The 2×6 Workshop – The Therapeutic Way to Model Your Process!

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?

My suggestion is that you start with a 2×6 workshop for each process that you’ve selected. This is quite simply a 2-hour meeting with roughly 6 people who are knowledgeable or involved in the process you want to analyze.  The ultimate goal of this session is to map the “As Is” or current state of the process in question, and start to understand the existing problems or pain points that are motivating change, while at the same time helping them to realize the practical benefits of the BPM approach in their jobs.

Here’s the recipe for the ideal 2×6 workshop:

• Secure the right participants
• Have the right facilities & tools in place
• Capture the process milestones (start, end & key phases)
• Elicit the major high level activities across the full width of the process
• Follow the happy path (you can incorporate the most significant exceptions, if you must!)
• Warning…beware the “Detail Devil” - don’t go too deep too soon!
• Layer in the process participants, problems, key inputs & outputs and capture any useful notes
• Obtain sign-off from the participants/process owner at the end of the workshop - not later!

Remember that getting the right people into the room absolutely critical.  Using the following as a guide for who you need in your 2×6 workshop:

• Facilitator - An impartial, objective analyst to run the session, keep it crisp and in-focus.
• Process Owner - Responsible for process definition and signs off on the outputs.
• SME’s - The people who know and DO the work in detail - on a daily basis.
• IT - Someone who support the process and brings a tech perspective.

At first, these participants may be skeptical, cautious, even nervous about BPM. But as they see their process captured visually, and start identifying all the different problems that that they experience with the process, you may well find the session ends up like group therapy! All of us in change management are solution-focused at heart, but the essential thing here is to concentrate on the problems, and create a sense of purpose and urgency for improvement. People will become excited about the potential for improving the way that they do things on a day-to-day basis and being an integral part of that initiative.

It sounds a bit like an episode of Dr. Phil. But the bottom line is that for your organization to improve - and to sustain that improvement - you need a set of communication techniques in order to really get things going and start driving the cultural change as well as technical change.  A 2×6 workshop is a communication channel and method of building stakeholder support, as much as a way to quickly launch the modeling and analysis necessary for a solid program foundation. And that, I imagine you will find, is an enticing reward for a couple of hours’ work.

As you can see throughout the entire Lombardi philosophy, in adopting BPM you’re rewiring your organizations DNA.  Part of that DNA is software, part of it is people and part of it is process.  The approach to a successful BPM project has to incorporate an understanding of all of these elements, and should encourage and facilitate communication between them.

Hopefully this will help you to get some traction in your initiative. If you’ve had some success with these types of workshops, please share your story in the comments.