BPM is about to change

Dynamics in a process is complex, there is no one ideal way of getting things done in todays business. Process change so does people and business.

So how do you account for these changes when you are building your business processes, fact of the matter is you cannot. During the design phase, it is not practical to accommodate all permutation and combination of a process flow from end to end neither can you account for external factors that will influence your business process execution. So process cannot be structured, you have to empower process participants (end users) to expand or change process as they go without any strict restrictions just because someone designed the process that way. BPM is all about process improvement and not always process automation. Most vendors capabilities today revolves around process automation on structured processes, I make that distinction because I believe you can improve your process without having to define the process before hand. The reason you can do this is because you are implicitly turning your process participants a contributor to how the process should be in real life, you are getting direct feedback from the "knowledge workers" in your organization.

This concept is coined as Dynamic BPM at Fujitsu. Dynamic BPM is a platform on which users collaboratively not only get their actual work done help build the process. While getting their actual work done is the direct action, the result is process that gets constructed automatically. An example could be an RFP process, when account executive (AE) receives the RFP from a customer, AE can define a team to complete the RFP, delegate/subtask to other members within the organization and own the process and control it. Lets say AE tasks it to product management (PM) and sales engineering (SE) to complete the RFP, PM can add their input and further task it to more people for additional inputs. Once all chain of events (tasking) is complete, the result is completed RFP that is ready for AE to be sent it to the customer. While RFP process participants have done nothing new but do their job, implicitly what we could generate is a "real-life" business process for an RFP process. This process is rich and clearly depicts the process routes. It is true that a structured process for automating the RFP process could have been built before hand but inflexibility will result if AE or PM decides to take a different route in getting the RFP completed. Since that was never captured in the structured process, people will fail to do their job which results in going back to the re-design of the process. But doing this entirely as a dynamic business process will result in improved productivity and better visibility to actual real life process.

The beauty of this approach is as more RFP process gets completed, the visualization will provide common patterns across these processes and eventually extract those common patterns and provide recommendation for context based process improvement.

Based on all my BPM experiences, this is an inevitable feature that all vendors will soon realize and jump into. You just cannot dictate users to do their work a certain way, Dynamic BPM helps overcome that at the same time govern the way work is done.

Do it your way...

Getting started with Business Process Management

Business Process improvement initiatives within any organization must start with analyzing the current "AS-IS" state of the process. As I always say to my clients, the weakest link in Business process management is the business process itself. Poorly designed processes produce poor results, it is important to get them right and you can't get them right the first time hence process improvement is iterative and continuously need to adapt with ever changing business situations. In other words an organization can never be in a "To-Be" state because that state is dynamic and influenced by internal factors (re org, new direction, mergers/acquisitions) or external factors (regulatory/compliance/market etc). So best strategy is to understand the "AS-IS" state and analyze that to infer what in the current process is working and what is not, the result of which is applied to improve the "AS-IS" process. As you do this more iteratively you are consistently doing the following things:
a) Analyzing the current "AS- IS" state
b) Applying the results to improve the "AS-IS" state.
What you achieve implicitly is that the process is being improved and corrected along the way.

Now the million dollar question, how on earth does organization know their AS-IS state. The answer is they don't, reality is most organization base their understanding of the AS-IS state from manuals/documents that are outdated or directly from the employees who by the way rely in the same outdated manuals/documents or from other employees. So it is cyclic... So this methodology will result in a "AS-IS" state that is outdated so I want to refer this "INVALID AS-IS" state. I'm also not trying to undermine the challenges in terms of convincing clients that their understanding of the process is wrong. Lets deal with that for later.

Now the real question, Ok so if the process state derived from these documents or et al is incorrect how do i know?

Enter Fujitsu Automated process discovery service.. Oh here we go again a consulting service? No this is not a traditional interview based techniques to understand the process, it is a service empowered by a tool that can visualize an organization "AS-IS" as it really is. You can find more details on here and how it works.

You really have to see the demo to understand the power and information spit out from this tool. It is just awesome. It is a must have for every person who is interested in understanding and improving the process. If these things are of interest to you, this tool is just for you!

• Finding best performing processes route
• Cost of accomplishing these processes
• Am I in compliance or not? Cost of compliance vs non compliance
• Exception paths and how often these paths were taken and time/money spent on those exceptions processes
• How good or bad is my current process?
• Where and who are the bottlenecks?
• How do i get my process back on track, complete visibility.

Going back to core part of the message here, you can only improve what you can measure. The measurement should start with understanding with your current state of high visibility business process and take it from there....

Its the right way to do BPM! Lets do it right.

--Rajiv Onat