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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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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