I’m excited to announce that the Blueprint Spring ‘09 release is now live on blueprint.lombardi.com! This update moves Blueprint from being a great modeling tool to be the place for everyone in your organization to go for business improvement conversations. We’ve leveraged social networking concepts to facilitate the discussion about how each person can make their job better. Everyone can see and be notified about changes that are relevant to their work, discover relationships between what they do and the rest of the organization, and contribute feedback and suggestions to the community.
Let’s take a look the new features in detail:
See Changes and Discover Relationships: Social networking sites like Facebook and LinkedIn can tell you when a colleague switches jobs or a long lost friend gets married. It’s news you wouldn’t have heard otherwise, or perhaps even known to ask about. Blueprint now does the same for process in your enterprise. The new Activity Feeds show you changes happening to your processes and helps you discover relationships between what you do and the rest of the company. Now you’ll know when something changes two steps upstream from you that will affect your job, or that the person in the next building over does something similar that you leverage.
This morning we officially announced the Blueprint Spring ‘09 update. The new release allows you to move beyond the realm of process mapping and documentation and to a place where every employee in your enterprise can contribute to process improvement efforts and actively make their jobs better.
Usually only a relatively small number of people inside an organization do real modeling of processes. The vast majority of us have “day jobs” and don’t necessarily think of things in terms of flow charts, activities, and decision points. How do we participate in the process improvement discussion?
Blueprint now leverages social networking technology similar to sites like Facebook and LinkedIn to build a community around business improvement that everyone–modeler or not–can participate in. “Participants” can reference and offer suggestions and feedback on their processes without the need to know any mapping or diagramming techniques. “Authors” can have threaded, two way conversations with the participants in the business and leverage Blueprint’s existing easy to use modeling capabilities to rationalize and improve processes. Tying this all together is a Facebook-style activity feed that proactively notifies you when your processes or the conversation about them changes.
One of the great pleasures of delivering Blueprint as a SaaS application is that we’re able to stay flexible and update the product approximately every six weeks. To that end, we dedicated the February Update of Blueprint to fulfilling the top three customer requests we’ve heard over the past few months on the forums and out in the field.
Take a look at this screencast for a quick rundown or see the full details after the break.
This morning I’m happy to announce that the year end release of Blueprint has gone into production. This is the culmination of our effort to make Blueprint a complete repository for all of your process related assets. The biggest change that you’ll notice immediately in this update is the ability to upload and store files as part of your documentation. We’ve also addressed several other top customer requests that we’ve heard on the forums and from out in the field.
Take a look at this screencast for a quick rundown or see the full details after the break.
The latest monthly refresh of Blueprint went live this morning, and I’m excited to give you the scoop on the changes. Over the past 6 weeks, we’ve focused on addressing the top pieces of feedback that we’ve heard from customers. With this release, you’ll find it much easier to keep track of who’s currently using Blueprint, to collaborate with new users, and to print out your process diagrams in exactly the right format. We use your feedback to drive our release schedule, so make sure you give us your thoughts!
Let’s take a look at the improvements in detail:
User Management: In today’s business environment, it’s more important than ever to ensure that you’re getting maximum utilization of your software. One of the great benefits of Blueprint’s SaaS model is that you can add users to your account just in time when they need access to the tool. When they’re done, you can remove or reuse their license so you’re not paying for software that isn’t being used. This can save you a ton of money compared to traditional desktop tools like Visio that require a big upfront investment and then only get used a few times a year by many people.
In this release, we’ve greatly enhanced our user management capabilities. You can now see at a glance who has access to your account, when they last used Blueprint, and how many seats you have available. If someone doesn’t need access anymore, it’s just one click to archive them and make their license available to someone new.
Today I’m happy to announce that we’ve gone live with the latest batch of Blueprint improvements. This release is unique–not only will all current Blueprint customers get to use the changes immediately, but anyone who’s signing up for a new account also will enjoy the benefits. Over the last month we’ve focused on two areas: giving you the best experience possible for documenting the details behind your processes and creating a simpler and easier signup process for new users.
Let’s take a look at the improvements in detail:
Structured Documentation View: The documentation view in Blueprint has always been a place to record the “narrative” behind your process–the procedures, training material, KPIs, and the like. But we’ve also heard from you that it’s important to be able to see all of the inputs and outputs, stakeholders, and opportunities for improvement that you’ve recorded in context on that view as well. As of today, the documentation view is your one stop shop for viewing and editing all of the details behind your process.
This has been one of my favorite improvements to Blueprint so far. We’ve been using the updated interface internally for the last few weeks and it’s already made us much more productive at capturing and disseminating information about our processes inside Lombardi, and I think it will do the same for you and your team. Let us know what you think on the Blueprint forums!
Scott Francis from BP-3 recently posted a great, objective review of the Blueprint Summer ‘08 release. He does a thorough and insightful job covering the entire product. For example, here’s his take on the Visio import functionality we recently introduced:
Visio importing has long been the “holy grail” for process modeling tools. If I had a dollar for every time someone asked me if a particular BPM product could import Visio models directly I would be rich! However, Visio import into a process execution environment isn’t always all its cracked up to be. Visio diagrams tend to be quite unstructured, whereas BPMN is very structured, and executable BPMN is even more structured in form. Moreover, Visio models don’t have enough information attached to them to be immediately executable. It is possible to run into issues of “who owns this model” once you import the Visio (the business may have the expectation that they can keep making modifications and “reimport” into Teamworks, for example). At some point, the implementors must take over the model and own it to produce something executable. I’ve been working on some models for OMG certification and I thought they would be a fun (albeit simple) set of examples to import into Blueprint for a test drive. Blueprint imports these easily and accurately. I went back to the archives and tried importing some really awful process diagrams circa 2004. The results weren’t pretty (the original wasn’t pretty), but Blueprint imported the models nicely (a visio diagram with 10 tabs and one process per tab). Going to the Diagram View I was able to sort out the diagram into swimlanes and go from there. Interestingly, when I imported a diagram WITH swimlanes defined, Blueprint created those swimlanes and participants for me.
But my favorite quote had to be:
I actually like the diagramming portion better than Teamworks! And collaborating on the same process isn’t just possible, its actually cool. You almost look for an excuse to try to be logged into the same process at the same time so you can try to step on each other. Blueprint handles all the conflicting edits really well. I’m impressed!
We’re very proud of Blueprint’s collaboration and diagramming capabilities as well because we believe that there’s no tool that’s easier to use or can make you more productive, online or off.
Take a look at Scott’s full review when you get a chance.
Today I’m proud to announce the availability of the Summer ‘08 Update release of Blueprint! One of the great benefits of delivering Blueprint in SaaS model is that we’re able to stay nimble and quickly add functionality that improves the value of the product for everyone. So following shortly on the heels of our main Summer ‘08 release, we’ve added features to address some of the most common requests we hear from our customers.
Let’s take a look at them in detail:
Microsoft Word Export: Blueprint now gives you the ability to automatically generate a Microsoft Word document containing all the details of your process. This is a great way to communicate your process to stakeholders that don’t have a Blueprint account. For example, we’ve been using this feature internally to generate “specifications” for our processes when we need to interact with outside vendors.
Ross Mayfield noted today that one of the biggest challenges with collaboration among distributed teams is actually agreeing on who is actually part of the team. Larry Irons quotes research from Distributed Work to that effect:
Of the twenty-four teams surveyed, not a single team was in complete agreement on its boundary: who was and who was not a member of the team. In fact, the average level of agreement within the sample was only 75 percent, such that any given team member was likely to disagree with the rest of his or her team on one-quarter of potential team members.
We see this all the time in real world BPM projects. Agreeing on what the process is is often the easy part. Identifying the who is can seem nearly impossible, especially if a single team is attempting to define a process that is executed in many different locales all over the world.
A distributed, collaborative environment such as Lombardi Blueprint is key to solving this challenge. Having a structured repository to identify and maintain the players and relationships involved in a business process promotes visibility and knowledge sharing among those involved. Discovering the who in a process becomes far easier when all those that are involved can both document their own role and see how where they fit inside the grand scheme of things regardless of what office or time zone they happen to be working in at the particular moment.
We just wanted to check in and report on the first day of our annual Driven User Conference here in sunny Austin, TX.
The day began with CEO Rod Favaron’s keynote, which was all about how we are now at “the end of the beginning.” The secret is out about BPM, attention and visibility are soaring to new heights, and we are now entering a new phase of adoption and maturity.
A big part of this progression is the move from Project to Program to Culture, as Rod put it — in the early days of course it was all about getting your first BPM project up and running successfully, and then it became all about growing that project into a full-fledged program. But the next phase that Lombardi customers and partners are moving into right now is one in which BPM begins to truly impact the culture of any and every part of the organization that it touches, indeed the organization as a whole. This is the true value proposition of BPM ultimately — the idea that BPM becomes part of your DNA, that process becomes an integral part of what your company does every day.
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