Process Improvement: Reducing the Friction

An ongoing theme in our Blueprint releases has been making the user experience as easy as possible, or “reducing the friction” as we’ve come to call it. Each new release has included changes that make it easier/faster/better to model and document your business processes. Some of these improvements are large and obvious, others are more subtle.  Across my next several posts, I’m going to focus on a few of these design changes and explain how they can have a big impact on your process discovery success.

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.