Articles

Change – Too Much of a Good Thing?

Author(s):

Karen Tricomi

Consultant, The Process Geek

Agile. Continuous Improvement. The Virtuous Cycle. It’s true – change is necessary, and we all need to get better at adapting to change at an ever-more rapid pace. The increase in the pace of change in today’s world is exponential.

No one wants to get stuck in analysis-paralysis while the competition moves on without us, and there’s nothing wrong with experimentation and trying new things. However, it does sometime seem that changes are made for the wrong reasons, and not driven by pro-active, intentional movement towards goals. We’ve all seen decisions made without the necessary due diligence, and often those are compounded over and over as companies shoot from the hip, reactively trying to fix (or cover) their original mistake.

Requirements at the Speed of Business

Author(s):

Frank Fabian

Owner, Frank Fabian Group

How many of you have heard the statement “The project failed because we didn’t have good requirements”? I’ve heard it dozens of times. It doesn’t matter whether it’s from seasoned project teams or ad hoc teams. The single biggest reason for project failure is a problem with the requirements. Even with agile processes in place, I see the same things repeated over and over. In doing post-mortems on projects that failed and projects that succeeded I have found some common traits.

Evolving From Human-Centric to Social-Centric BPM

Author(s):

Ashok Kumar C S

Industry Principal, Infosys

The need for evolution from Human BPM to Social BPM

With the significant cultural revolution brought about by social media resulting in a new set of social capabilities, enterprises are discovering value in collaboration and engagement of process users in the BPM execution environments. By traditional definition, human-centric business process management is an approach to BPM that focuses on human activities and human interventions in business processes, and supports them with automated functions ¹. The emphasis was on operational efficiency, process visibility and control with business agility. Now, the adoption of social models and opportunities for collaboration are extending the traditional boundaries of human-centric BPM systems. There are many dimensions that necessitate this change in outlook.

Customer Experience Measurement

Author(s):

Andrew Spanyi

Faculty Member, DBizInstitute.org and Managing Director, Spanyi International

An increasing number of organizations are monitoring the “Net Promoter Score” or NPS metric. While NPS can help an organization get a sense of where it stands with its customers, measuring NPS – by itself – is no guarantee of improved success in performing for customers. However a process based approach to measuring, modeling, and improving customers’ experience can produce significant results.

What About Unstructured Processes?

Author(s):

Gagan Saxena

VP Consulting & Principal Consultant, Decisions Management Solutions

The race to define, standardize, automate and improve processes started with Henry Ford’s assembly lines. This ‘structuring’ of processes has driven tremendous productivity benefits for organizations, and managers are therefore trained to consider the organization to be a sum total of its processes. A key management goal is to drive more structure into business processes with automation being the desired end-state. While most data-driven, transactional processes have been automated over the decades, there is a class of knowledge-driven processes that have eluded efforts to structure or automate them. These ‘unstructured’ processes are variously referred to as Manual Processes, Expert Processes, Case Management, Supervisory Functions and similar. And the goal has been to apply process-centric thinking to structure and automate these pesky but high-value-add processes. This is not working and a new decision-centric approach needs to be considered.

Enhancing the Value of Your Government Transformation Road Map

Author(s):

Ken Mullins

Senior Principal, MITRE Corporation

“All you need is the plan, the road map, and the courage to press on to your destination.” – Earl Nightingale

If you are a government program or project manager, let’s say in the IT solutions (or services) delivery business, you’re probably devoting a lot of thought to the long term view of how you plan to deliver on the promise of your product(s), solution(s), or services(s) – even as you grapple with the day-to-day challenges, risks, and issues that inevitably arise to frustrate your best laid plans. I suspect that you’re also maintaining some form of a road map for each of your projects, to highlight the many intermediate goals that need to be accomplished along the way – perhaps feeling frustrated at times by the need to maintain all that information on a single, fairly intuitive page.

Wanted: A New Business Architecture Framework

Author(s):

Drew Guitarte

Enterprise Business Architect, Wells Fargo & Company

We’re familiar with the enterprise architecture (EA) frameworks such as those of Zachman, TOGAF, and Federal EA Framework (FEAF). These frameworks provide a conceptual structure of ideas (Merriam-Webster, 2014) that helps us understand the process, value, and function behind EA. Is there one among these more popular frameworks that adequately expands on the business architecture value proposition of aligning strategy with tactical demands? Probably not.

What we need is a new business-oriented and customer-centric business architecture framework. Allow me to introduce a set of concepts and principles for this new framework that’s closer to the essence of business architecture. Let’s call this new framework, for lack of a better term the Enterprise Business Architecture Framework (or EBAF).

Difficult People in the Virtual World: Part 2 of The Virtual Team Facilitator

Author(s):

Shelley Sweet

Faculty Member, BPMInstitute.org and President, i4 Process

Difficult people can disrupt any meeting, and we all know their frequent styles and behaviors from face-to-face meetings. These are people such as the Heavy Talker, the Technical Expert, and the Know It All. Below are some more difficult people that apply in the virtual meeting. (Of course many of these roles apply in the face-to-face meeting as well.)

The Late Comer. You need to have the virtual tool set up at least 15 minutes ahead for a long meeting (over 2 hours) and 10 minutes before for a shorter meeting. Welcome people as they come on. Then at the start time, tell everyone you will start now or wait for 2 more minutes, and then start. When new people come in, welcome them and move along.

First and Last: A Tale of Two Enterprises

Author(s):

Brian Stucky

Managing Director, Business Decision Management, Allegiance Advisory Group

Far too often these essays are motivated by an observation of, or conversation with, an organization that has gotten itself into some trouble. Their pain becomes a springboard to discuss how things should be done in the world of decision management and provides an unfortunately steady stream of topics for forums like this. That said I am quite pleased to be able to report some generally positive recent experiences with Enterprises that are making great strides as they embrace business rules and decision management. We will use these as exemplars that other similar organizations might look to as they plot their decision management.

Business Architecture & the Role of the CIO

Author(s):

William Ulrich

President, TSG, Inc.

I get a chance to work with CIOs in various capacities that usually involve major business challenges their organizations are facing and how IT can collaborate with business to address those challenges. These discussions are generally a precursor or follow-up to a strategic assessment, which tends to surface the expected technological challenges along with a few surprises. The surprise is not that IT has layer upon layer of fragmented, heavily redundant application and data architectures built on aging technology. This is unfortunately the norm. The surprise lies in why these problems keep multiplying and attempts to address them often turn into the next failed project. The fact is that issue analysis, problem definition, planning and funding all begin with the business and more often than not, these concerns lie behind a shroud of organizational siloes, fragmented customer perspectives and myriad business dialects.

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