In case you missed it, we published an article in the latest issue of Workforce Management that might be of interest. The article is entitled “A Simple Approach to Documenting your HR Process” and it is filled with statistics and tips for getting your HR processes documented and streamlined.

A recent study by Staffing.com revealed that 70% of applicants and 28% of hiring managers are dissatisfied with how their hiring processes work; and that is just one of the many critical processes in your company. Effective documentation of your HR processes can lead to impressive savings and a large reduction in your company’s overhead.

Optimizing your HR processes is critical for saving time, avoiding errors and reducing company overhead. The absolute best way to save time and money is through process documentation. If you are interested in finding out how to quickly document and streamline your key processes, there is a simple next step. Just click the link below to download the full white paper.

Get the White Paper: A Simple Approach to Documenting Your HR Process

Ready to start documenting your processes now? To effectively document your processes, you will need the right tool. Click here for a free trial of Lombardi Blueprint, the easiest process documentation tool on the market.

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 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.

We’re announcing the Spring ’09 release today and it goes live on blueprint.lombardi.com on Saturday morning. Want to see more? Make sure you attend the introduction webinar tomorrow at 10 AM central.

PRC, based in Ft. Lauderdale, Florida, manages 14 domestic call centers and a handful of centers offshore.  In January of last year this 25-year-old company declared bankruptcy.  Six months later, after a massive restructuring they emerged from Chapter 11.

One of the efforts that helped in this restructuring and which continues today is an effort to document, standardize and communicate all of the company’s processes.

Rachel Pace-Maron, Director of Operations Support Service was asked to lead this effort with a shoe-string budget.  Last week I chatted with Rachel to learn more about her effort.

My conversation with Rachel (11:19)  Listen

Some of the topics Rachel tackles:

• The goal with mapping PRC’s processes was to find out how they could do things better and faster and why things take so long.  They weren’t able to answer why a process took so long because no one person knew every step.  This is what lead them to process mapping.
• One of the first processes they mapped was “agent time,” how much time do agents spend on break and what is the management process for keeping them on the phone efficiently and within break parameters.
• They found each call center had a different process and none were doing it efficiently.
• By standardizing on a process for all centers and bringing them into metric, they had a bottom line impact on revenue.
• Before adopting Lombardi Blueprint for process mapping, groups had been using, Visio, Exel and Power Point.
• PRC has a group of people who are visually oriented and a group who are narrative oriented. As Rachel explains, “Blueprint’s ability to marry picture to narrative has been fantastic and, I’m not going to say life altering, but certainly business altering.”
• Her excitement over the latest Blueprint release and how the addition of participants will help PRC break down silos and take their process initiative to the next level.

Devin Rickard is a Senior Director of Business Process Improvement at Symantec, the company best known for its Norton line of security products.  The team that Devin belongs to acts as internal process consultants at the company and they’ve adopted Lombardi Blueprint as the common process modeling tool for the group.  What they found however is that Blueprint has a wide appeal beyond their group.

I caught up with Devin to learn about process improvement at Symantec and how his team was using Blueprint.

>>My talk with Devin (11:53): Take a Listen

Devin Rickard of Symantec's Business Process Improvement team

Some of the topics Devin tackles:

• Symantec has grown through rapid organic growth as well as acquisition.  This has led to processes being executed in islands. Devin’s group works with the islands to try and “pull them together into a single continent.”
• The team practices “stealth six sigma.”  They have adapted the processes and tools from Six Sigma so that they fit the Symantec corporate culture.
• What started as a nice tool for the practitioners has ended up becoming the core catalyst that brings together individuals and helps them to visualize what they are trying to improve upon for Symantec customers and partners.
• As business owners or process managers become engaged they are becoming aggressive adopters of Blueprint.  They find it gets them a picture of their business that they’ve never had before and they want to find the areas within their own processes that they can make improvements to.
• The interest/involvement of the business has noticeably shortened the time to improvements.
• Some of the projects Devin and team have used Blueprint for: transforming the quote to cash process and the procure to pay process (Blueprint helped to cut the time to pay employee expense reports from 3-5 weeks to 2-3 days) as well as working on ways to make the process of integrating acquisitions smoother.

As an application that leverages all the agility and reach that the cloud provides, we thought it only appropriate that Lombardi Blueprint help sponsor Cloud Camp Austin 2009.

Along with lesser known companies like Microsoft, Sun and Rackspace :-) , Lombardi Blueprint is a gold sponsor of the event (actually since I took the screenshot to the left, Aserver, Rightscale and Zeus have also joined the golden ranks).

As a gold sponsor we get to deliver a 5-7 minute lightening talk at the beginning of the event.  The only restrictions are that it be cloud related and it can’t be a product pitch.  I will be talking about the cloud and democratization of information.

What, When, Where…

The event takes place next Saturday, April 25th from 10AM – 4PM down at Austin City Limits on the UT campus. Here’s how the webpage sums up the event:

CloudCamp is an unconference where early adopters of Cloud Computing technologies exchange ideas. With the rapid change occurring in the industry, we need a place we can meet to share our experiences, challenges and solutions. At CloudCamp, you are encouraged you to share your thoughts in several open discussions, as we strive for the advancement of Cloud Computing. End users, IT professionals and vendors are all encouraged to participate.

(Here are a few more thoughts regarding the event from co-organizer and Red Monk analyst Michael Cote.)

Free for All

The cost of the event is FREE and all you need to do is register online so they know how many folks are coming (heck, I bet if you showed up that day they probably wouldn’t turn you away.)  So come on down next Saturday and enjoy and learn.  And remember, since its an unconference that means anyone can propose and lead a session and we all learn from each other.

For those who will be in the Austin area then, hope to see you there!

Last week I came across an article in NetworkWorld.com that listed today’s “Top 10 Technology skills.”  The list was based on work done by Foote Partners, which conducts quarterly assessments of IT pay trends in the US.

Foote Partners’ CEO David Foote says “what’s unique about this downturn is that IT departments are hiring talent in certain areas – such as business process modeling and project management – while laying off in others connected to weak product lines.”

And, indeed, coming in at the top of the list was Business Process Modeling:

1. Business Process Modeling

Business process management, methodology and modeling is one of the few IT niches that saw pay gains in the fourth quarter of 2008, according to the quarterly IT salary survey compiled by Foote Partners. In particular, companies were willing to pay for workers with ITIL IT best practices and CobiT IT governance experience. Pay for these skills was up 10.3% from a year ago and 5.6% from the previous quarter, the Foote report says.

Kevin Faughnan, director of IBM’s Academic Initiative, says business process modeling is one of the key skills that business majors should be studying. “It’s about how does our business work, what are the business processes and how do we analyze them,” Faughnan says, adding that this is a key issue for companies to consider before applying IT to solve business problems.

This seems to make sense to me. It is always important to know your business processes in order to be able to modify and refine them to keep pace with change… and today there is an extra helping of change that we all must not only keep pace with but get ahead of.  Business Process Modeling is a key first step.

And the rest…

For the curious, the other 9 skills were:

• 2. Database
• 3. Messaging/Communications
• 4. IT Architecture
• 5. IT Security
• 6. Project Management
• 7. Data Mining
• 8. Web Development
• 9. IT Optimization
• 10. Networking

At the end of last year, Blueprint Product Manager Dave Marquard and I had a call with Forrester analyst Clay Richardson to brief him on Lombardi Blueprint.  The result of that call and a considerable amount of further research was a 6-page report that debuted last Friday — “Vendor Snapshot: Lombardi Blueprint Bridges Gap Between Process Discovery And Execution.”

Here is the Executive Summary from the Forrester site:

Austin-based Lombardi Software’s latest offering, Blueprint, positions the vendor to extend its leadership in human-centric business process management (BPM) and takes direct aim at Microsoft Word, PowerPoint, and Visio as the tools of choice for process analysts. Blueprint provides a process modeling and discovery platform that blends collaboration and documentation capabilities into an easy-to-use, low cost, software-as-a-service offering that can be used by beginner to expert process analysts. To stay ahead of the pack, the platform needs to continue extending its collaborative Web 2.0 functionality as other BPM suite vendors play catch-up by introducing similar offerings. Consider Lombardi Blueprint if you need a collaborative and lightweight process discovery tool that is tailored to support geographically dispersed process discovery teams.

We are in the process of licensing this report and as soon as we do, we will be making it available on the lombardi.com site.  If you are already a Forrester client, you can log in access the report here.

If the above has piqued your interest, you might be interested in signing up for a 30-day free trial of Blueprint and seeing for yourself. :-)

Yesterday I chatted with Dr. Joyce Statz who has been teaching a course at St. Edwards University in its school of management and business.  Her course, “Multiple project and portfolio management” is offered as part of the Masters of Science in Project Management degree, and teaches how to manage multiple portfolios of project work in an organization.

I recently learned that Joyce introduced Lombardi Blueprint as a tool within her class and had a lot of success.  I called her up to learn more.

>> Take a listen (6:11)

Some of the Topics we tackle:

• Who are the students that make up her class and what are their backgrounds?
• Mixing concepts with hands-on exercises
• Replacing Visio/Word/Excel in the classroom
• How the strongest Visio advocates at the beginning of the term became the biggest Blueprint champions at the end of the course.

Blueprint Educational Program

Lombardi provides free Blueprint subscriptions for educational use.  If you are teaching or taking a course where you think Blueprint would be appropriate, please contact us at blueprint@lombardi.com to learn more.

I’d like to share with you a little set-piece that I often use with clients as a learning aid.  I call it (rather unimaginatively!) my “Google Maps exercise” and it makes some very neat points with regards to process decomposition and modeling best practices.

A common challenge I encounter is that people get bogged down with figuring out the level of detail they should go to. This isn’t because of the lack of a definitive standard for process levels – I think the root cause of the difficulty is simply that process modeling is not an exact science.  In fact, much of it is quite subjective.

So, the exercise usually goes something like this…

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