The July ’09 Blueprint Update Is Now Available!

I’m pleased to announce that the Blueprint July ’09 Update is now available on blueprint.lombardi.com! This release has addressed some of the top requests we’ve heard from you. We’ve expanded the ways you can leverage the models you create in Blueprint, given you additional ways to secure and control access to your account, and tackled several other improvements that you suggested in the Blueprint Forums.

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.

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Butler Group Reviews Teamworks 7

Last week, UK analyst firm Butler Group published their latest Technology Audit report on Lombardi. In it, analyst Mike Thompson reviewed the capabilities of Teamworks 7 as they relate to Butler’s product assessment methodology in the areas of building, optimizing and managing processes faster and smarter in this Technology Audit.

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).

Production, Operations Mgt and BPM at Texas State

Dave Angelow, adjunct professor at Texas State University just finished teaching a semester long course in Production and Operations Management.  The course, which focuses on the supply chain and value chain as well as some production methods, is a core requirement in the school of management.

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.

The Blueprint Spring ’09 Release Is Now Live!

I’m excited to announce that the Blueprint Spring ’09 release is now live on blueprint.lombardi.com! This update moves Blueprint from being a great modeling tool to be the place for everyone in your organization to go for business improvement conversations. We’ve leveraged social networking concepts to facilitate the discussion about how each person can make their job better. Everyone can see and be notified about changes that are relevant to their work, discover relationships between what they do and the rest of the organization, and contribute feedback and suggestions to the community.

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.

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The Platform For BPM’s Second Decade

Yesterday was the culmination of hundreds of man years of effort and understanding here at Lombardi. Yesterday marked the end of what I call “the first decade of BPM” and sets the industry on what I think is going to be an all-new course, or more accurately, a much broader and valuable course. And so out of pride, but also because I think that the BPM industry shifted today, I want to write about it a bit more.

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.

Spring ’09: Blueprint On Every Desktop

This morning we officially announced the Blueprint Spring ’09 update. The new release allows you to move beyond the realm of process mapping and documentation and to a place where every employee in your enterprise can contribute to process improvement efforts and actively make their jobs better.

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.

Call Center outsourcer uses Process Mapping to help it emerge from Chapter 11

PRC, based in Ft. Lauderdale, Florida, manages 14 domestic call centers and a handful of centers offshore.  In January of last year this 25-year-old company declared bankruptcy.  Six months later, after a massive restructuring they emerged from Chapter 11.

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.

Symantec, process improvement and Blueprint

Devin Rickard is a Senior Director of Business Process Improvement at Symantec, the company best known for its Norton line of security products.  The team that Devin belongs to acts as internal process consultants at the company and they’ve adopted Lombardi Blueprint as the common process modeling tool for the group.  What they found however is that Blueprint has a wide appeal beyond their group.

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.

Announcing the Blueprint February Update

One of the great pleasures of delivering Blueprint as a SaaS application is that we’re able to stay flexible and update the product approximately every six weeks. To that end, we dedicated the February Update of Blueprint to fulfilling the top three customer requests we’ve heard over the past few months on the forums and out in the field.

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

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BPMInstitute.org Review of Lombardi Blueprint

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.”

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