I’ve been thinking about basketball, butcher shops and hotels. These thoughts unexpectedly coalesced as I stood in my nephew’s shop in Regina, Saskatchewan, Canada. Butcher’s Best is no ordinary butcher shop as evidenced by the constant stream of customers queued out the door and the energy and enthusiasm with which the three staff worked all day to engage, entertain and serve the customers. A lot like Fish! [1] with meat and without the throwing.

Paul Harmon has been recently thinking and writing about ’service processes’ as opposed to ‘manufacturing processes’. You can read his thoughts here and here. This difference is important as it can inhibit process thinking for those who are in the business of service delivery and find no resonance in stories about efficient manufacturing processes. If I’m running a hotel, what do I care about how cleverly Toyota makes cars?

In manufacturing processes there is usually fixed content, method and sequence. You cut a piece of metal to shape, drill holes in it, bend it and then paint it. It can’t be done in any other sequence. The metal is always the same type, the hole needs to be precise and accurate and you can paint it any colour as long as it’s black. Such processes can be relatively easy to model, improve and manage.

The Harmon thesis usefully points out that this can’t be the same in delivering services. He uses the example of running a hotel. The guest might check in and go straight to her room or might go straight to her meeting in the restaurant. She might order room service, go the restaurant or dine away from the hotel. Will concierge services be requested? Will there be laundry? Will check out be early or late?. The individual processes are quite well defined, eg Order Room Service, Request Laundry, Check Out, Visit Gym, but you can’t be certain of the sequence. You can identify some patterns of possible sequencing and there are sequences that are not possible (eg check out followed by room service). As the day goes by the set of possible sequences narrows and the final process/sequence for the day emerges. You can’t model the process instance until it has been executed. The process is truly emergent [2].

At Butcher’s Best I was reminded that there are many environments where both manufacturing and service processes are closely coupled. A customer buying prepared product from the showcase is part of a highly predictable ‘manufacturing’ process. Giving customers the Goldilocks Option (not too much, not too little, but just right) means that you are out to the cold room to custom cut steaks two inches thick rather than one inch or to season the roast with a little more of this and a little less of that. That’s different to a hotel isn’t it? Henry Ford certainly wouldn’t have put up with such customer driven anarchy! He said if he’d asked his customers what they wanted, they would have said “a faster horse”.

I was also thinking about basketball. I know very little about basketball but having watched a bit of Olympic TV coverage I was wondering about how you might model the process Play Game. (Yes, I know – it’s tragic isn’t it!). In the traditional structure of management, operational and supporting processes, the on-court activities are the operational processes. Management and support processes are common enough but the on-court action is much more challenging to model. There are well defined processes like Receive Ball, Pass Ball, Intercept Throw, Shoot Goal etc. Seems that all(!) you have to do its put those together in the right sequence and execute them with precision and accuracy and you’re up there on the podium for the medal and the flowers trying to remember the words of your national anthem.

If we could introduce Lauren Jackson [3] to Frederick Taylor, Frank and Lilian Gilbreth et al would they be able document all of her subprocesses leaving the only thing to scratch our heads about being how she chooses so quickly and so well which subprocess to execute next? Putting aside for a very brief moment the extraordinary execution skill required, a great deal of the successful performance of the Play Game process is about agile sequencing of processes in a context sensitive environment.

What questions can we shape, and perhaps start to answer, by comparing the processes Play Game, Run Butcher Shop and Manage Hotel? We need a better classification system; there’s more to this than ‘manufacturing’ versus ’service’. I don’t have anything like a complete picture of this yet but some of the issues, similarities and differences are highlighted below. I’d love to hear your perspectives on agile resequencing of processes (see below for my email address).

• Resequencing velocity: there are significant cycle time differences between basketball, Butcher’s Best and the hotel – the velocity of resequencing is greater on court than in the shop and greater in the shop than in the hotel (most of the time). Agile process resequencing must happen in seconds on court, but maybe 15 minutes in the shop and, depending on the services involved, even longer in the hotel.
• Competition effects: the basketball resequencing task is more complicated that the hotel and butcher shop equivalents because you have a team of people making real-time decisions alone and in combination against an opposing team doing a similar thing with the intent of counteracting what you’ve just done (and what they forecast you might be about to do). There are important elements of Decision Theory and Game Theory involved.
• Resource flexibility: Between the butcher shop and the hotel there is a key difference in the number, type and flexibility of the resources involved. In this particular shop everyone can do everything that is required by the customer. The hotel systems have more resources and the room service chef is unlikely to check you in (would you like fries with that?!).
• Collaboration demands: another possible classification attribute is around the degree of collaboration involved. In both the hotel and the shop the various resources are working in a coordinated but reasonably independent way. That can’t work on court.

If we can discover and describe all of the (sub)processes involved, then process agility is not about creating new processes per se but rather about the resequencing of existing processes. I’ve suggested four possible attributes of agile resequencing for context-sensitive processes.

What do you think?

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[1] Lundin, Stephen C., H. Paul and J. Christensen. Fish! A Remarkable Way To Boost Morale & Improve Results. Hyperion 2000.[2]  Olivera Marjanovic (Faculty of Business and Economics, University of Sydney) writes interestingly about emergent business processes in a paper, Inside Agile Processes: A Practitioner’s Perspective, to be published in the Proceedings of the Hawaii International Conference on Systems Sciences, HICSS’42, Hawaii, 2009.

[3]  Australia’s phenomenal basketballer!

[First posted to ProcessDays 2008 on 4 August 2008]

In a recent post in his fantastic blog, Seth Godin, discusses the lovely idea of Toothache Marketers. These are people whose services are much in demand to deal with immediate and insistent pain but in the absence of pain they are invisible.

I wonder if selling BPM to executives and others in our organisations might be like that? Is there something about the way a dental practice works that might inform our efforts to develop the process view?

Open wide!

[First posted to ProcessDays 2008 on 4 June 2008]

Designing and populating the ProcessDays Conference program is a fascinating exercise. What are the key issues? What do delegates what to hear about? How should we present the various sessions? Who can communication the messages? What are the compelling topics?

As part of the design process every year we search for the elusive species – the BPM Aware Senior Executive. Our holy grail is to create at least one plenary session where we have fair dinkum executives talking about process. Not BPM practitioners but perhaps the people they report to. They don’t need to be BPM experts but they do need to have a well developed “executive perspective” about why BPM is important. The sort of person we look for has little knowledge of BPM at an operational level but certainly knows why it is important from a strategic and executive management point of view  – a good high level understanding of what BPM means to the organisation and why it should be supported. The key BPM practitioner probably reports to this person.  Like Sir David Attenborough searching everywhere for rare life forms, we search high and low for that fabled creature ”the executive who has bought in to BPM”.

Such people are, of course, hard to find. And perhaps even harder to get into the spotlight. The bpmase* seems to be a rare and timid creature. Perhaps they hesitate to reveal themselves because they know that they have with their grasp significant competitive differentiators based on BPM? But we never give up our search to find one or two out there in the wilderness that we can coax into ProcessDays for an hour or two.

If you spot a likely bpmase in your travels, let us know. We’ll send out a retrieval team.

[*BPM Aware Senior Executive]

[First posted to ProcessDays 2008 on 16 May 2008]

In recent BPTrends Advisors Paul Harmon has been leading an important discussion about the differences between product (manufacturing) processes and services processes. Seems to me that the differences are about complexity and one key driver of this is sequencing.

As Paul shows in his hotel example, the service processes don’t have the same fixed sequence that is a feature of most (but not all?) production processes. Will Roger call room service tonight or will he go the restaurant? Will he have laundry to be sent out? Will he check out early or late?  By comparison, a manufacturing process will almost always have a fixed sequence of activity.

Although it’s not the multiplicity of customers that cause the differences between process and product processes, the sequencing decisions are made largely by the customer so the complexity is customer-driven. There is a “service process selection matrix” and the service processes have a (quasi-)random element to their execution. Perhaps a “web of processes” rather than a “value chain of processes”.

Important not to lose sight of the fact that “processes deliver value to customers and other stakeholders” and that is absolutely the same for both product and service processes.

Can we always make a clear distinction between service and product processes? The home delivery pizza shop is clearly doing both product and service processes. Maybe the useful distinction is whether there is a repeatable sequence of processes rather than just whether the output has mass as well as value? And there might be a mixture of both at various levels in every process architecture? A key test will be: with what certainty can we predict what the next process(es) will be?

These are important questions that may well have an impact on the achievement of The BPM Tipping Point.

[First posted to ProcessDays 2008 on 11 May 2008]

Reading a book called “Made To Stick: Why Some Ideas Survive and Others Die” by Chip and Dan Heath (yes, they are brothers). The authors acknowledge that this is an extension of Malcolm Gladwell’s “Stickiness Factor”. A very useful extension I think. We need to understand how to make the idea of BPM sticky.

Why are the ideas embedded in urban myths, proverbs, great speeches, successful business ideas, jokes, war stories and conspiracy theories so potent? How do they stay around for years (in some cases hundreds and even thousands of years) and cross geographic and cultural borders?

The book describes six principles of successful ideas: Simple Unexpected Concrete Credentialed Emotional Story. Lots of examples and useful practical advice about how to achieve these characteristics.

One idea I have from the book that I’m finding very sticky is the Curse of Knowledge. This talks about the difficulty we have in remembering what it was like NOT to know something. In our BPM context I think we often get too complex too quickly. We’ve been thinking about process-based management for years and, when we are explaining it to someone who is new to the idea, we unconsciously make assumptions about what they already know. These assumptions are based on our knowledge, not theirs. The Curse of Knowledge! Maybe we should NOT be trying to tell everyone everything all at once. Maybe it will work better if we have a staged plan that nudges people closer to an understanding of BPM as a management philosophy one step at a time?