Process People Q&A with Jeremy Kraybill, Boundless Network

Process People will be conducting a series of periodic interview sessions with Lombardi customers to provide useful insight into the BPM issues that they faced at their company, guidance for how to overcome obstacles, and to share the lessons learned during their process improvement journey. These real-world interviews will be posted regularly, so be sure and check back frequently. . .

In this Process People interview, we welcome Jeremy Kraybill, CIO for Boundless Network.

Process People: Describe in as much detail as possible the problem or need on a project level that first made you consider BPM and/or Lombardi as a viable solution.

Jeremy Kraybill: At Boundless Network, we were undergoing a business process re-engineering project at our business. We initially set out to document and analyze manual process changes that would reduce our company’s cash cycle and help us scale our back office. After the first couple weeks of the project, we realized that there were a whole set of business processes held in individuals’ heads that we could benefit from automating. Nobody at the company had previous BPM experience, but after looking at the first BPM vendor’s demo we knew that a BPM solution had great potential for our business pains. After a 3-month evaluation process we selected a BPM solution and have been very happy with the decision and how the implementations went.

Process People: How did you initially present the idea and to whom? Who did you need permission from to proceed?

Jeremy Kraybill: The initial idea was presented to our COO and co-founder. The decision to move ahead was approved by our company’s executive team. It was a fairly easy sell based on what we had uncovered in the manual process re-engineering efforts.

Process People: What were some of the surprises along the way? What was the most unexpected thing that happened during your first project?

Jeremy Kraybill: We were most pleased with how quickly we were able to get self-sufficient on the Teamworks modeling environment. The first phase of our implementation was achieved with 1 full-time person focused on modeling, 50% of my time on modeling and integration, and 25% of one of our Java developers on integration and web services work. We completed phase 1 of our project in under 6 weeks with 12 hours total of services help from our vendor and their product training up-front. Since then we have completed 5 additional project phases and have used about 4-8 hours of services work per phase.

Process People: How closely did the IT and business sides work together initially, and how closely do they work together today? Any recommendations for effectively facilitating this interaction?

Jeremy Kraybill: I think the most important role on a BPM project is selecting the right person to be the person who interprets business requirements into the design of the business process implementations in the BPM package. If it’s a small project or team, and one person does both the requirements gathering and the implementation (as was the case on our project), that person’s skill set is even more critical. The person requires good analytical abilities, as well as the process/technical background to be able to match the capabilities of the BPM package with the needs of the business.

Process People: What would you do over if given the chance?

Jeremy Kraybill: Our first phase went extremely smoothly, much more smoothly than expected. So for our second phase, we got more ambitious than originally planned, and rolled out a number of processes that were pretty radical changes to the way in which our sales support team did business. Because our first phase had been so smooth, we actually scaled back the amount of training and education we provided the users as compared to the first phase. We ended up with a number of our most experienced sales support staff, who were not receiving many BPM tasks from the first project phase, having some significant growing/adoption pains in the second phase. They just were not ready for how much of a daily change to their way of doing business it was. We addressed this through providing them with more education and training, and also with some business process changes in the third phase. It took a good 3-4 weeks of education and calls with the staff to get the second phase fully accepted.

Jeremy manages the Boundless Network technology group in Austin, TX. He has spent eleven years managing web application and enterprise IT projects. Prior to Boundless Network, Jeremy managed an eBay subsidiary, worked for two enterprise software startup companies, and had an independent web consulting practice in Australia. Jeremy’s professional interests include open source, intelligent web applications, usability, and the application design process.