What separates a good university masters degree program from a great one?  I believe it can be summed up in 3 key factors:

1. Expert instructors, who are actively working in their field.
2. A curriculum with a strong practical focus.
3. Perspectives drawn from a broad range of real world experience.

These same 3 key factors were core design principles for our Level 2 BPM Developer course – which takes good BPM Developers and helps them transform into master BPM Developers.

Most of our customers have learned how to build successful process applications, but they are still unclear on how to best leverage Teamworks to address their more complex application requirements.  They want to know how to design, architect and implement very robust process applications … how to master the use of Teamworks. 

That’s why Lombardi field mentors lead the instruction of our Level 2 class.  Lombardi mentors are highly experienced implementation consultants that work shoulder-to-shoulder with customers – but as mentors their focus is on teaching the customer how to build the solution, rather than building it for them.  Their mission is to build self-sufficiency in our customer teams and transfer knowledge about BPM best practices and implementation techniques.

Our mentors and consultants helped design a Level 2 BPM Developer curriculum with a strong practical focus.  Through 6 half day instructional modules, we teach the most common complex requirement patterns encountered in the field and the best practices for addressing those patterns.  The course topics and hands-on exercises are based on experience gained by Lombardi field delivery teams across hundreds of customer projects.

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I’ve talked a little bit about change management in previous posts, and I’ll continue on that theme here. This post is about talking it out, pure and simple — and in the process establishing important relationships that weren’t there before. I’ve also touched on how it is common to just throw things over the wall and not know what happens after that — it is really important to get in the habit of walking around to the other side of that wall and having regular conversations with the other people involved in a given process. This is an extension of that same idea.

Note: the best practices that I describe below usually come into play at a more mature process stage where we’re trying to jump-start some new initiatives or reinvigorate old ones, but it also applies to the beginning stages as well.

Overall, it is of the greatest importance that you first make sure that other people in the room or on the phone hear the larger story or narrative of the process, and understand where they fit into that bigger picture. This is always where we start. A lot of times when you give people this kind of perspective, the floodgates will open — as a result, colleagues start sharing their own experiences and other anecdotal pieces of information and ultimately this is how you get to reality. Perception is reality when you are working with process, and talking it out helps you to start putting some of that picture together. They say a picture is with a thousand words — from a process perspective it is usually worth another million once we start collecting information. Much of what we learn, in fact, can remain hidden, again, without the proper perspective as to why it does or does not matter. You’d be surprised what people bottle up because they feel it isn’t applicable to the project as a whole or they don’t think you’ll actually listen to what they have to say.

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So far on this blog we’ve had a lot of important conversations around getting started — the first 180 days, putting your BPM team together, that first playback, etc. Today I want to focus a little bit more on the optimization piece of the puzzle. What do I mean by optimization? Imagine that you’re already effectively using BPMS and you’re doing pretty well all in all, but you’re not seeing the kinds of fireworks that you did when you got that first process up and running. The question is, essentially, what are some the of the advanced topics that that come to mind in terms of things that companies can do that really optimize and take process excellence to the next level? This will continue to be a theme for me in subsequent blog posts, but I’ll share some initial high level thoughts as well as a few best practices here.

I’ll begin with where I come in as part of our Services group. It often starts with a happy customer telling us that they are slowly starting to stall. That is, they got through those first multiple iterations, but now the question is — where do we go from here, how do we know whether we should add on another process or move to an area that is totally separate?

From an optimization perspective, we are going to go in and do a review and an assessment of what the customer has, what they are doing, and what kind of returns they are seeing. For example, is this process more customer-impacting, is it employee-impacting, and most importantly are we really understanding what the true value proposition is for each?  We decide how and where we want to focus, and determine whether we are doing a good job of tying into strategic objectives within the organization. Ultimately, optimization is all about alignment and realignment, that’s the first take-away.

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By now, you’ve probably experienced how simple it is to document a process with Blueprint. But we know creating detailed diagrams takes a significant portion of your time. So, we made Blueprint even better! The Spring ‘08 Release of Blueprint is here and it is the next evolution of diagramming. Based on user feedback, we’ve streamlined diagramming and added many requested features to make it even easier & simpler to document your process.

I’ll be leading a webinar on Tuesday, April 29, 2008 at 10:00-10:30 a.m. CST on best practices for process mapping and modeling with Blueprint. The topics I’ll be covering include:

• Effective utilization of the process map for simplicity and clarity
• Fast and efficient techniques for diagramming
• Using subprocesses to reduce complexity and encourage reuse
• Leveraging existing work that you’ve done in Microsoft Visio

Update: The webinar is now available on demand. Check it out now. For the Blueprint veterans out there, the webinar focuses on the features we just introduced and I’ll think you’ll find it very informative. But if you don’t have an account yet, don’t feel left out! Sign up for one now and join us on Tuesday.