Human Processes: Discovering Collaboration

All the articles in the “Human Processes” column for BP Trends are based on the view that there are two distinct types ofbusiness process – step by step and collaborative. They have a lot in common since, at heart, both transform inputs into outputs. However, the means by which they do so is fundamentally different.

Step by step processes were the basis of the industrial revolution and their theory continues to evolve to this day- as reported on, of course, by many writers for this Web site. Examples of step-by-step processes include much supply chain work, both operational and back office, such as order processing, manufacturing, shipment, invoicing, payment and financial accounting. Other examples include case management work such as customer service, fault management and auditing. On a larger scale, construction and software development processes fall also into this category, although project rather than process management techniques are typically used to manage such work.

Collaborative processes, on the other hand, include tasks but it is not useful to analyse them in this way, since tasks emerge from collaboration rather than underpin it. Examples of collaborative work include strategy/policy development, legislation, merger and acquisition, transformative change to services (public, private and third sector), management accounting, health/social care, research and development, venture capital investment, start-up development, military operations, intelligence gathering, crisis response, scientific research, and some forms of marketing. It is often the case that collaborative processes are carried out by people who might shy away from using a software system to support their work.

Step by step processes are formed of tasks, which trigger one another either directly or via messages, and are carried out by human and/or machine actors. Hence, the basis for defining step by step processes is the automata theory of Computer Science, its incarnation in such formal techniques as petri nets and the pi-calculus, and graphical notations such as BPMN which are derived from these techniques.

By contrast, the basis for defining collaborative processes is the five principles of Human Interaction Management (now often referred to as Virtual Team Planning to highlight its cross-boundary nature). These principles assert that collaboration rests on understanding and managing:

1. Teams, to assign and accept roles and responsibilities
2. Communications, to create and support action
3. Knowledge, to maintain and share useful information
4. Time, to target effort towards goals and measure its effectiveness
5. Plans, to discuss and update them as circumstances change

Since each type of process has a fundamentally different basis, you cannot analyse them in the same way – especially as collaborative processes often include many different organisations as partners. Traditional business analysis techniques fall down at the first hurdle, often failing even to capture the full range of stakeholders involved in collaborative work or the nature of their involvement.

I won't discuss here how to analyse step by step processes, for which you can refer to many articles and columns on this site. Rather, I will offer a few pointers on how to analyse collaborative processes.

The first step is to define the initial goals of the participants. There will generally be an overall goal of the process itself. Associated with this there will be a number of sub-goals, some of which are shared and some of which are specific to particular partners. The dynamic, evolving nature of collaborative work means that refining, extending and sometime curtailing the overall goal and the sub-goals is an inherent part of the work itself, but defining an initial set of goals is always the starting point for analysis. In software that supports collaborative processes, the overall goal may be used as the descriptive text for acollaboration plan, and the sub-goals may be referred to as Stages, Streams or Themes.

Each sub-goal will be of interest to a specific sub-group of stakeholders. Defining these sub-groups is the second step. Not everyone will be interested in all sub-goals, and restricting areas of interest via the process definition is vital in order to cut down the volume of information and messages that people have to deal with.

The third step is to break down (using a technique such as RACI – Responsible, Accountable, Consulted, Informed) who is producing and who is consuming, and what is being produced/consumed, to help achieve each sub-goal. In many collaborative processes, some of the most important items produced by the process are the sub-goals themselves, along with the means used to achieve them – i.e., the collaboration plan produces its own details of “who makes what and who uses it”.

A fully-featured collaboration plan may include much more information, such as start/end dates for specific items to be produced, the form that those items will take, and associated financial or qualitative costs, revenues, benefits and risks. If you use a software system to support collaboration planning, this additional detail can be used to automatically generate online forms and reports for doing and managing the work.

However, in many situations, none of this additional detail is necessary. The three simple steps above are enough to support effective and efficient collaboration, by identifying:

1. The goals of the work
2. Who has an interest in achieving each goal
3. How they will work together to do so

If you are familiar with mainstream techniques for step by step processes, then you will recognise that it is very hard to capture this basic information using graphical notations such as BPMN. In fact, it is counter-productive to try and do so, since the resulting diagrams are more likely to mislead than to inform. Step by step and collaborative processes are very different, and a different technique is needed to capture each type of process.

SOURCE: BPTrends

Social, to Knowledge Management's Rescue?

Knowledge management — as most people think of it — never existed. So anyone proclaiming its "death" can't be right. How can something that never existed die?

Let me explain.

Knowledge Management Meets Enterprise 2.0

Last week I read an interesting article by Nick Inglis (@nickinglis), “Knowledge Management rises from the dead.” In it, Inglis suggests the resurrection of KM is due to Enterprise Social Networks (ESN), which got me thinking. In spite of what I said above, I do believe knowledge management is alive and kicking in various forms and doing very well in specialist niches across a number of industries. I use Claire McInerney's definition for KM: “KM is an effort to increase useful knowledge within an organization. Ways to do this include encouraging communication, offering opportunities to learn, and promoting the sharing of knowledge objects or artifacts.”

The post argues that many KM initiatives fizzled out in the late 90s or early 2000s because the technology tools could not facilitate the capabilities required for a broader uptake. My take — what many people consider to be KM is actually Information Management, and that in the late 90s and early 2000s, many organizations were doing good things on the unstructured information management front. That time saw the introduction of Enterprise Content Management (ECM) strategies, many ECM suites and platforms, a focus on metadata and taxonomies and web based collaboration tools. And then came Enterprise 2.0.

MIT's Andrew McAfee coined the phraseEnterprise 2.0 in early 2006 to describe the use of new web 2.0 tools and techniques to internal enterprise systems. This concept worked for me because McAfee provided us with the SLATES model for assessing systems and their use. Move forward one year and a lot was going on in the E2.0 world:

• Dion Hinchcliffe (@dhinchcliffe) expanded on the original E2.0 model with his expanded FLATNESSES model
• David Gurteen (@davidgurteen) coined the term KM 2.0, suggesting that E2.0 “social” technologies would push us into a new way of looking at KM
• Microsoft release SharePoint 2007, a huge improvement over the 2003 version and introducing basic social tools like blogs and wikis to many enterprises (and with add ons such as NewsGator, even more functionality).

So eight years ago we had a major KM luminary like David Gurteen suggesting E2.0 / social would push us into a new way of thinking about KM. In the eight years since, not only has SharePoint moved on by two major versions (both of which have been somewhat deficient in social collaboration functionality), but the market has proliferated with tools and platforms like IBM Connections, Jive, SalesForce Chatter, TIBCO Tibr, Yammer, ThoughtFarmer, ThreadKM and many, many more, reaching new levels of maturity, and being joined by start ups on a regular basis.

Nothing That a Teaspoon of Social Wouldn't Help

Back to the article. Inglis states that knowledge serendipitously captured in a social collaboration platform is in essence "feral knowledge" (as opposed to well classified knowledge). This concept doesn't work for me. Writing something down in a platform doesn't constitute “knowledge capture.” I believe knowledge is mostly tacit and in our heads. Efforts to capture and share knowledge generally turn it back into information, which brings us back into information sharing and information lifecycle management. 

Inglis goes on to write:

“One major problem that ESNs have is not the capture of knowledge, but the transfer of knowledge from the individual to the collective. Yes, ESNs are searchable, but they often live in a disconnected space, separate from primary systems for managing information. To move from Capturing Knowledge to Transferring Knowledge throughout an organization, ESNs need to continue their march from fringe outlier systems to connected enterprise systems.”

On this we agree. Social collaboration functionality does need to be embedded in business processes and into the major business applications that facilitate them. And enterprise search platforms can provide an enhanced capability for linking information content residing in various silos.

Let’s take a look at Hinchcliffe's FLATNESSES E2.0 model with a KM viewpoint, to see how social is continuing to change our view of KM. 

• Freeform: “Old style” KM platforms were criticized for making users jump through hoops to enter additional content. The freeform nature of social tools helps with usability and user experience while enabling information capture
• Links: Link to content and perhaps more importantly to people, through rich profiles or content they published, their comments, likes, etc. Finding the right people (expert finding) has always been a key KM concept
• Authorship: The egalitarian approach to content creation. Although I don’t necessarily agree that “capturing” your every working moment in a blog constitutes knowledge capture and transfer, it certainly can build up the searchable corpus of useful information
• Tagging: Potentially one of the most useful elements of E2.0, the use of simple and situationally appropriate metadata without recourse to overly broad or complex taxonomies is highly important to KM
• Network Oriented: Small pieces of information, that are re-usable, but are also easily discoverable an addressable across the network, that can be surfaced in a news feed
• Extensions: “Other customers who purchased this book, also purchased these ones” — extending the references to an individuals previous transactions or operations. In a KM context this can be useful for gauging both provenance and authority of a source and assisting in navigation towards other useful information
• Search: A crucial element from a KM perspective, the search capabilities of a social platform, or its abilities to open up and be indexed by an enterprise search platform actually under pin many other functionalities. There is no point in capturing all this stuff if search cannot surface it for re-use
• Social: The truly transparent exchange of information either within groups, or across the enterprise as a whole — this can only benefit a broad KM strategy
• Emergence: “The sum of the whole is greater than the sum of the parts.” In other words, patterns and structures which have a meaning at a higher level of abstraction than at the lowest levels of detail. In a KM context, harvesting valuable insight from those high level perspectives may illustrate patterns or trends that constitute knowledge objects themselves
• Signals: RSS, email alerts, news feeds and other elements which can send signals to users that something of interest is taking part makes for highly contextual KM

So can enterprise social collaboration platforms help push KM? It depends on your definition of KM, and what models and concepts within the broad academic area of knowledge management and related studies you subscribe to. I believe “social” has a very important part to play in information capture and information sharing. Social collaboration platforms democratize content creation and information sharing, in smaller “bite size” chunks, which may in some situations constitute McInerney’s “knowledge objects.” I also firmly believe that you cannot enact a knowledge management enabled strategy without good information management, and that social collaboration platforms or social intranets have a role to play.

Has social resurrected KM from the dead? Not really! KM was, in the words of Miracle Max from the Princess Bride, only “mostly dead” — but it can certainly be invigorated by a dose or two of social.

 Title image by  James Loesch 

SOURCE: CMSWiRE

What is Kanban and How Did It Change Management?

If you’ve shopped for project management or enterprise resource planning (ERP) software recently, you’ve likely come across the term ‘Kanban.’ If you’re like most software buyers, you might not be familiar with what that means. Below, we explain the history and business uses of this system.

What is Kanban and Where Did It Come From?

Kanban is a Japanese word that literally means “card” or “billboard.” In terms of project management, Kanban is a way of visually organizing production using cards, each of which represents a task or step in the production process. The system was born in the late 1940’s by Toyota engineers who drew inspiration from the “just-in-time” delivery model of supermarkets. Instead of ordering product to restock shelves based upon vendor availability, supermarket clerks ordered based upon the current store inventory. The engineers used this idea as a model to develop a manufacturing process that relied on matching inventory with demand in order to increase both quality and throughput. The result? Kanban.

On the manufacturing floor, workers would use a Kanban, or card, to represent steps in the manufacturing process. Adjacent up-and-downstream workstations communicated with one another via the Kanban cards. A container at each station would contain a Kanban that, when received, authorized the station to produce parts or ship the full container to the next workstation. The visual nature of using a card or billboard allowed teams to better communicate with one another, which maximized productivity. The result? Toyota became the largest, most profitable auto manufacturer in the world.

Kanban Goes Mainstream

Kanban was only used for manufacturing until the early 2000s, when David J. Anderson, Corey Ladas, and others developed the Kanban method for software development. It was centered around the idea of making incremental changes to processes and systems, and could be used by corporations in any industry, not just manufacturing. It is a “pull” system, where work in progress is limited in order to reveal bottlenecks that prevent supply from matching demand.

Of course, the introduction of the Kanban manufacturing process to software development resulted in the development of e-Kanban, or electronic Kanban systems. Instead of physical representations of work, e-Kanban systems, like those found in Kanban-based project management and ERP software, use electronic cards that may or may not contain barcodes, attachments, or other electronic messages.

Whether used for development or manufacturing, Kanban has six rules, developed by Toyota, that help ensure a successful implementation.

1. Downstream processes use items only in amounts specified by the Kanban card.
2. Upstream processes produce items only in amounts specified by the Kanban card.
3. Nothing is made, moved, or altered without a corresponding Kanban card.
4. If an item is produced or shipped, it must have a corresponding Kanban card.
5. Errors, defects, or shortages are never sent downstream
6. The total number of Kanban cards are limited to reduce inventory or work-in-progress and reveal bottlenecks or other problems.

Do You Need Kanban?

While the benefits of Kanban/Lean processes to manufacturing and development are relatively well-known, a Kanban system can be used with great effect in a myriad of industries. Any team that generates a product can use Kanban. We even use Kanban software on several teams here at TechnologyAdvice. While Kanban takes some getting used to when transferring from a traditional waterfall system, once your team becomes more comfortable with the process it will help reduce lead times, and increase team communication and output. 

To find out more about Kanban-based project management and enterprise resource planning systems, call, click, or email one of our Technology Advisors for a no-cost, no-obligation consultation on how Kanban can benefit your business.

SOURCE: TechnologyAdvice

Don't let email become your ball and chain

The UK is not as productive as it could be. An addiction to email isn't helping. Howard Frear explains why you must not let email become your business ball and chain.

We are not as productive as we could be in this country. According to an Office for National Statistics report, the UK has the second-lowest rate of productivity outside of the leading nations – leaving us lagging behind our European counterparts Germany, France and Italy.

Better training and more industry investment may improve the problem. But one of the biggest strangleholds appears to be the habit in the UK of mixing business with pleasure and the so called "email epidemic" that is harming business in the UK, where employees insist on checking work emails day and night.

Email addiction

u2028Email is an essential business tool today, but not all of what is sent or received is either necessary or of interest. We are suffering from email overload and waste time reading and deleting emails, instead of concentrating on the project in-hand. 

Time spent reviewing and composing emails is time spent not working on creating and producing for the business. Tending to the inbox can become practically a full-time occupation if you let it!

Email overload

Should we be overly worried about the blight of email in UK business? Very definitely according to Sir Cary Cooper, psychologist and professor of organisational psychology and health at Lancaster Management School. In his keynote to the British Psychological Society annual conference he focused on how email is killing UK productivity.

Cooper said he was concerned about employees checking email outside working hours, saying it was detrimental to health and well-being, as well as having a huge impact on employee productivity. He said that employees were being duped into the fact that writing and answering endless emails was work and felt a “compulsion” to answer them as soon as they came into their inbox.

Cooper argues that a flood of unnecessary emails is contributing in the UK to long working hours, administration overload and a dramatic drop in productivity.

Making email work

So what is the answer? Email plays such a key role in daily business communications you can’t simply ban it. It is all about proper management of email.

Businesses need to make sure that email archival and retrieval is as efficient as possible. By doing this they will see successful management of data contained in their business’ process and workflow. Basically business needs to become as good at managing email as it does other forms of documents and put the right procedures in place to do this.

Read tips about how to manage email more effectively:

• Five tricks to achieve inbox zero and not let email take over your life
• Is it time to retire email?
• Seven tricks to ensure email doesn't take over your life

Email servers were never meant to be virtual store rooms for mountains of emails. By going down this route the control of data is moved away from the business, and without the right control measures in place it is difficult to meet legal compliancy which could lead to hefty e-discovery and disclosure costs. An email archiving solution will put you back in the data management driving seat.

When it comes to compliance, transparent archiving of mailboxes, defining of archive folders and the scheduled processing of e-mail messages are all features you should definitely consider adopting. Also look at concurrent searches in archived and on-archived e-mail messages as well as multiple archive mailboxes.

Back in 2009, AIIM, the global community of information management specialists, found that enterprises cited the sheer overload of email as being the biggest problem with the business tool. Organisations were unsure or unclear on how to approach email management. 

Zip forward six years and very little has changed. Businesses need to make completing an enterprise-wide email management initiative a priority if they are to be released from the strangle-hold email has on them and see a return to higher productivity levels.

SOURCE: realbusiness

Watch How a Lean Thinking Company Runs a Morning Meeting

Is Gamification the missing link in Business Process Management?

Business people want technologists to engage in a language they understand, how about Gaming?
VIQU’s Managing Director Matt Collingwood shared his thoughts on whether gamification is the missing link in Business Process Management. Matt can be found at @collingwodmatt or https://uk.linkedin.com/in/mattcollingwood

In the 1980’s it was Workflow, the nineties Content Management, the noughties Service Orientated Architecture (SOA) and more recently in the Tenties Business Process Management (BPM).

As we have progressed down years, one of the major barriers to adoption has been the battle between technology and differing objectives of the business, as if they both speak a different language.

SOA was supposed to bridge that gap by defining IT in terms of service. Still with a wide range of technical concepts and tools with great names such as Business Process Execution Language (BPEL), Business Activity Monitoring (BAM), Service Bus and WebLogic have failed to connect with the business community.

This was all to change with Business Process Management by delivering business improvement on the back of flexible technology that allowed nimble processes to be implemented and delivered. Providing a Flexibility that can be changed easily to meet with changing business demands. However, due to the technical nature of the conversations the business was left on the periphery or not integrated fully in to the decision making process. The required change to the business structure and operations was driven by IT and the Technology was still speaking a different language.

What is Gamification

This may be about to change as there is a new concept of engagement that is linked to Service related technology and BPM, but it is driven by a language that we can all relate to and understand.

Gamification is all about behaviour change by using gaming mechanics, game play and structures to create a desired outcome. By using a gaming format within a business process organisations can leverage the power of games to motivate staff and define a result that is of business benefit.

For example in sales order processing there is a set routine that is followed to take an order from start to finish with touch points required along the way. This can be a laborious and time consuming process, staff turnover rates can be high and errors lead to delayed payments and money not arriving in the bank on time creating cash flow issues.

Gamification is a Process

How can Gamification improve this business process? Well you can use Gamification in the following way:

There are a range of reward mechanisms and tools that are used by game designers such as:

• hyperbolic Discounting
• Variable Reward Incentives
• Cognitive Flow
• Bartle Character Types Recognition and Reward Systems

These are all motivational states that helps to deliver change in behaviour. In gaming it is a powerful way of creating positive behaviours and delivering change.

Business Process Improvement and Gamification

We can use Business Process metrics to define what behaviour needs to change and then create a game structure to deliver the required changes.

For example in Sales Order Processing a key metric may be accurate processing with speed of processing i.e. Quality and Quantity. What we can then do is apply reward mechanisms to deliver behaviour that creates both Quantity and Quality behaviour.

This may be a points system where employees are rewarded based upon the number of orders processed with then additional rewards for perfection. These rewards need to variable.

Rewards and Character Types

Within game design there has been a lot of research on different aspects of Gaming including how users can be engaged and how they can be motivated. It has been found that there are four character types of gamers (Richard Bartle Definition) and these can be used to engage and benefit the gaming interaction and therefore the gamified business process.

Bartle Character types were created by Professor Richard Bartle who studied game players and found that a distinct set of character types could be defined each wanted to interact with games and environment in a set way.

By identifying with these character sets enables a fuller engagement as you will be speaking a similar language.

Killers for example are disrupters and challenge conventional approaches to the Status Quo and like to destroy or upset things. Whereas socialisers prefer working in teams and building relationships.

Both these character types will exist within your organisation and will exist within your Business Processes and customer base, so why not harness these characters and engage a behaviour which benefits the process you have defined.

In terms of rewarding behaviour these character types and interaction can be used as a motivational approach by catering to character types own way of interacting.

Achievers want recognition

Achievers for example love rewards want to be top of the points tables, collect all the badges and show the world how good they are. This can easily be used in Game mechanics and game play and linked in to business process improvement programs but is not for everyone.

Business Process and Gamification in Summary

In summary organisations can look to Gamification to improve Business Process and motivate both their staff and customers. Interactive Processes can have a significant positive effect and engage on an individual basis by speaking their own language and engaging at their level.

By implementing technical architectures that support flexible business processes the business can work towards higher level methods of engagement. Gamification of Business Processes and how these processes can be improved in a meaningful and positive way will help meet current and future business drivers.

It will be interesting to experience a world where both technologists and Business People speak in a unified language why not through Gaming and Gamification.

SOURCE: VIQU

Involving End Users in Big Change

In its Agenda Overview for Business Process Management, 2015, Gartner makes it clear that the primary challenge businesses face today is their ability to cope with and achieve Big Change. Business disruption is a constant reality, and organizational change agents must be equipped with the proper tools and mindset to adapt their organization to meet its challenges.

The most significant aspect of the Big Change phenomenon is that the pace of change is accelerating. This leaves organizations no choice but to scrap traditional IT philosophies and techniques, and create new frameworks for keeping up with change.

The Unique Position of the End User

One area that is often overlooked when it comes to Big Change, is the importance of the users of the system. For the sake of this article, we will include both entry level end users, their managers and department heads in this equation. End users hold the unique position of being able to see how the system is actually functioning in real life, in a very hands on way. Their hands. In many cases, they will be the first people to recognize changes in the environment which affect the system. These could either be things that are starting to go wrong, or alternatively, new opportunities for how to improve outcomes.

That’s why it’s important to provide all end users with an easy-to-use, attractive and intuitive feedback mechanism. This mechanism should enable end users to communicate problems and opportunities for improvement to management and the IT team in charge of the system, so that the organization can react to changes quickly.

So how should a Feedback Loop be implemented in the application? Five words: Be Creative, Keep it Simple. Feedback should not require more than 1-2 minutes to provide, and often even a couple seconds of feedback as enough. As such, look for ways to build feedback mechanisms into the system that are fun, visual, quick and unobtrusive, but that can capture important user reactions at critical stages of the process.

Let’s Get More Advanced
Give users who want to become more involved, tools to provide more extensive feedback. A couple clicks might take such users to a portal which enables them to suggest a new feature, or a change request, where they can provide more detail and the reasons for the change.

If you’d like to get even more advanced, consider leveraging the power of Social. Once several users are making requests for Change, consider opening up these requests for voting in a Social Networking style. This way, suggestions that have the power of the majority will get priority.

At the far end of the idea of End User involvement, the future could see organizations providing an ‘Assemble Your Solution’ portal, which enables department heads and managers to select their own solution from an available tool kit, and either build it themselves, or get the IT team off to good start with the specs already in place.

In Short…
In order to keep up with Big Change, you need to give all of your teams the ability to contribute and communicate with each other. End User feedback is just the right place to start.

SOURCE: BPMLeader

DO YOU HAVE THE CRUCIAL SKILLS FOR BUSINESS PROCESS MANAGEMENT SUCCESS

Businesses rely on processes to help manage everyday tasks. Some processes are large and sophisticated while others may be small and simple. Examples can include processes for hiring and firing, those to help create and stay within budgets and those for interacting with customers and employees.

While some may consider business process management to be technology-driven, it actually has a broader reach than that. A process is how people and systems work together to get things done and create value for an organization. How these processes are designed and managed matters, and how efficient and accurate they are is often key to an organization’s output and success.

Business Process Management (BPM) can help optimize procedures throughout an organization by implementing its five-step methodology: Design, Model, Execute, Monitor and Optimize.

BPM utilizes a holistic approach which focuses on improving processes throughout the organization as a whole. Professionals who acquire and develop BPM knowledge and skills can help add value to an organization by identifying processes that may add to the effectiveness and efficiency of the business’s operations.

Business Process Discovery

It’s important to understand the processes throughout the organization and how they work together so you can focus on which ones need attention and which may need to be disbanded or rebuilt completely. The first step of BPM implementation is to identify the people involved in processes, determine their sequencing and skill sets, and define the inputs and outputs of the processes. When you identify these things, it can help determine productivity and efficiency, and help decipher where adjustments are needed.

Project Management

Processes are part of the fabric of business operations. They can also be the basis of projects, such as improving current processes, creating new architectures or generating new software in support of evolving process needs. This can help create an overlap of skills and capabilities. A BPM redesign project, for example, typically requires more than analysis and design skills, research and communication capabilities. It often takes a professional who is intimately familiar with the process to take responsibility for applying all the project management tools and techniques, to guide the redesign to a successful outcome.

Organizational Change Techniques

BPM also brings aspects of change management into the equation. Successful BPM or change initiatives, for example, require input by professionals at multiple levels in the hierarchy. In particular, people working mid-level and front-line jobs may have important knowledge to share about potential areas for improvement.

Another change management technique involves the business case. By making cases that are both rational (based on business objectives) and emotional (based on human engagement), changes can gain much more traction with stakeholders. Engagement is another focus of change initiatives and BPM that must be practiced on a sustained basis, not just when the initiative is in its formal stages.

Communication

It takes consistent communication, from the beginning to the end of the initiative, for the process to successfully deliver its intended benefits. Devising a BPM communication strategy starts with addressing four key questions:

• What do we want to say?
• When will we say it?
• To whom will we say it?
• How will we say it?

Answering these questions can help provide a communication framework. The first question aligns with the deliverables of each BPM project stage, from explaining processes to sharing documents used in the process. The “when” question encompasses four stages during the project: awareness, pilot, implementation and continuous feedback.

Audiences are often determined by stakeholders, depending on what they expect of the project and what the project needs from them. Other aspects of the project are often dictated by the nature of the stakeholder’s role and investment in the project. A kickoff newsletter might be appropriate for all audiences, for example, while BPM training might only be offered through an Intranet, exclusively to business analysts and BPM architects.

Business Process Modeling

A business process model classifies processes of the same nature and groups them together. Describing the development process – what, when and why – can provide guidance for future process development. Process models have three objectives:

• Descriptive: describes what actually happens during a process and determines what improvements would make it more effective or efficient.
• Prescriptive: covers desired processes and how they might perform, laying down rules and guidelines that would result in the desired performance.
• Explanatory: explores the rationale of processes as a basis for possible courses of action. It also explicitly connects the requirements that processes must meet.

Business operations are changing and becoming increasingly complicated, making business process management a high-priority organizational discipline. With BPM, companies can improve process effectiveness and productivity and better manage change. The challenge lies in cultivating the people with the diverse range of skills and capabilities to help lead the charge.

SOURCE: SIX SIGMA DAILY

Will Enterprise Chat Supplant Email?

Enterprise chat, sometimes referred to as team messaging, has emerged as a viable alternative to email and might just knock it off its throne. At the very least, there is the potential for enterprise chat to absorb much of the communication that is now done through email.

Since the emergence of email as the primary form of corporate communication, everyone has complained that there is too much of it. What knowledge workers really mean (unless they’re talking about spam) is that it is too hard to use for the way most people want to communicate: What they seek are conversations, not electronic letters. 

Before email, corporate knowledge workers wrote memos (on paper!) for insiders and letters for outsiders. These forms of communication served the corporate hierarchy of the time. Memos went up and down the chain of command, and letters were formal messages between the company and its vendors and customers. 

Email was originally a reflection of that culture. As corporate culture became less hierarchical, email came to be used more and more for less official communication, effectively replacing conversations that would in the past have required a meeting – or at least a water cooler. But email is an unsatisfying medium for informal, conversational communications, because it was designed for more formal, letter-like statements.

Tweaking the Model

There have been a number of attempts to change the way email operates, usually by changing the email client. Google tried valiantly by linking emails into conversations, a method since adopted by just about all email clients. Alas, it still didn’t change the basic way that email handles communications – with signatures and headers and all of the proper parts of a letter. 

More recently, IBM has come up with a way of taking an email chain, stripping it of the parts that don’t matter in a conversation, and presenting it more conversationally. That may be fine if you are an IBM Verse user, not so much if you use any other email client.

SOURCE: CMSWire