Justifying business process improvement without being a fool

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This year is the fifteenth that I have been working with business process management, document management and business information systems. Or when people ask what I do, "I'm in IT, but I can't fix your PC". Over the years not much has changed. The same business problems are still there. Companies still have an over-reliance on paper or email, because it is just too hard to get started in a process improvement project. Communications with customers are still on paper. Yep, you can get your bank statement online, but that isn't a transaction that results in a business process. Nope, processes are still manually guided by individuals driving a desk and an email account. Am I a fool to think that people want to change this?

In the last two years, I have been focusing more on small and mid-sized businesses. They seem to offer a great opportunity, hanging on through grim economic times, and needing some attention to be able to work better. The problem is that there is never a lot of money or time to spare in small businesses to change the way things are done. Rightfully, people focus on doing what needs to be done right now, trying to grow the business (or just stay afloat). The idea of adding some process rigor, to make it easier to do common repetitive tasks in the future, just doesn't figure. In many cases, a process incorporates a grand total of one employee and a customer. A checklist is a more effective process management tool than a formal workflow, and managing information, data and documents with minimal hassle is a much bigger issue.

Mid-sized businesses have process needs that are reminiscent of the processes I have worked with in giant corporations. Since the multinational monsters are always split into business units and smaller departments, the scale of what needs to be done is often the same as the requirements of a mid-sized company anywhere in the world. Which is great news, as that means I have some great experience to offer these smaller companies from my time spent with the big guys. 

The problem is this: it is far more transparent where the cash comes from to pay for business improvement in a mid-sized company than a multinational corporation -- the owner's bank account. In large corporations, you can make an ROI and justify it two levels above you, and you're still not even in the peripheral vision of the CEO. In a mid-sized company, the ROI has to be real, and offer real results.

So am I just fooling myself trying to work with mid-sized businesses? Or will the lessons of transparent decision-making make me into a better process improvement specialist? My job is no longer in fabricating an ROI for an enterprise software salesman to present to his prospect in the department of a huge company. My job is to recognize that mid-sized businesses have process problems that need fixing, in sensible, justifiable ways. And if you can't justify making a change, things will carry on fine just the way they are. 

Reality is, in 15 years my job hasn't changed. I'm still "in IT, but can't fix your PC". I just have to focus on the real business problems, not the ones that used to make a salesman a fat commission!

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Fix the little things, and get big results

Workflows are just not big enough for us to pay attention to any more. Why bother fixing things that just involve a handful of people working to get a job done?!

Most business process practitioners experienced the days when a business process was represented in reality by a paper workflow. The movement of work from one person to another represented the process for specific work to get done, so we called it 'workflow'. The word workflow seems dated. Despite this, the paper workflow still exists, although in many cases the workflow has become email based, with just a piece of paper to be signed by the customer. 

Business process management, both methodology and technology decided along the way that it needed a bigger piece of the pie. If you just transfer work from one place to another, surely that's not very exciting. Every professional needs more than that. Let's make sure we can measure the process in a way that was never needed before, analyzing it to a level of detail that could be considered obsessive. Let's model a new improved process and simulate its inside workings so there are no surprises. Let's step it up another notch and implement the new process with tools that could run real-time stock trading.

None of this stuff is bad, just for many organizations (okay, all organizations), there are simple workflows that are run on paper or email. They don't need much analysis and they don't need simulation. They certainly don't need a 6-digit piece of software to run them. These workflows are common: accounts payable, check/cheque requisitions, complaints handling. Business process management wants to think big and be big. So nobody ever focuses on the fact that some of these processes have an impact through the value chain on customer satisfaction. 

So while we are trying to fix business processes at an enterprise level, don't forget fixing business processes, oh hell, call them what they are, WORKFLOWS, at the departmental and team level. Its amazing (although it shouldn't be) how picking off some of these smaller items can help a company be significantly more profitable through better customer service.

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Old approaches to business process management are failing companies

We all know that companies of all sizes are facing tough economic challenges at the moment. These challenges are coming from one of the toughest directions possible: customers are not spending money, making it more important than ever to convert the few available prospects into profitable customers. Improving business processes is a powerful way for companies to work better, but the old business process management (BPM) approaches companies often rely on just don't fit the current challenges.

Companies invest in business process management from two direction:

• methodology - the way a company can fix its problems
• technology - applications helping people work in a more structured way

The reasons for doing this were all reasonable in an economy with plenty customers with cash in their pockets:

• reduce headcount
• do more work with the same resources
• improve the quality of a product or service

In the current economy, these types of improvement are not enough. Whether a company is a bank, a manufacturer or a law firm, the challenges facing the business is that the economy is making it harder to attract new customers and retain them.

This is where modern business process management solutions kick in. First, they offer a faster startup time with more focused analysis of problems, which means less money is spent on teams of expensive consultants trying to build strategies for things that don't matter. Second, the solutions offered already include a range of business templates, helping companies to build to a tried and trusted plan rather than always reinventing the wheel. Finally, and possibly most importantly, the methodology focuses on iterative improvement, rather than trying to get every little thing right first time. When the tools are designed to adapt to this types of constant change, the company can improve based on experience rather than luck.

With this lightweight approach to business process improvement, the flexibility to change processes based on experience and best-practices allows companies to do something that in the past was really difficult: 

• treat each customer as an individual rather than force fitting them into a standard model of a customer
• allow the processes that serve customers to extend and adapt based on circumstances
• help the business owners introduce new improved processes rapidly and with minimal cost

Business process management can help companies meet the challenges of the current economy. Companies that adopt new methodologies and technologies can become known for great customer service at a good price. In these times when social media is the marketing machine, and word of mouth spreads corporate reputation like wildfire, companies can attract and retain more customers than ever before.

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Despite Twitter, email is still where we communicate

I have a love-hate relationship with email. For tracking work and tasks to be performed, especially in common workflows, email sucks. For communicating with people, the 'offline' nature of email is perfect, since you can send a message and that message will sit and wait in the recipient's inbox until they get a chance to read it. At the other end of the spectrum, Twitter and Facebook feeds just can't claim that: the messages are so transient that they are more like watching TV or listening to the radio, so if you weren't staring at the screen when a post came through, it is likely you'll never know about it.

So my renewed love of email (over social networks, at least) was given a little spark by the news that Constant Contact (don't claim you have never received a newsletter or event invitation from a company using them, because I won't believe you!) acquired Nutshell mail. Why is this interesting to me, or you? Well, quite honestly Twitter and Facebook really start to stress me out when work/life balance skews itself in the 'work' direction. I want to follow what is going on in the network of my friends, associates and the companies I follow, but keeping my head in an application like TweetDeck is unreasonable and a terrible distraction. So the idea of getting a notification email summarizing everything that has happened in my social network world, that sits there until I'm ready to decompress a little and read it, seems like a great idea. Finally, there is a better chance that I will not miss the last minute wedding announcement from a certain friend the far side of the world (you know who you are...), and that I will not miss another VIP announcement related to a local event that my small business is sponsoring. This is what Nutshell mail can offer, a nice summary of what is going on in your online social world, in a consumable email, ready to read when you are ready to read it.

So I still think that email sucks for work that people do in offices that is routine and repeatable: HR recruitTell him its about self-promoing; employee onboarding; travel expense claims; account payable and invoice tracking; new customer account opening; and so on. If you do these types of work regularly, you don't want the tasks getting lost in your email inbox, the same way as you don't want to have to stare at your Twitter and Facebook feeds all day long to know what is happening that affects your business or makes your sales efforts generate more leads. Email is great for less distracting communication, since it isn't just the Twitter equivalent of a crowd of people standing in a room shouting and waving 'HEY, LOOK AT ME!'.

I'll be interested to see where Constant Contact takes Nutshell Mail. It seems like a great addition, as it puts important messages for you where they should be: in your inbox. This ties in really nicely with the process improvement work I do with companies, where we work to free up employee's email inboxes by taking the routine work out of them, leaving the inbox to do what it does best: hold messages you need to know about but can deal with later.

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Edit ... OK. So the scoop is I'm married to a senior-ish person at CTCT. I'm not being paid for this blog post (the obvious pay-back is no more than you'd expect - and a whole pile of chores to complete at the weekend). And if you have read my blog before you'll know that this post is as relevant to the constant information sharing (and subsequent self-promotion) that is a blog such as mine. There you go - official cya declaration done. Oh, and the second declaration is that as much as I enjoy the concept of Facebook and Twitter, they really do stress me out. But please do follow me anyway at http://twitter.com/consected

Cheers, Phil

Improving processes as companies merge

Mergers and acquisitions can lead to chaos at the best of times, with inconsistent processes and un-integrated teams. Can business process management (BPM) or general workflow automation help in M&A related organizational integrations, or is it just money being thrown into an inferno of change?

BPM marketing often uses words like 'agility' when describing how your processes can be adapted to respond to change. Agility implies an ability to dodge new requirements and keep ahead of the chasing threats, all requiring constant attention from Management to work. I prefer a process improvement solution that is 'flexible' and can absorb the impact of unexpected actions and requirements, automatically taking on the new shape required by a rapidly changing organization.

In a chaotic organization, there is the temptation to avoid process improvement, since it is too much to handle and things are changing too fast. Despite this, bringing structure to the processes that enable a company to operate is essential, whether there is chaos surrounding them or not. With a strong starting point, a department can not only run its own operations better, it can start to influence the organizations with which it interacts. In an M&A scenario, having a solid base of process can make it more appealing to retain that backbone of operations in the new organization, rather than defaulting to the typical political decisions for what stays and what goes.

The problem is that traditional BPM takes a significant time and investment to implement, which is rarely a possibility when approaching M&A. A better approach may be instead to consider a 'quick and dirty' fix to the key processes that will be interacting with the new organization, in the knowledge that everything will change anyway. To be successful, the 'quick and dirty' approach needs to also be flexible (that word again), to adapt to the constant change around it, rather than just collapsing by being too brittle.

Picking the right technical products to build your solution is one part of it. Collaborative technologies, like wikis are great for sharing information in a loose team with minimal effort, but they don't help reinforce processes that require repeatable operations and decisions. Business rules management may be better for processes that rely on complex decisions that must evolve over time, where the end-to-end process is limited in length. BPM is fine where there is rigidity and constant repeatability required and you have time to put it together. Software as a Service (SaaS) or prebuilt solutions running in the cloud can help to get things up and running faster.

I think that companies need a combination of all of these, even when they are not in the chaos of M&A. And rapidly built solutions using flexible blended applications may not be a bad approach to follow.

A post from the Improving It blog

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Lean + BPM = no big surprise

As I have been working more with process improvement professionals that practice lean methodologies, I thought I would put down my thoughts on what 'lean' means to the office / services companies that are typically customers of business process management (BPM) tools. I'm sure for anyone involved in 'lean' already this will sound like a very rudimentary definition; for that I apologize. This is really an attempt to try and communicate the value of applying lean manufacturing techniques to BPM projects, for customers that have not yet delved into one or the other. To me it seems that the combination of lean and BPM is really nothing new.

Lean Production / Lean Manufacturing has been refined by manufacturing companies, building on decades of experience running ever more efficient production-lines. Without the constraints of a physical production-line, office and services businesses often struggle with improving their business processes, typically falling into the trap of deploying ever more complex enterprise software. The benefits of lean methodologies can be experienced by businesses without a huge software investment and lengthy implementation projects; of course, a solution is required to help guide work as it flows between the activities performed by different people in an end-to-end business process.

As some vendors start marketing the benefits of Lean Business Process Management (Lean-BPM), it is important to remember that the design of new and improved processes with BPM and workflow tools has always incorporated aspects of lean methodologies:

Remove waste from the process

• convert manual delivery of paper documents to automated delivery of electronic work cases
• prevent repetitive email of requests lacking appropriate information to template work requests guiding the entry of all information
• handle manual allocation of work by supervisors to team members automatically, allowing supervisors to focus on delivering value as experts rather than task-masters
• reduce the time-lag between activities especially for priority work, by instantaneous delivery of work to the next available person in the process, allowing a critical series of activities to be completed faster
• remove the need for rework by implementing solutions that guide people to completing their tasks correctly first time, also improving quality of the work product and customer perception

Continuous improvement

• provide the capability to measure the performance of processes with real business metrics
• identify issues and areas of waste in a business process with easily reviewed information
• allow business users and analysts to make changes to a process without burdening IT or requiring software development skills

Lean-BPM is a marketing term, not a standalone methodology. A company almost certainly needs software to help improve an office- or services-based business process. If you follow the advice of experienced lean practitioners you will avoid committing to over-complex BPM and enterprise software tools and their extensive software projects at the outset, until you have a better idea of whether they will offer real business value to your to-be processes.

A post from the Improving It blog

Let us help you improve your business today. Visit www.consected.com