BPMN Method & Style
I reviewed the book BPMN Method & Style by Bruce Silver at the BPTrends website.
On Time
It’s a mission critical asset for every enterprise, but we can’t own it. There’s seems to be an endless and reliable supply but we keep running out. It can’t be stockpiled and we can’t do anything without it. It’s not visible but we can see where it’s been. A vital natural resource, it is available to all in precisely equal amounts. It always arrives just-in-time and, short of wormholes and ultra high speed travel, can’t be slowed down or speeded up. An essential element in every process, it is the ultimate perishable. Time.
Balancing Right and Wrong
In my recent BPrends Practical Process column I suggested that we should be more interested in measuring the things that go wrong than those that go right. Jane challenged me on this:
” … I disagree with you that “We should be more interested in things that go wrong than in things that go right.”. Yes, of course it’s important to capture and measure what goes wrong so that you can identify weaknesses and improve/resolve them – but unless you capture and measure what goes right, how on earth do you compare ‘wrong’ against ‘right’. Or be able to reward, praise etc the team/people who got it right?”
Sure we need to know what is working well for all the reasons janestate. It’s also true that the stuff that is working well can be a benchmark or source of ideas for fixing the stuff that isn’t. Continuous improvement though means continuously finding things that should be improved. My experience is that organisations who are not actively seeking to uncover problems, don’t find them. Meetings/reviews where most of the time is spent listing all the successes can easily turn into a lovely time of self-congratulations. It’s also the easy thing to do. As always it’s about balance. I’d tip the balance in favour of continuous improvement and for that to happen you have to be continuously finding things to improve.
BPTrends Column
My BPTrends column Practical Process has been published.
ProcessDays & The Process Ninja
The Process Ninja has been blogging about ProcessDays.
Management Attention
There is a finite amount of management attention. If we want managers to start paying more attention to BPM, what should they let go? Is it a zero sum game?
Measuring The Impact
In process improvement and management, it is vitally important to be able to measure performance. If you can’t measure performance then what does “process improvement” mean? “Make it work better” just doesn’t cut it. We need the numbers. We need to know the most important measures, how the process is currently performing according to those measures, what the target measures should be and, very importantly, what measurement methods we’ll use to get all this data for both the As Is and the To Be. If that all sounds too hard or even impossible, then pause and rethink what you are doing. Once the process has been improved, how will you know?
The end of a process improvement project where the new improved process is handed back to Business As Usual is where many attempts at Process Management fail. Process Improvement may have been successful but ongoing Process Management will fail if we can’t successfully cross the chasm between the project and BAU. A critcal aspect of this change is to ensure that process performance will continue to be measured in BAU mode. Often times these measurement activities are artifacts of the process improvement project and fall into the chasm never to be seen again.
What does improvement mean?
At a training course I delivered yesterday there was some interesting discussion about what “improvement” means when we talk of “process improvement”. Too often it is equated with cost reduction and this is a very shallow view of process performance. Of course, cost is important but it’s not the only thing. Processes deliver value to customers and other stakeholders. Who are the customers and stakeholders? What value do they each need from the process? That’s what we need to identify, measure and manage. Processes have a cost but I can’t think of any process where cost is an output valued by a customer.
Practical Process
My regular column at BPTrends, Practical Process, has just been published. I’d be interested to hear what you think about the latest thoughts on the Compelling Reasons BoK.
Leonardo ProcessDays 2009
Each year, along with my colleagues at Leonardo Consulting, I produce ProcessDays. ProcessDays 2009 is a process festival of nine Master Classes and a two-day conference. It takes about 18 months to design and deliver ProcessDays and about this time last year we were concerned that a difficult economic environment in 2009 would make it difficult to have a successful event. Little did we imagine just how deeply troubled the economy would be. But in any case we ate own dog food and looked at the processes of design and delivery, we looked at where the value was, we looked at where the costs were, we looked at where the frustrations came from. The changes we made, many not obvious from outside, were profound and far reaching. And very successful.
In 2009 we will have more delegates, more sponsors, a larger program and we’ll deliver much enhanced value to all who invest their time and money in ProcessDays. I like the idea that the largest and most successful BPM education and networking event in Australasia will be hugely successful in the face of economic turmoil because we took a process-centric approach.
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ProcessDaze
Hosted by Roger Tregear
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