I recently attended a Lean Six Sigma conference. It’s always interesting to hear evangelists from various industries in different countries sharing their experiences with improving efficiency, effectiveness, and moving towards a culture of high performance and continuous improvement.
It never fails to surprise me how dogmatic many are about their particular flavor of methodology. Within the Lean Six Sigma camp there are Six Sigma purists who will partake of no Lean. There are Lean gurus who speak not of Six Sigma. Then there are the fusionistas, who happily take the best bits of both. (Personally, I’m willing to utilize any tools that get results within a structured framework.) Some proudly advertise their allegiance, while others refuse to be pigeonholed and embrace a more neutral term such as Process Improvement or Operational Excellence. As a pragmatist I tend towards the latter – in my experience, for every person out there in a position of influence who is pro a “Big M” methodology, there will be another who is equally (or more!) anti that same methodology. So why provoke resistance to change over a mere label? Well, that’s just my two cents!
I’d like to share this video that one of our Business Process Management Analysts, Nachi Chidambaram, recently created. Blueprint can be hard to explain to new users because it’s so different from any other product out there. Unlike Visio or Word, there’s no emailing files around and wondering what the latest version is. Plus it’s easy to pick up Blueprint and start making compelling process documentation without needing to take a big training course first.
Check out the video below. Nachi does a great job explaining what makes Blueprint is different how it makes your job of documenting processes easier. And just like the product, the video is quick and easy to understand!
If you’ve been reading the Process People blog, you might have noticed that we talk a lot about an iterative approach to deploying BPM.What we haven’t touched on as much is that the iterative approach is an element of the overarching methodology.Looking in on the methodology from the highest level you will get a view of a three-phased approach – which ultimately results in iteration.But we want to provide a big picture of how all of the different parts of our methodology tie together, and how each point of emphasis leads into or loops back to key areas of the other two phases.
I realize that in some organizations, “phase” is a four-letter word.With BPM it is a must… it is the foundational element that leads to continuous process improvement and ultimately maximum business benefit.But don’t just take our word for it, just look at the countless customers who have used this methodology and achieve enormous success because of it.
Definition Phase
The definition phase is probably the most critical portion of the entire BPM adoption lifecycle.This is where you set the expectations for the BPM project, define metrics to measure the project and create a framework so that the focus remains on delivering business value throughout all three phases.
In this phase organizations should:
Take the broader initiative and narrow it to a specific departmental level
Define the business milestones and associated metrics
Develop the business case
Ensure that there is a common thread throughout the whole project (Business value)
The best description of “executive level buy-in” that I know of is only 7 letters long:
F-U-N-D-I-N-G
Maybe that doesn’t help you as much as you had hoped, so I’ll provide some additional color around this one. Funding is the absolute bottom-line when we talk about executive buy-in to a BPM initiative. But funding has to reflect the iterative approach, which means that the project isn’t over when the process is deployed. The project is really just getting started.
Funding has to map back to the methodology required to do the project right. It has to reflect all three phases of a proper BPM methodology. We’ve discussed this methodology on Process People before, and if you haven’t seen some of those posts, I recommend that you read one first!
In reality, executive buy-in also means you have to have an executive who’s willing to get up on a podium and endorse the process improvement program organization-wide. It means that the executive has to be willing to commit funding in every manner necessary – money, people, time and so on.
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.
Driven 2008 has come to a close, and we’re really thrilled with this year’s event. Many of the conference attendees stayed for the Lombardi golf tournament yesterday, which took place on the beautiful Fazio Canyons golf course at Barton Creek Resort and Spa. The weather was perfect and the golf was great.
On that note, I thought it might be timely to provide a quick recap of a session that Toby Cappello hosted on Wednesday. The session was called: “The Monday Morning Quarterback Discusses 10 Painful Lessons Learned.” Toby started things off with a golf analogy – one which he lived up to on the course yesterday!
The analogy went something like this: “BPM is like golf – you need to build muscle memory if you want to develop consistency and achieve success.”
In all honesty, I can’t really think of any other combinations of a technology (BPMS) and a discipline (BPM) that fits so perfectly with this analogy. It cuts to the core of Lombardi’s methodology. In fact, if you break it down even further you’ll see more uncanny parallels that help to visualize what exactly you’ll need to do to achieve success with BPM.
Posts