Playback Central: People and Process

Ed.: This is the fourth and last post in a series of Q+A sessions focusing specifically on playback session best practices, with our in-house expert, Kris Komassa. See our previous coverage here.

Anyone besides the BPM team, subject matter experts, and business managers that you’ve had involved in a playback session? Who do you usually suggest be present?

It varies.  I’ve had CIOs CEOs, end users, it runs the gamut.  Ultimately, you want to have a true cross-section of the organization present.

I always like to have my core project team and IT staff involved of course, but again when it comes to the playback, a diversity of roles and perspectives is important. For example, one bank we work with has a very diverse set of processes, so within their playbacks I have had a bank teller, a bank CSR person, a bank loan officer, a bank loan manager, an executive approver and then the core project team on top of that.

For me if you follow that process from a linear prospective, you need to have someone who can weigh in on every part of the process.  I like to have people in the room to say “yes” or “no” each step of the way — and in that sense you need to think long and hard and do your best to anticipate the questions that are going to be asked at every stage. You learn over time, of course, too, and I’m always happy to talk in greater depth about specific industries or situations, just leave a note in the comments.

This is more of a cultural question, I suppose — in all stages, what would you recommend to help stakeholders step outside of the box during a playback session? Sometimes challenging the status quo can lead to the most frank (and productive) assessment, say, for example, having to do with different modeling approaches.

That’s a good question and it’s a challenge especially when dealing with businesspeople because they only know what they know.  They’re often bothered by a mindset of “well this is what I know.”

I ask a lot of questions and encourage clients to ask questions in return — I want them to take a hard look at everything, and I want them to step out of their comfort zone. Ultimately it’s more about the questions than the answers — what’s at stake cuts to the very heart of the business itself, and we can’t afford to leave any stones unturned.

You have to look at is this way: teams cannot fix a fundamentally bad process. So, we want to be sure that everything that comes out of a session is worth the investment of time and resources that we are going to put into it.  It’s easier to do this at the very beginning, before you’ve committed to a course of action, and have already began executing against that plan. The earlier you ask the hard questions, the better. Start early and never stop. I challenge my customers to ask “why?” and “how?” constantly, and at every process step to conclude whether a given step is truly relevant.  And, is there any way to automate that step, is it truly a required step, and/or can it be optimized further down the road?  You have to be stubborn, because there is no substitute for that kind of frankness, which can ultimately make or break a project.

Ed.: If you have any playback-specific questions that you’d like to have answered, either as a follow-up to the content discussed here, as just in general, leave us a note in the comments!