM ultimately — the idea that BPM becomes part of your DNA, that process becomes an integral part of what your company does every day.

Rod also went on to share some awesome momentum numbers and growth metrics, including:

• Lombardi now has 225 Teamworks customers
• There are now over 3,000 Blueprint accounts
• Lombardi has a corporate presence in 24 countries
• Blueprint is now being used in more than 95 countries
• And Lombardi now has over 50 partners worldwide

The photo below is of a display in our offices that has a flag from every country in which Blueprint is actively being used — the growth has been phenomenal, and we’re really excited continue taking the product to new and exciting places (and to this end, Dave Marquard has a piece up today about the Summer 2008 release).

Additionally, Sandy Kemsley has been here blogging the individual sessions, and her posts are well worth checking out:

• Lombardi Driven: Rod Favaron and Phil Gilbert Keynote
• Lombardi Driven: Executive Roundtable
• Lombardi Driven: Blueprinting Business Processes
• Lombardi Driven: BPM Project Delivery Panel
• Lombardi Driven: Day 1 Wrapup

And finally, here are some photos from throughout the day for your viewing pleasure!

• Rich Wiki Editing Of Process Documentation: Blueprint now provides a rich, wiki-style experience for filling out the details of your process. You can link to external documents, embed images, and format your documentation any way you please. Already have something written up in Microsoft Word? No problem. Just paste it in and we’ll leverage what you’ve already done.

• Printable Documentation View: Once you’ve gotten all of your standard procedures entered into Blueprint, you need to be able to effectively leverage them. You can now generate an attractive printed version of your documentation with a click of the “print” button.

• Improved Process Details: We’ve take the process details pop up windows and completely revamped them to improve their usability. We think you’ll find them much easier to both edit and use to present your content. And they look great too!

• Process Data Export to Excel: Once you’ve entered your data into Blueprint, it’s important to be able to leverage it in any way you see fit. Now you can export your process data in a tabular format to Excel so you can slice and dice it, create PivotTables, or just share it with your friends in the finance department.

• Improved Diagram Layout: In the past, we wasted countless hours in Visio making sure our boxes and lines were all straight on our process diagrams. With Blueprint all of that tedious layout work is handled for us automatically. In this release, we’ve made some tweaks here and there to make your diagrams look better than ever.

We’re constantly working to improve Blueprint. Try out the new release and send us some feedback. Your input helps us shape our future releases and enables us to build the best tool possible for your needs. And if you don’t already have an account, make sure you sign up today!