Monthly Archives: August 2010

There is a lot of momentum in BPM fora as people from all walks of life conclude that some form of BPM is needed in order to make sustainable lasting and meaningful change for their clients and in their organisations.

Most of the people joining the great BPM debate have backgrounds in process re-engineering or IT, among many others.  Some have come from organisations where BPM maturity is high with process thinking very well established.  Others have come from more chaotic places where BPM is in its early stages.

The paths taken to the gate of BPM can be very very different.  This results in lots of people having strong opinions, and a good chance that most are right, albeit looking at similar problems from different angles, and different points in the BPM lifecycle.

My bank has very few branches, but one free all-purpose phone number answered by sympathetic people far far away, with above-average capabilities to the basic things right.

Over the last 6 months, I’ve had to call them about 10 times.  All but the most recent one ended in frustration, and sometimes escalation to whomever at the call centre was playing manager that day.

However, a couple of days ago, I called up to ask for my IBAN – the international version of my account number. The only reason I had to call was that I couldn’t find it online next to my regular account number where I expected it.

Today I received a call from their customer service team asking me to rate my recent call: agent performance and overall outcome.  Was it coincidence that I was only asked about the best, and simplest conversation?

I said “yes and no”.  I wanted to offer some really actionable information.  But this didn’t fit the 1 to 5 rating scale. Not the callers fault.  She probably didn’t have a freeform field on her screen to take notes, or a way to flag our recorded conversation so that is could be re-routed for analysis.

After explaining that my overall experience over the last few months had been poor, and that I was only calling to ask for something that I felt I should have been able to find online, I briefly let slip that the actual call in question had been satisfactory.

At that point she had enough information to fill in her form and with a quick “thank you sir”, hung up the phone.

I’ve never felt less listened to by that organisation.

Historically, on TV, the score of a football/soccer match was shown with the names of the scorers and the times during the match that the goals were scored.

In ice hockey, the basic stats also credit some players with assists.  Increasingly in all sports (including soccer) the contributions of other players are recognised, albeit rather simply.

Should root cause analysis be the same?  Often a failed unit  fails due to a number of factors.  I have found that capturing all contributing root causes helps, a lot.

Particularly once solutions to mitigate the root causes go live.  Imagine anticipating a big drop in defects, having resolved the number one root cause on your pareto chart, only to find that the number two and three root causes were also factors in the defects attributed to the number one stack, but hadn’t been captured.

As a concept and as a tool, Six Sigma’s defects per million opportunities (DPMO) has got to be the BPM worlds unsung hero.  Its limited profile may be due its complexity, but in terms of its potential to do good, its value as a universal performance metric, the power and the potential are up there.  My other contender for such praise is Net Promoter.  But these are two contenders from different ends of the scale.  Where Net Promoter is simple to gather and analyse and pretty much anyone can “get it”.  But it doesn’t point to the place to go and fix stuff. DPMO is a trickier beast, but once tamed, its unbeatable.

Which other metric encompasses so much:

1. points of failure – embeds points of failure definition, and their evolution as they get eliminated or mitigated
2. volume insensitive,
3. vertical and horizontal aggregation – vertically (different products) and horizontally (different phases of an end-to-end process)?

If you are struggling to find a metric that really digs into the performance of a complex organisation, processing many different products, and want to be able drill down to understand performance at any level, DPMO might be your holy grail.

If you can tame it…

The BP Group on LinkedIn has been having an interesting (if you are into this sort of thing) discussion, posted by Hamid Sadeghi asking: Can anybody make a one sentence describing Business Process Management ?

There have been lots of great ideas, and healthy debate.  I have tried an number of different angles.  The latest one resonated well:

“If management thinking and activity starts with understanding the process, its customers, and their needs, it is BPM.  If not, its not.”

In the movie, 6th Sense, a young boy is cursed with a gift, an extra sense that allows his to see dead people, ghosts that are asking for help.

BPM work can often feel the same way.  Looking around a work place, seeing so many opportunities for improvement, yet the people who need to make the change seem uninterested and/or unaware.

If I breakdown the phases of any process improvement, it goes like this:

1. identify/define the process
2. understand the problem or opportunity
3. generate and evaluate solutions
4. implement best solution(s)

The challenge for many of today’s knowledge and information based processes, its really hard to see the process.  Its not like a factory where you can follow physical goods around conveyor belts.

Any tools or methods that really bring BPM and Process Improvement to the mainstream will have to be really effective at helping more people see and understand processes as part of their everyday work, especially the dead ones.

In movie, 6th Sense, a young boy is cursed with a gift, an extra sense that allows his to see dead people, ghosts that are asking for help.

BPM work can often feel the same way.  Looking around a work place, seeing so many opportunities for improvement, yet the people who need to make the change seem uninterested and/or unaware.

If I breakdown the phases of any process improvement, it goes like this:

1. identify/define the process
2. understand the problem or opportunity
3. generate and evaluate solutions
4. implement best solution(s)

The challenge for many of today’s knowledge and information based processes, its really hard to see the process.  Its not like a factory where you can follow physical goods around conveyor belts.

Any tools or methods that really bring BPM and Process Improvement to the mainstream will have to be really effective at helping more people see and understand processes as part of their everyday work, especially the dead ones.

Clients may say they want BPM, but then when it comes time to administer the treatment, there is almost always resistance.

The decision makers who decided to focus on improving BPM have other objectives.  It is critical to understand these, the relative priority of each one, and any expectations about approach.

It doesn’t end there.  Ultimately, BPM is about getting people to work differently.  They must actually come to work and change the way they behave, the way they respond in certain scenarios, the decisions they make.  You cannot force people to change.  If you can’t show them how BPM helps them achieve their goals, you need to reset their objectives, or risk failure.

A perennial favourite of process people for mapping processes during group mapping exercises, we have a lot to thank the humble Post-it for.

However, they have yet more to offer.  As a concept for tracking process flow, issues (defects) and capturing valuable metrics, they are great.

Imagine there was a tool out there that allowed knowledge workers to add post-its to items that they worked on flagging them as having defect A or B or C…  Most of these defect types would probably be of a “remove-before-flight” type that required resolution or rework before going out to the customer. Useful eh?

That’s not the reason I’m so excited about post-its.  Imagine you could count things like, the number of items processed.  The number of items with no post-its (no defects).  The number of defect As, Bs etc pulled from the bin at the end of the process.

Finally, the potent Defects Per (million) Opportunity concept has an real-life analogy that works.  All we need now is the IT tool that makes it happen. Anyone?