Process, Culture and Trust

Process People: We frequently hear from Lombardi that BPM has everything to do with organizational culture.  Can you give us one concrete example that you commonly see which demonstrates this cultural shift?

Wesley Chung: Yes, it’s very much a cultural thing, and I would say that a big part of that is trusting the [BPMS] system.  Many organizations still rely on old-fashioned, manual status reports to track the success of a process because they don’t have any other way to know that people are getting their work done.  A traditional status report provides a way for them to monitor that.  Without a product like Teamworks, there’s no way to efficiently and effectively monitor that people are accomplishing their tasks in-line with the business process.  It’s how things have always been done.  Ultimately, they need to be willing to trust the tool if they want to change how they manage a process. The other major cultural challenge is that managers have to learn new concepts and completely alter their methodologies for managing processes.

Process People: So what is one example of a cultural difference between managing processes manually and managing them with a product like Teamworks?

Wesley Chung: The difference is really about managing exceptions.  An exception is an instance where a process was not followed in the normal case, where someone in the organization didn’t do what they were supposed to do and the process did not turn out as expected.  Once managers see that the process team can provide them with some automated reports and the managers realize that they can trust the system, then they can start thinking about managing the exceptions instead of managing the processes that were carried out properly.

What we’re asking people to do is to stop worrying about making sure EVERYONE is doing what they’re supposed to do, and to start focusing only on the instances where people didn’t do what they were supposed to do.  This means that a manager has to trust the BPMS, which is so different from the traditional method for reporting.  In the past, when sophisticated technology was not available, it was considered good practice to solicit manual status reports.  What happens in manual reports is you have to check in on every single instance of a process to find out which ones worked properly and which ones failed.  That takes a lot of time and resources, not leaving much time for thinking about improvement.  With Teamworks, you never have to look at the instances that worked properly, and your reports are automated - so your focus is going to be on process improvement with an eye towards reducing the frequency of exceptions. This requires a huge cultural shift, which means that the process owner needs to start thinking in terms of process and purely delivering business value - rather than touching every single instance of the process.

Process People: The more we talk about how big of an organizational and cultural shift this is, the more I wonder how feasible it is to get a BPM customer to truly change.  How do you improve the chances of getting an organization to change?

Wesley Chung: So that’s really the question.  I would say that the first part of this is that the customer, from a cultural standpoint, needs to be thinking of BPM as a very different way of doing things.  Not all of our customers fit perfectly into that category. For instance, some of them are project-based customers.  They have a project that they need to deliver, and they have chosen BPM as a technology that allows you to get that problem solved.  That’s great, and every customer goes through this at some point.  However, at the project-level, you are not necessarily thinking of how you transform the business or achieve a specific strategic effect.

Or, maybe they’re thinking about it in the long-term, but in a short-term it’s not really their goal to start creating a new environment of continuous process improvement.  So, you need to really commit to transforming the business before any progress can be made.

Once that commitment is made, we can really make some progress with playbacks, which are an incredibly important part of our delivery methodology.  Our playbacks, when they are done correctly, tend to be the most compelling way to get the people within an organization to change their culture, their DNA.