Rachel Pace-Maron, Director of Operations Support Service at PRC, was asked to document, standardize and communicate all of her company’s processes to help improve business processes across 15 domestic and 5 international call centers.

Rachel recently sat down with Jim Rudden, VP of Marketing with Lombardi to record a webinar on how Blueprint has helped her company restructure, document and standardize their processes. To listen to the full webinar, click here.

In the webinar, Rachel explains that one of the biggest challenges they faced was that everyone had their own way of doing things. Documents were in piles all over people’s desks and everyone was doing their processes differently. There was no standardization within their processes, which was costing them time and money. PRC needed to be able to take a narrative of their situation and see it in a visual manner.

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This post is all about the cultural changes that BPM can (and needs to) drive within an organization. But it’s also about some of the ways in which processes don’t live in the clouds — they live on the ground, in real situations, with real people. I think it’s really important to remember this fact in our day-to-day work. I like telling this story because it’s from a long time ago when technology was quite different — and yet there are stark similarities to the challenges that we face today.

When I started at Sprint (my former employer), I was among the people who just assumed that when you picked up the phone, there would always be a dial tone — to me this was no big deal. I didn’t really understand all the technology, all the incredible things in the background that happen to actually put phone service in your home. This was of course ten years ago, so cell phones were popular, but everybody still had a landline, and the company overall was still focused on the latter market.

One of the first things the company did was send me out to a call center. This was part of my “process discovery” phase in my new role (though we didn’t call it that) — my goal was to see and document how things actually worked, and then find ways for us to improve.

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Last week, I wrote about the importance of understanding user roles and how a successful UI allows each user to focus on what s/he does best, especially with regards cross-functional process teams (Rule #1).

It’s crucial to get these groups aligned from the very outset of a project, to get them walking lock-step with each other as soon as possible. This is Rule #2.

But how is this accomplished through the UI?

The most important thing we’ve learned about aligning cross-functional interests from a UI perspective has to do with the early discovery and documentation phases of the project. This is the first (and potentially only) opportunity to get everyone’s interests on the same page, and is exactly why we created Lombardi Blueprint.

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When you’re tasked with documenting your department’s processes, it can be overwhelming. Often times the project is so hard to approach that the gut reaction is to rely on everyone’s favorite method for doing anything: start at the beginning, and take it one step at a time.

Unfortunately, this approach just doesn’t work when documenting business processes. It’s not the processes themselves that present a problem — it’s the people. When you try to document each step chronologically, the inevitable result is a trip down rat-hole lane. Rat-holing is when you get caught up with the minor details and exceptions that occur in any process. I’ve seen documentation sessions go on for hours with little to show for the effort because each stakeholder in the room was preoccupied with the subtle exceptions to the steps that they themselves were most passionate about.

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A few weeks ago we were having a conversation at SXSW here in Austin that is worth relaying.

There has been a good deal of talk about making BPM more engaging to users via Web 2.0 and Ajax, which is ultimately part of the whole Enterprise2.0 conversation. It makes me laugh, though, because Ismael Ghalimi was talking about making BPM cool again way back in 2006 – was it ever cool?

Well, anyway, we’ve obviously come a long way since then, and certainly Lombardi has been at the forefront of the UI/UE innovation since the very beginning. We recently announced the Spring 2008 release of Lombardi Blueprint, which incorporates our most evolved thinking about usability and experience.

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