In this Process People interview we welcome Farrukh Humayun, vice president of information services at National City.  Farrukh was instrumental in the launch of the BPM initiative at National City, which is one of the nation’s largest financial holding companies.  In this interview, Farrukh discusses some of the challenges he faced when engaging the business, how he worked through those challenges, as well as providing some of his thoughts on funding a BPM initiative at the project and program levels.

Process People: What challenges have you seen engaging the business during the project and how have you tried to get the business more engaged in the projects themselves?

Farrukh Humayun: There have been lots of challenges. The first one is that the business is not completely aware of exactly what Business Process Management means. They don’t think in terms of managing their processes – they think in terms of managing functions or in terms of managing transactions and they also talk in terms of managing data. But it doesn’t take them long to start thinking or becoming more process-focused. Having visual tools which model the process up-front and get the business thinking about a process flow are also very helpful.

We also found challenges in getting agreement from the business to say what the actual process was, what were the quantifiable business objectives that they were trying to achieve, what were the service level agreements (SLA’s) that they wanted to build inside the actual process. It was also difficult, at first, to get agreement on who on the business side was going to be accountable for which activity or which sub-process within the overall process.

Process People: What do you see as the main challenges and difficulties of implementing a BPM project in a bank? What is it about Financial Services that adds obstacles or makes it easier?

Farrukh Humayun: Banks are very conservative in nature because we want to make sure every process and system that we implement is very secure, customer-centric and complies with all the regulations such as internal audit regulations as well as external regulations. The challenge that we see in a bank environment is that there are lots of stakeholders involved and getting all of them to agree on what the quantifiable business objectives of managing a process are going to be can be challenging.

Also, historically, banks grow by acquisition and some of the lines of business are fairly autonomous. So when we say that National City had over 370 systems for our lending systems alone, those were all one good idea at a time, and that can pose a lot of challenges for people who are trying to build a process across multiple systems where people are used to doing things one way or another.

Process People: When you get into a BPM project do you simply implement the base process as it exists and expect the optimization to happen later, over time, or do you try to optimize the process as much as you can as you build the initial project?

Farrukh Humayun: We have actually done both. I am of the firm opinion that the sooner you get started with a BPM initiative, even though your process is not optimized; the better it will be because you will have data sooner that can help you optimize your process.

We had a paper-based procurement process to get a laptop, and in one case it took months for them to figure out what went wrong with their process. In fact, it took 9 people to touch a requisition for us and pull a laptop. As soon as they saw a pictorial representation of the bad process, they immediately began questioning the value of their existing processes and started thinking about how to do things differently. You cannot optimize what you cannot see. Certainly the best way to do it is to optimize your processes first, but sometimes that can take so long and the business does not have the appetite for that.

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Like all enterprise software solutions, the person implementing a BPM strategy must contend with a chasm between the business and IT. The two speak different languages, have different priorities and tend to justify results in a different light.

So which side do you approach first?

There’s a tendency for enterprise software to gravitate to IT. And why not?  IT gets it, right? They understand the technology and the inherent benefits it brings to the table. And IT is constantly justifying new software, hardware and services through the annual budget reviews. So it seems natural for anyone wishing to see a BPM solution deployed to look at IT first.

I believe this is a mistake.

Despite conventional thinking, the right place to begin conveying the benefits of a BPM deployment is on the business side of the house. That’s because BPM has to be looked at not for the technology, features and specs, but for its ability to change and improve the business.

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BPM project durations are usually measured in weeks-to-months - not months-to-years. With this velocity, you can’t afford to get stuck in the rut of traditional “define & design” techniques based on multiple rounds of 1-on-1 analysis meetings. In fact, I’d go so far as to label this as rework which increases a project’s cycle time!

I’m an enthusiastic supporter of the workshop format, where not only speed, but also quality, visibility and buy-in are greatly enhanced compared to the 1-on-1 approach. You could say it’s a way of applying process improvement methods to the way we carry out process improvement itself (or “PI²” as I like to call it).

In a previous blog, I shared some secrets of success for the “2 x 6 workshop“. One of the critical success factors is utilizing a facilitator - “an impartial, objective analyst to run the session, keep it crisp and in-focus”. Let’s dive into that a bit more. Why do we need the facilitator role, how does it add value to the process of process improvement, and how can it be done well?

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Getting started with BPM makes many people nervous, and for good reason.  Change can bring uncertainty and fear - and hence often generates resistance.  In response to this type of internal skepticism and unrest, I frequently recommend conducting a 2×6 workshop when initially analyzing your processes to engage and excite the people who live the processes every day.

But before I tell how to run a 2×6 workshop, I would like to put it in context:

BPM is first and foremost a discipline to improve the efficiency, effectiveness and agility of a business, from a process viewpoint, to deliver real business value.  That being said, you have to do a certain amount of rewiring PEOPLE and your organization before you can start worrying about the software.

To really drive BPM in your organization, you need strategies in place to make the shift a bit easier for your workers to consume.  People don’t want change to be forced upon them.  But if you present them with an opportunity to help drive that change, then they can become fully invested as participants who help shape their own future.  So when you begin your initiative and need to take stock of where you are, you do some process analysis.  How do you get started?

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We just wanted to check in and report on the first day of our annual Driven User Conference here in sunny Austin, TX.

The day began with CEO Rod Favaron’s keynote, which was all about how we are now at “the end of the beginning.” The secret is out about BPM, attention and visibility are soaring to new heights, and we are now entering a new phase of adoption and maturity.

A big part of this progression is the move from Project to Program to Culture, as Rod put it — in the early days of course it was all about getting your first BPM project up and running successfully, and then it became all about growing that project into a full-fledged program. But the next phase that Lombardi customers and partners are moving into right now is one in which BPM begins to truly impact the culture of any and every part of the organization that it touches, indeed the organization as a whole. This is the true value proposition of BPM ultimately — the idea that BPM becomes part of your DNA, that process becomes an integral part of what your company does every day.

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