BP-3 Reviews Blueprint

Scott Francis from BP-3 recently posted a great, objective review of the Blueprint Summer ‘08 release. He does a thorough and insightful job covering the entire product. For example, here’s his take on the Visio import functionality we recently introduced:

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.

The Blueprint Summer Update

Today I’m proud to announce the availability of the Summer ‘08 Update release of Blueprint! One of the great benefits of delivering Blueprint in SaaS model is that we’re able to stay nimble and quickly add functionality that improves the value of the product for everyone. So following shortly on the heels of our main Summer ‘08 release, we’ve added features to address some of the most common requests we hear from our customers.

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.

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Who’s on the team?

Ross Mayfield noted today that one of the biggest challenges with collaboration among distributed teams is actually agreeing on who is actually part of the team. Larry Irons quotes research from Distributed Work to that effect:

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.

Building A Better Diagram

We frequently get asked about the design process here at Lombardi. First off, it’s helpful to understand a little bit about our team, which consists of folks with very diverse backgrounds in user interface and visual design, human factors and engineering. Having such a broad mix of skills enables us to come at a design problem from many different angles and explore a variety of options very quickly. We practice an iterative approach that includes rapid prototyping and end user testing. Sometimes our solutions may seem obvious – but they are usually the result of multiple iterations and variations. A perfect example of this is the new insert or “+” sign that was recently added to Blueprint.

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:

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Lombardi Driven 2008 Conference, Day One

We just wanted to check in and report on the first day of our annual Driven User Conference here in sunny Austin, TX.

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.

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Announcing the Blueprint Summer ‘08 Release

Today I’m proud to announce the availability of the Summer ‘08 release of Blueprint! In the Spring ‘08 release, we delivered what we feel is the best process diagramming tool on the market, online or off. Over the last two months we’ve focused on improving the “other half” of process documentation — the standards and procedures, narratives, and data that make up the details that live behind the picture of the process. Let’s take a look at the improvements in depth:

• 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.

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TeliaSonera Puts Blueprint and Teamworks to the Test

Recently we had the pleasure of announcing that the Finnish Sales Division of the Nordic and Baltic telecommunications service provider, TeliaSonera, is deploying Teamworks and Blueprint. The news was picked up by KMWorld.

This should be a very interesting deployment that we’ll review later after their initial playback and first round of results.

The company will use Lombardi to support sales of business services in Finland, as well as its activation and provisioning and other core business processes. We expect to be able to help them increase their service levels and improve customer satisfaction by designing and automating their business processes so they can be easily controlled and managed.

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SaaS BPM - For Real

I’ve been seeing a bit of blog postings lately on the reality of SaaS on Demand or SaaS BPM.

Last week, Jason Stamper at CBR included some commentary on a beta product that he had heard about through the Process Factory. And couple of weeks ago, Jack van Hoof - who writes on SOA and EDA, posted a well thought-out blog entry about the marriage of BPM and SaaS, including the possibilities and the complexities at hand.

I love seeing this kind of dialogue on the Web because SaaS BPM is extremely popular with our customers right now. However, despite the aspiration of many developers, SaaS and BPM is NOT an easy combination. Nor is it likely that the two will ever be completely married in the traditional integrated form.

We launched Lombardi Blueprint a little over a year ago. It’s a SaaS-based modeling tool that integrates with Lombardi Teamworks, which operates behind the firewall. What worked so well in this case was that anyone in an organization could access the modeling tool to help shape a BPM project during the discovery stage. It doesn’t need to be integrated into legacy systems and it doesn’t require IT to deliver company data to the hosted model outside the firewall.

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Blueprint Best Practices Webinar

By now, you’ve probably experienced how simple it is to document a process with Blueprint. But we know creating detailed diagrams takes a significant portion of your time. So, we made Blueprint even better! The Spring ‘08 Release of Blueprint is here and it is the next evolution of diagramming. Based on user feedback, we’ve streamlined diagramming and added many requested features to make it even easier & simpler to document your process.

I’ll be leading a webinar on Tuesday, April 29, 2008 at 10:00-10:30 a.m. CST on best practices for process mapping and modeling with Blueprint. The topics I’ll be covering include:

• Effective utilization of the process map for simplicity and clarity
• Fast and efficient techniques for diagramming
• Using subprocesses to reduce complexity and encourage reuse
• Leveraging existing work that you’ve done in Microsoft Visio

Update: The webinar is now available on demand. Check it out now. For the Blueprint veterans out there, the webinar focuses on the features we just introduced and I’ll think you’ll find it very informative. But if you don’t have an account yet, don’t feel left out! Sign up for one now and join us on Tuesday.

The Blueprint Spring ‘08 Release Is Here!

I’m very happy to announce that the Spring ‘08 release of Blueprint is now live. A quick rundown of the new features is below. But don’t take my word for it: log in now and check it out. Sign up for a your own account now if don’t have one yet.

Improvements in the Spring ‘08 release:

• Improved usability in the diagram view : Significant ease of use and productivity improvements have been made in the diagram based upon customer feedback and testing. The toolbar in the diagram view has been replaced by the Blueprint “plus sign”, which allows you to click where you want to insert an item and have it show there immediately. New Blueprint users will be able to get started quicker and experienced users can get their job done a lot faster.

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