Ed.: This is the fourth and last post in a series of Q+A sessions focusing specifically on playback session best practices, with our in-house expert, Kris Komassa. See our previous coverage here.

Anyone besides the BPM team, subject matter experts, and business managers that you’ve had involved in a playback session? Who do you usually suggest be present?

It varies.  I’ve had CIOs CEOs, end users, it runs the gamut.  Ultimately, you want to have a true cross-section of the organization present.

I always like to have my core project team and IT staff involved of course, but again when it comes to the playback, a diversity of roles and perspectives is important. For example, one bank we work with has a very diverse set of processes, so within their playbacks I have had a bank teller, a bank CSR person, a bank loan officer, a bank loan manager, an executive approver and then the core project team on top of that.

For me if you follow that process from a linear prospective, you need to have someone who can weigh in on every part of the process.  I like to have people in the room to say “yes” or “no” each step of the way — and in that sense you need to think long and hard and do your best to anticipate the questions that are going to be asked at every stage. You learn over time, of course, too, and I’m always happy to talk in greater depth about specific industries or situations, just leave a note in the comments.

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While a complete enterprise BPM roll-out is a multi-year effort, this two-part series focuses on the Pilot as the crucial first step in an enterprise initiative designed to spread throughout the organization.

On first toeing the BPM waters, there is what we call the “Startup” phase. The goal for this phase is to demonstrate that your organization can adopt and benefit from BPM on a broad scale. Your Pilot project, hopefully, is a great success – and frankly, it usually is. Why? Because you have spent months laying the groundwork, aligning the team, building the business case and acquiring the technology. Your company – at least the part working on the Pilot — is aligned, dedicated, and singularly focused on a shared and common goal.

But now, with a single successful process under your belt – what comes next?

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Ed.: This is the first in a series of Q+A sessions focusing specifically on playback session best practices, with our in-house expert, Kris Komassa.

People like to talk a lot about collaboration between business and IT, but it seems like a playback session, as a collaborative, iterative process baked into the development environment, is where the wheel finally hits the road.

When you start any engagement, any project work, the existing tendency is for business and IT to split off fairly early, but I try to keep them in lock step as much as possible, which is important in order to be successful ultimately.

That first playback session is the first formalized opportunity to get everyone back in the same room and on the same page. We try to immediately do a level-set, making sure that everyone has the right expectations coming in, and a clear understanding what is going to be covered. We ensure that there is an agenda of what is going to be accomplished, both from a business and an IT perspective, and that both sides also know their roles and the various responsibilities for the playback.

Then once the playback starts, I’m really big on having an ongoing ad dynamic back-and-forth between business and IT, and typically at first it is driven by IT because they’ve been more hands-on to date in the first parts of the project. There are also instances, though, where the business side is driving because you’re doing more process flow at the first part of the first playback, which is important to note.

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Recently we sat down with Rachel Aukes, a member of the Wells Fargo Financial Information Systems Continuous Improvement Team. Rachel, who plays an active role in the use of BPM at Wells Fargo, shared how Wells Fargo got started with BPM. In February, Wells Fargo received the Global Award for Excellence in BPM and workflow.

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.

Rachel Aukes: Our BPM program came about as a solution to organizational level needs – in fact we selected our BPM solution (Teamworks) and began to implement it before deciding on a specific project. We were challenged with increasingly complex, paper-intensive processes that had a large number of manual steps and handoffs. That was obviously inefficient and meant there was room for errors (such as bad typing, misplaced files, etc.). The idea of what BPM offers became prevalent in 2006 when most of our development staff was focused on maintaining our legacy systems while building our future systems of record. This effort was strategically important to our company; however, the business had immediate tactical needs that must continue to be met. We asked ourselves what we should do to best support our business partners, and we determined that BPM was a good solution for this. We haven’t looked back.

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