The Business Process Management elevator pitch

Another week another conference - well my life isn't actually like that, it is just coincidence that I had two back to back - no more for months. This one was on B-Process-M and had moments of enlightenment in amongst the chaff. One of the moderators was Dr Michael Rosemann from QUT in Brisbane - someone I have met a few times now and each time I am more impressed than the last - he has a marvellous intellect, a sharp wit and a passion for his calling.

One of the questions thrown to a discussion panel from the floor (actually a colleague of mine, go Jonathan) was "what is the elevator pitch for BPM?". Great question and one that the panel really struggled with. You know the scenario, the CEO steps into the lift beside you and as the doors close he/she turns to you and and asks "so what do you do for our company?". You have 6 floors (20 seconds) to pitch your value and worth to the top dog.

"Well, eh, um, I, eh, you see, we, eh, I'm........" ding go the doors and out walks the only platinum coated sponsor in the business - impressive work Agent 99.

It's important to practice these things - you only get one shot!

The problem with our trusty seminar panel is that the elevator must have been in the Empire State Building - CEO's need sound bites - not monologues. And as I listened to the various suggestions I realised that I sound just like them. So over the last 24 hours I have put myself to the test - give me the snappy elevator pitch - and the follow-up line when the CEO presses the stop button and says "tell me more".

I started out with "BPM increases customer satisfaction and reduces costs" - hah! Everything ever pitched to a CEO "increases customer satisfaction and reduces costs" - got to do better than that.

"BPM reduces customer irritation and recovers margins lost to the business" - all right, that sounds pretty good.

His hand is reaching for the stop button, quick what's the follow up? "We identify the most common complaints our customers have about our service delivery and then we iron out the wrinkles in the processes that underpin those areas so that we get a quality result everytime. The reduction of administration and problem management releases profits back to the bottom line everytime."

Hey, not bad, give the man a cigar - can anyone do better? Let me have it.

June 1st - Hmmm, having slept on that I don't think I nailed it. Some tweaking required.

"BPM increases staff and customer [internal and external impact] satisfaction and recovers profits [better than margins] lost in the business".

Followed by:
"We search out [more proactive] the most common and serious [intent] complaints people [not just customers] have about our value chain [end to end] and streamline and automate [expend effort] the processes that underpin those areas to get a reliable, quality outcome. The resulting reduction of administration and irritation releases profits back to the bottom line everytime."

I think that's better again - any thoughts out there?

The presentation virgin

Another session in last week's Corporate Performance Management seminar was a case study by the Melbourne Cricket Club. A venerable Australian sporting institution that coincidently I am proud to call an iPOS eProcurement for SunSystems client. The speaker introduced himself as "a presentation virgin" being his first presentation to a body of this nature. He performed admirably, his talk was on topic, his presentation was well considered and some of his graphics were simple yet brilliantly representative of a point (something a lot of presenters could learn from). Well done Ivan.

However it got me wondering what sort of guidance and support the seminar organisers gave this "virgin" in the lead up to the day. I hope he wasn't left to work it out for himself - that would have been a little discourteous.

Having given a presentation or two myself, and having also been the driver of some in-house events, I recently published the following tips and tricks on our corporate portal. These may not work for everyone, indeed some presentation experts may consider them amateurish, however they have helped me build a fragile confidence over time in the black art of public speaking.

In the interest of sharing, here they are:

Preparation

• Use the correct PowerPoint template presentation. And a simple one too please- nothing too busy.
• If there is a keynote speaker, dove-tail some of your focus points to that topic and if you can talk on the fly, try to weave some points from that session into yours.
• Use pictures wherever possible.
• Read it over and over and remove every word that doesn't add clearly to your message.
• Shuffle points and slides around to get the best sequence.
• Don't use someone else's presentation unless you are very confident - build your own with trigger words that mean things to you.
• Develop a presentation model of “objective, benefit, feature”, e.g. “Driving down maverick purchasing [objective] will generate cost savings and reduce risk [benefit] – the delegated approval controls in iPOS eProcurement for SunSystems [feature] ensure only valid purchases are generated onto supplier orders.[objective achieved]”.
• There should be a re-focusing conclusion and a call to action for sales/next steps at the end.
• Workshop your presentation with your peers/the sales team/the seminar manager.
• Less is more – thin it out and stick to the core message. Averaging one slide every three minutes is a reasonable pace.
• Do a full dress rehearsal with the projector etc in front of an audience (the weekly team meeting perhaps).
• Backup your presentation on a USB key or similar.
• Practice your presentation at home in front of the mirror (I also use the ironing board!) – try out different phrases and word combinations to find what works well when spoken - very different from when being read - get confident in these phrases.
• If possible get some background on the interests of the attendees and relate information in your presentation appropriately.

On the day

• Get a good night’s sleep and get to the event early.
• Dress appropriately – suit & tie/business wear normally (better to be a little over than under dressed).
• Setup and test any hardware before people arrive especially including microphones/speakers.
• Bring plenty of business cards.
• Introduce yourself to some of the attendees as they arrive and engage in conversation – ask them what they are looking for from the seminar – later try to relate that in your presentation – “Sally from company XYZ was telling me over coffee that ….” – and please don’t pick on poor Sally every time.
• If you are being introduced to the floor by someone give them the details of how you would like that to happen i.e. “Here is John, he works in the basement” leaves a completely different impression to “Today John will talk to us about xyz. John has worked with Acme Company for 4 years and his current role is as such-and-such with prime responsibility for so-and so. John brings great passion to his topic today and will be available afterwards for further discussion”.
• If using a microphone, please don’t tap it, discreetly ensure it is switched on and start talking. Talk in only a slightly louder voice than normal, microphones do not amplify your voice clearly if it is not already somewhat amplified to start with. Do not shout.
• Start by introducing yourself and thank the attendees for their time.
• If you can involve some sort of personal experience with the topic you are speaking to, it can warm up the audience very well, particularly if they can relate to it themselves – keep it short though, no life stories.
• Don’t read every point on the slides – they can do that themselves – talk to the focus point. Telling stories with a relevant point can be very effective.
• Stop pacing around like a caged lion (I used to be an Olympic class pacer - very hard to stop).
• A stage actor gave me a tip to get into a slightly uncomfortable standing position pushing your toes into the front of your shoes, it may feel uncomfortable but it actually looks good from the audience.
• Use your hands for restrained emphasis, don't wave them around and don't shove them into your pockets gentlemen and fiddle with your keys.
• Make eye contact with people and smile.
• Talk slower.
• If a question threatens to derail the presentation, suggest that it can be addressed after the seminar one-on-one.
• If someone throws up a horrer story about your company or product/service try not to be drawn into a battle. Perhaps you could express amazement and disappointment that such an event has happened to them and welcome their feedback directly after the seminar. This is a rare occurance but can happen - think disgruntled shareholders.
• Encourage and thank people for filling out the feedback forms at the end of the session.

Now, that's not too much to remember is it? All you have to do after this is actually speak about the topic - easy - that will be your passion.

20 June 2006 - having just given another presentation last week there are two very important extra points:

• Urge all attendees to fill out the feedback form ther and then
• Take the feedback as constructive suggestion on how you can improve (rather than personal and hurtful abuse!)

Adminaphobic knowledge workers

Today I am coining a new phrase - remember, you read it here first - the "Adminaphobic knowledge worker". The what? The well paid, over-ego'd, middle/senior ranking colleague who believes he (let's face it, rarely a she) is too important/busy/needed elsewhere to be bothered with the nuisance of administrative tasks such as purchase requisitioning, timesheets, incident reporting, leave requests etc etc etc. (Read this for an excellent explanation of the "knowledge worker" as opposed to the adminaphobe).

Know anyone like that in your patch?

The challenge for business management is the sickening reality that sometimes these guys are actually right - they may well be a little too important to us in some way, we may be somewhat over exposed, they could well be the "bus man" (the one person you don't want run over by that proverbial bus). Unfortunately they are also frequently arrogantly aware of this and willing to flaunt and abuse their position of power. So what can we do - because we really do want these guys to perform their admin.

An aside but an interesting and relevant little anecdote and a flash back to the malevolence of a previous ORA post. One of our iPOS eProcurement for SunSystems clients was complaining that "the system doesn't work for us". Now, I would say that pretty much everytime I have heard something like that the problem boils down to the fact that their business processes or people are the cause of the problem - not the "system" (and that is not a proud boast on our software, I would say it is a fairly safe general comment about most commercial, mature software applications). Sure enough, the problem was that requisitions for inappropriate spend were being "approved by the system incorrectly". After a little forensic analysis it actually turned out that one of their adminaphobes had handed over his password and responsibility to a group admin assistant to approve his requisitions (I'm too busy for that) and as she had no basis for deciding what was right and wrong she was merrily approving everything that came his way on his behalf.

So how would I approach the conundrum of our adminaphobic friends?

To be continued ..... (don't you hate that).

BPM is BPM

I spent 2 days of last week at a conference, the major focus of which was Corporate Performance Management (CPM) - quite worthwhile, mildly enlightening, excellent hospitality. One of the presenters voiced a commonly held view - Enterprise Performance Management, Corporate Performance Management and Business Performance Management are one and the same thing. I concur.

And on the basis that the driver is "performance" then the classifications of Enterprise and Corporate add little more than a sense of scale rather than difference in purpose. Therefore the performance management equation is EPM = CPM = BPM.

But what of the other BPM? Business PROCESS Management. My BPM.

Well I believe that is one and the same thing as well.

So BPM = BPM. Hmmm, that's a tricky equation to prove.

Process Management is all about the inputs - Performance Management is all about the outputs. It is the same spectrum just viewed from different ends.

Another presenter made a very valid point - if you are not interested in, and driven by, change, then Performance Management is pointless. Performance Management when broken down into its component parts - as done elaborately by one presenter - focusses greatly on the identification, measurement, reporting and analysis of business information from disparate and frequently unconnected sources.

That information is also predicated by its very nature on what has gone before - you can't measure what hasn't happened. Performance Management gives excellent opportunity to identify trends and patterns and do that holy grail "what if" analysis. However there is little point investing the time, effort and cost in the Performance end of the spectrum if you have no intention of embracing change at the Process end.

It is afterall the Process end that incubates all that lovely measurement information in the first place. So making process improvements guided by historical performance starts to make a lot of sense. Therefore BPM = BPM.

True customer service

Much to the chagrin of my home life I was in London for 10 days in February and as a concession to my absence I though I would make a good impression by sending some surprise flowers on Valentines day. The joys on online commerce I thought as I selected a florist website, selected a bunch, filled in the details - and when I hit submit .... horror of horrers - the ultimate draed of the web-shop - a system crsh. So now what? Do I order again and hope they don't send two bunches? Do I let it be and hope they send a bunch? Hope is not a strategy.

In my interest to spend money locally I had cunningly selected a florist near my home in Sydney. It was 7.30am on Valentines Day - they must be up and at 'em. I phoned through and a very pleasant woman apologised profusely, assured me the order had not been placed and took all the details very efficiently over the phone.

What a result - a stunning bunch of flowers arrived, far more impressive than the modest arrangement I had chosen online, with a little side gift of heart shaped chocolates thrown in. Commendable care and unrequested compensation for my poor user experience with the website. Went down a treat on the home front as well

Now that is customer service. Need some flowers? Use the Crows Nest Florist - but don't order online!

What is a business process?

Everything in life is a process. Brushing your teeth is a process – a process that when done well results in rewards from the tooth fairy – and when done poorly ends up in tears at the dentist (can you tell I have got kids?).

A business process is any one of the day-to-day jobs that you have to do from 9 to 5. It may be the mundane business equivalent of teeth brushing or the enthusiastic reporting of the increase in annual profits, but either way, it is a business process. Many business processes are effectively managed within the confines of your software applications, company finances, customer service records, purchases and sales – all transaction based processes that you probably have a good handle on. What keeps you awake at night usually concerns the things that fall through the cracks and invariably those things are people dependant and exposed to the vagaries of human error.

Business Process Management is the definition, honing, documenting and automating of common business processes with special attention to those involving interpersonal communication and responsibility transfer. Another, probably more familiar, name for this is workflow.

There are two initial areas of importance in workflow – the concept of “end-to-end vs edge-to edge”, and the “process owner”.

Edge-to-edge usually replicates the responsibility of the org chart – step 1 is done by department X and then step 2 is done by department Y. Ownership and responsibility get handed over (hopefully) from department to department as the job progresses.

End-to-end is about addressing a process from inception to completion regardless of divisional or org. chart delineations and responsibilities. A process owner owns a process “end-to-end” and is the individual charged with ensuring the process starts, progresses and completes in an effective and efficient manner.

The business process management journey frequently starts in assessing these two areas in relation to the primary pain points in the business and devising ways of improving the inputs to achieve consistent, best quality outputs.
So when you look into the mouth of your business tonight which are the teeth that will earn money from the tooth fairy and which will have you in tears at the dentist?

ORA again

Ownership, responsibility and accountability - my favourite topic again. One of the various email newsletters I get is from Just Sell which is a sales practice forum. Their latest posting is called "A letter to Garcia" and reprints a missive from Elbert Hubbard in 1899 - the ORA concept brilliantly put all those years ago. Check it out for yourselves.

Why is business process management (BPM) a big deal ...

…and why should small and medium companies be looking at this practice? The answer is simple – dollars, dollars, dollars. Over the last decade we have seen the wax and wane of the big IT project throughout the enterprise – ERP, CRM, intranet, ecommerce etc. Time and again these projects failed to meet expectations, ran over budget, implementations rolled on endlessly and no-one talked ROI at the end of the day the way they did at the start. I think most would agree that the one big technological innovation that has boomed for everyone (indeed now becoming a victim of its own success) is email – and it crept up on us bit by bit to a point where now perhaps we can’t function without it. Email has automated the business process of interpersonal communications.

The problem with email from a procedural viewpoint is it is unstructured, fluid, uncontained and virtually unauditable. Let’s face it, when you want to get someone to do something in this day and age, even though they are only down the corridor, you bash out a quick email and hit the send button. Unfortunately the intent or expectation of your message is not always correctly digested or enacted by the recipient.

A request along the lines of “please do a credit check on A.N. Company” may be merrily replied to with a “done” but, have the tasks that were required and expected by the sender been performed by the recipient? Did all three credit checks with existing suppliers of longer than 3 years, a trading history scorecard from a credit reference agency, and a verification of the company registration number all get “done” with the results recorded in the files – or not? That is the mystery and the danger of email. And remember – this is the realm of email because few of the mid-tier financial or ERP systems incorporate a workflow or automation framework outside of the transactional lifecycle. Adding a new debtor to the ERP system generally starts at the data capture screen [you know the drill, New record, Code = , Name = , Address = ……..] – but hang on – what about all those prior steps involved in capturing all the data and assessing and approving the debtor for trading purposes in the first place? Those business processes fall through the cracks of your average FMS/ERP because they are about communication – not transaction.

Business process management is the structured execution of tasks based on pre-defined policies and procedures. So when the credit check is performed, the person engaged must follow through the approved set of tasks and actions and record the results as they go before being able to reply “done”. If they don’t do it and record that they have done it, then they can’t set it “done”. The process may start and end with an email as before but the correct steps were taken in between – every time. Simple, consistent, foolproof and money-saving – every time.

In every company across the planet there are myriad processes demanding structure when you think about how to improve and control your business communications and operations. Drive down costs, drive down risks, drive down errors – dollars, dollars, dollars.

Environmental sustainability is our responsibility

I am writing this on a plane to London – 24 hours of enforced inactivity – plenty of thinking time. I have a jammed week of meetings with our UK resellers ahead and this may be one of the only times I get for a rant.

Before I left I checked the level in our water tank. We have a modest 3000 litre tank in the back garden fed by the runoff from the main living area roof. It is connected to a smart little pump system that feeds the water to the toilets and the washing machine. If the tank runs low a sensor kicks in a “Rainbank” device that diverts the feed from the mains water instead. Cool, hey? The problem with Sydney is rain is infrequent but torrential – it pours down for a few days and the tank fills up rapidly – then it doesn’t rain for weeks on end. Four weeks ago the tank was full to the brim, this morning there was about 10 days left before the sensor would be exposed. That’s important to me at the moment because the sensor is faulty and I want to replace it when the tank empties out but must make sure not to run the pump dry. That’s one of the little things we do around our place for environmental sustainability and it should pay itself off in 15 years unless the cost of water skyrockets! I would love to go the solar energy way and feed kilowatts back into the grid but the cost is mind blowing – and in a country like Australia it should be a no-brainer.

On the plane I have just read a newspaper article giving dire warnings of the world’s impending doom as the populations of India and China grow their economies at such an exponential rate that their demand for the world’s resources increases in a generation at the rate that the western world saw over hundreds of years.

On the radio in the taxi on the way to the airport I heard some of the federal government “question time” – generally boring as and mindless with the Dorothy Dixer rubbish that they set up for themselves – that woman has a lot to answer for (whoever she was). One of them was pounding on about the exciting events that took place in January when 6 of the countries that refused to sign the Kyoto Convention on greenhouse gas control and reduction – Australia shamefully being one of them, others I think being China, India, Korea, USA and Japan (known jointly as “AP6”) – got together to chinwag about what could be done to lessen the destruction of the world as we know it.

Earlier, at the school bus stop, I was talking to another school dad who is working with a company that is aggregating a bunch of small rural manufacturing and distribution companies across the country to build a coast to coast backyard environmental supplies chain – water tanks, grey water systems, sewage management, solar power devices etc – great idea.

Last weekend I was shopping for some big chunks of foam rubber seating (riveting I know but the window seat demands cushions) and the extremely helpful and knowledgeable shop owner said “buy now because in February the prices are rising 15%”. Apparently foam rubber has a critical component called TPD – or maybe TDP? –and this is of course a by-product of oil and only made by three companies worldwide (Dupont being one) and (take a breath here!) China’s demand for this substance is such that the supplies for the rest of the world have been frozen at current levels and all increased capacity is going to China (and presumably India when they work out how obviously precious it is). There must be a huge demand for window seat cushions in these developing countries.

In November 2005 I was at a breakfast seminar where the keynote speaker was Jack Knight of Frank, Knight, Sinclair fame – a helluva nice guy it seems. He was saying that Shanghai has more multi-story construction cranes in operation at the moment than the rest of the world put together.

The New South Wales government has been threatening to build a water desalination plant to lessen the threat of massive water shortages for Sydney in the coming decades – then magically this week they announced the discovery of a new aquifer in the Sydney basin that will “never run out” – that sounds like politico talk to me.

Where am I going with this? – I seem to be rambling – but hey, that’s the beauty of blogging. There just seems to be a constant noise these days about our voracious consumption of the planet we stand on. What sort of a world are we chewing up and spitting out for our kids? Will anything be left for my far off grand children? We each of us need to be doing more to maintain the resources we have.

Innovation and invention in new technologies to lessen our dependence on oil and coal and increase the output and affordability of renewable resources should be given greater incentives and broader support. We all need to look at our own consumption patterns for ways off reducing waste and our drain on natural resources.

Business Process Owners

Another of my current personal responsibilites is the commercial ownership of our Business Process Management (BPM) solution FlowCentric. The whole concept and practice of BPM is fairly new and evolving within the small to mid-tier enterprise and is frequently referred to as workflow (the big boys have been playing here for years but we have a great, affordable solution for the more cost sensitive organisation) .

One of the regular conceptual challenges is that of a business process owner - being someone who owns and is accountable and responsible (sound familiar) for the complete lifecycle of a process within the company. The reality is that many - if not most - people cannot get their heads around this idea. The general response is that "I own it from here to there, then Fred owns it to there and then Mary owns it and then ..." - in other words edge-to-edge rather than end-to end responsibility - no-one is measured on a lifecycle KPI.

The result of this blinkered view into process execution is that it can be challenging to achieve quantifiable efficiencies and improvements end-to-end unless each edge-to-edge champion gets a bite of the benefit cherry. Without a single, butt-kicking, head-on-the-block, KPI-driven, process-owner things are always going to fall through the cracks and get lost in the grey areas of handover.

The following snip from www.bpminstitute.org gives a nice definition to business process owner.

"The notion of business process owners was introduced by Michael Hammer in the 1990’s as part of the Reengineering discipline, but integration of this notion into business practice has been limited. A process owner, as stated in the iSix Sigma Dictionary, is the one "accountable for sustaining the gain and identifying future improvement opportunities on the process." These folks become your cross-functional link across all facets of the end-to-end process. They are the ones who ensure that improvements in one segment of a process don’t negatively impact downstream process segments. Identifying executives who will own the measures, improvements and success of each business process is critical to the implementation and on-going success of your process management efforts."

Ownership, responsibility and accountability (ORA)

This is a subject close to my heart and something I expect I will bang on about from time to time. One of my personal responsibilities is the commercial development and distribution of an eprocurement solution called iPOS for SunSystems. Some time ago I was asked to attend a meeting with a client that was complaining that their purchasing policies weren't beeing adhered to by the system.

As a colleague and I probed deeper into the problem it became obvious that the issue was not system related (these things rarely are) but people and culture related. A number of senior staff had taken the "don't you know how important I am" approach to business environment change - in fact they had avoided it all together by getting their secretarial or personal assistants to perform the online approval function for purchase requisitions. These assistants were generally not capable of making the decisions about what was and wasn't appropriate for team members to purchase and hence just approved everything that popped up in the email inbox. The results spoke for themselves.

There are of course a number of technical solutions to this situation that would force the correct person to have to login to the system and perform the approval process (digital signatures, dongles, two factor authentication etc etc) however that is not the point.

ORA means that an individual owns a task to the point where it can be handed over to another (or completed) and performs the task in a responsible way - surprisingly enough in this case that does not include giving your password to someone else and then blaming them (and the computer system) when they do your job incorrectly.

In another organisation I came across the dark side of ORA - I'll come back to that another time.

Customer service at my ISP

Negligent customer service really annoys me and unfortunately I seem to be coming across it a lot at the moment - maybe its me, not "them". My latest ISP is a support quicksand, I logged an online trouble ticket on 24th Jan and never heard from them again. I followed it up with a phone call today and the tech phone support desk announces they don't have access to the trouble ticket system - "that is another department" - but he takes my ticket number down anyway! My problem was resolved over the phone but I couldn't be transferred to anyone of meaningful responsibility to voice my opinions on my customer service experience. My dissatisfaction in their support service would be passed on to the "relevant people" by my trusty new friend on the phone.

So, I learn't a few things today:

1) My ISP tech support doesn't have access to its own tech support systems.
2) They also don't appear to have any structured way of managing complaints.
3) The individual person involved didn't seem to care about me or indeed that his life would be easier if there was a complaints process he could follow.

Taking into account the fact that I didn't sign up with this ISP - I was sold with a bunch of other customers by an ISP I had been with for over 10 years - I will be shopping around for a new ISP - that was a bad investment for the purchaser - no recurring revenue from me - I wonder how many others they have stuffed around and lost. With the easy availability of non ISP email addresses like Hotmail, Yahoo, Gmail etc - there is no need to be worried about the ISP email address being a personal asset - it can be changed at the drop of a hat.

This rant is about customer service - but really the issue is about poor or non-existent business processes. Efficiency and effectiveness are what all companies should be striving for. Get good and clean about what you do - particularly around any customer facing area - happy customers spend their money and come back for more. It is that simple.