Death to death by PowerPoint

Part of our Best Employer initiatives is regular communication across the business on what and how we are doing and where we are doing it. We recently had the past quarter company update that is a morning session comprising of about 8 different corporate and divisional presentations, supposedly for an hour but some quarters long past are remembered for their record breaking overruns!

It was not unusual for these sessions to turn into "death by PowerPoint" and you all know what I mean by that. Over the last couple of years a brave group of pioneers started to change the way they built their presentations. Rather than a slide buried in bullet points there would appear a single topic along with a picture. Now when I say "picture" I don't mean a graph or a logo, I mean a genuine photograph or cartoon of people, places or situations that was in some way evocative of the topic in hand. The presenter then talked to the topic whilst ideally drawing in some reference, however obliquely, to the picture. Very novel. Mind you, this was skunk-works, nothing officially mandated.

It had two outcomes, these presentations started to be rated as the "best" in the following online survey, they also tended to stay within their allotted time - no bloat. The message to all? people like pictures. Last week the presentations were riddled with pictures and it only ran marginally late - possibly a record breaker. Purely through exposing everyone to different ways of doing something the mass had adopted the change as a norm.

So strip out all the bullet points in your next presentation, put one key message on the slide and support it with picture that ties your message up in a memorable package. Give it a try, you might find it fun.

Now, where to get the pictures? The Internet dummy! There is a raft of stock photography suppliers online that sell low res images at very affordable rates. I'm not going to favour any one over another by naming them. I have really been delighted with the kind and generous nature of many of the amateur photographers that post on http://www.flickr.com/. There are millions of images here and I have found that generally the owners are delighted for you to use an image of theirs at no cost as long as the source is referenced and the presentation is not something that is being sold as part of a commercial offering. Find one you like and ask the owner - you may be surprised. The world is full of givers just waiting to be asked.

Bank your emotional credits early

I was chastised today for letting my blog entries lapse - time is a precious commodity these days and work, travel, kids, ill family members and handyman jobs have conspired to keep me away from the keyboard last month.

Another whirlwind week of business in London during Feb and another battle with the misery that is Heathrow airport. That place must be terribly demoralising to work in – it seems to suck the smiles out of people as they arrive – international travel has become a tedious and stressful thing since 2001 and it is made even more so by the surly, dismissive attitudes of ground staff.

In contrast some of the clients and business partners I caught up with are just brimming with energy and enthusiasm, ideas and innovations. It is amazing how the power of an individual can be magnified by a positive corporate culture.

I had three recent interesting conversations that led me to today’s post.

We have been providing training to some of our partners recently and one attendee was espousing how much better the experience was with PA than another organisation. Only wanting to beat our chest slightly, we are proud – and I think justifiably so – of our iPOS "boot camp" training, a lot of effort has been put into it by people much smarter than me. The comment was that we gave freely and willingly of information whereas getting things out of the other party was like pulling teeth.

We also have two large, publicly listed organisations using our Consolidations for SunSystems application who recently communicated their joy and delight with its functionality and operations. They both have achieved significant and tangible cost and data integrity benefits from the implementation to the point where they could now not easily function without it. Each of them have also requested enhancements and modifications to make it even better. Always on the lookout for good marketing I asked each if they would provide a "Consolidations from PA is great because ....." statement that we could use as a testimonial.

One turned a brilliant statement around overnight - a giver.

The other came back with a mealy mouthed "when you do what we have asked then we might think about it" - a taker.

In a previous existence I had the pleasure and privilege of having a smart and generous man as the business owner at a client. He called this sort of thing "emotional credit". We did a good job all month every month for his company year-in year-out and he constantly offered his services to us for case study and prospect references. He liked to bank his emotional credits early so that any time he did have a problem he knew there was a deep well of goodwill to draw upon to ensure a best possible resolution. And he was right, if the excrement hit the air movement device we pulled out all stops to deliver for his business.

Bank your emotional credits early. You get a whole lot more out of life.

Happy Googled Australia Day 2007

Google have been very smart with their marketing this year and have given all Sydneysiders the opportunity to make a personal appearance in Google maps. Check this out. (Update 29 March 2007 - Sorry, they deleted the link! They were planning to fly the camera plane around the cebtral, harbour and beach suburbs of Sydney to update the Google Maps images and give us Aussies a chance to be noticed.)

I am hoping to get into it and if it works out I will add the link here in due course.

What is it about process?

What is it about process and why do we want to manage it?

I am always pondering on ways to explain this to clients and watching Shane Warne retire recently from Australian international cricket gave me another insight. Warne, with perhaps an unimpressive track record off the pitch, is without doubt one of the world's best cricket bowlers, if not the best to date - even I who doesn't follow the game with much passion or attention can see this much.

Bowling of course is a process, a process that many of us are completely hopeless at and one that Warne is simply spectacular at. With a combination of talent and practice he consistently manages to bamboozle the opposition batsmen and take the wickets. The problem for the Australian cricket team now is how do they replace the loss of such an important "processor" in their business? Indeed the loss of three very competent cricket "processors" as Glenn McGrath and Justin Langer also bowed out on the same day.

This is the problem with manual processes (and processors) - you spend a lot of time and money training and skilling someone up to perform the task efficiently and effectively and in doing so you become exposed to the risks of losing that person with catastrophic effects on productivity and results. From a human resources management viewpoint you also want to be able to offer personal development and growth opportunities to individuals and this will be hampered by your reliance on specific people doing specific tasks above all else. Procedural documentation is all very well but "processing" is all about doing, not describing.

This is where a business process management suite (BPMS) can protect you from the storms of workforce turnover - not much help admittedly for the Australian cricket team - but masterful for directing and controlling the everyday business processes that earn you your crust every month. If a business process can be codified by a set of rules, then it can be orchestrated and trafficked through a BPMS. So anyone in your business can disappear tomorrow and your operations will survive the day.

Obviously there will still be training, productivity and efficiency challenges as people move in, around and out of the organisation however the rules and escalation points defined in a quality BPMS implementation should keep things moving along very nicely.

The time-to-value quotient

I was recently asked to compare one of our products to a supposed competitor in the marketplace. In reality we see the two as playing different roles and in some ways complementary to eachother. Different users have different needs and goals and the two products in question would be of value to intersecting subsets of the overall user community.

As I worked through a somewhat lengthy list of differences I came to the benefit of "time-to-value". There is frequent talk about the ROI (return on investment) and this is undoubtedly an important criterion when assessing the corporate spend - hey - you want to get a return on that don't you? If not, why are you doing it? And of course there is "hard" ROI in terms of money saved, time reduced, risk mitigated, and "soft" ROI in terms of happier people, fewer nuisance queries, better survey results - those things harder to measure and sometimes harder still to marry improvements back to a specific cause.

"Time-to-value" is a little different - how long will it take for you to start recovering some of that return on investment? The ROI may be substantial but in the case say of rolling out a new ERP system the project could be long and tortuous and it may be some time before you start to get your hands on a little of that "value".

The companion process solutions for SunSystems from PA have without exception a very rapid time-to-value. This benefit comes predominatly from one single core premise - a product that is seamlessly and natively integrated to your core system "out of the box" (in our case Infor SunSystems) is always going to give you a shorter and more cost effective time-to-value than an alternative.

Some of our small footprint products can be up and running with key users trained within half a day. The challenges and complexities of getting one piece of software to talk to another are largely removed from the installation task because of that native integration.

On the other end of the scale our iPOS eProcurement for SunSystems suite may need anything from 5 to 50 days to implement and configure depending on the size and complexity of the client requirements. However our knowledge of the market tells us that this is invariably only 50% of the time required for competitive products that are missing the all important pre-existing, deep seated integration.

Time-to-value is a very worthy criterion during a product selection process.

It used to be my father, now it's me.

Years ago, when I lived with my parents, my father would switch off the lights at home that were not needed, usually left on by the heedless amongst the family like myself. Now I do it in my house. I read somewhere that Queen Elizabeth does it in Buckingham Palace. It appears to be an abiding ritual hardwired into the oldest person in a household. Without doubt it was a money saving exercise on my father's part "money doesn't grow on trees" after all - and there is an element of that in my behaviour as well. But there is more.

Global warming and climate change are real threats to the stable future of our planet. I have kids and I want them to have a planet as good as I had, and I want their kids to have it too. This will only happen if we change our habits and making those changes should start now.

We have already reduced our ecological footprint a little as part of a house renovation a couple of years ago - rainwater tanks piped to the toilets, wide eaves, heat sink flooring for catching the winter sun, instant gas hot water rather than preheated storage. There's more we could do without a doubt but that is a start. I would love to go solar but the costs are prohibitive at the moment - the Australian government should be heavily underwriting domestic solar power rather than considering building massive infrastructure for more coal and nuclear power plants

In a world first the World Wildlife Fund is organising the Earth Hour in Sydney during March 2007 - an hour in which they are encouraging everybody, residential and corporate, to switch off all lights for 60 minutes from 7.30pm on 31 March. The aim is to reduce the city's greenhouse gas pollution. I like this idea, switch off those lights, make it a habit.

Why DSO is important in debt collection

Another of my interests and roles is the stewardship of our debt collection/credit control module, SunSystems Collect. I have been remiss in not including my thoughts on that area in this blog. Today I was drafting an article for another forum and thought it pertinent to add here.

Days Sales Outstanding (DSO)

DSO is probably one of the most critical performance metrics in the debt collection process. It tells you the average number of days sales still outstanding based on the period of activity assessed. It is worth noting that DSO measures the efficiency of your collections in terms of how quickly the invoices are converted to cash rather than the effectiveness of your collections in terms of what activities result in the best client behaviour.

The most common base calculation is:
[total receivables]
first divided by [credit sales value for the period]
and then multiplied by [number of days in sales period].

SunSystems Collect has a number of algorithms built in which are detailed extensively including work-through examples in the reference manual.

A low DSO is good and means clients pay their invoices in a timely manner, a high DSO means clients pay slowly and quite probably late. A high DSO means the company is using its own cash to fund the business rather than recovering cash owed to it by clients and using that to fund the business. When you go out to replenish product stock (or whatever) it is a far healthier position to be in paying with money from sales than money from your savings.

If the client DSO value is close to the client payment terms then they are behaving well, however if for example the terms are 30 days and the DSO is 60 days then you have some work to do. A low DSO can also be a health indicator for the client - happy clients pay their bills.

There are no exact good and bad values for DSO however there are forums for most industries where membership will include access to common benchmarks, best in class etc. As an example, for some industries if your payment terms are 30 days then a common and reasonably achievable goal is to keep DSO in the low 40's. Best in class would probably be consistently sub 40 days.

Collect also allows you to analyse the DSO over time by various dimensions. So you may want to see DSO trends broken out by account manager, and perhaps also by project or product. Measuring your collections staff by DSO can create a healthy competitive atmosphere where people strive to better eachother in keeping the DSO down for their allocated accounts. When a collector only has time for one more phone call in the afternoon they should perhaps target it at a client that most counts from a DSO perspective.

Some organisations use the value of a single days DSO as the target for sales/account managers to agitate their clients to settle outstanding dues. If each account manager succeeds in reducing your DSO by a day then you will have recovered a meaningful amount of cash back into the business at virtually no cost of sale. For some organisations they discover that reducing their DSO by 10 days is worth more to the business than increasing sales by 10%.

DSO is well worth focusing on for your collections activity.

EBIT = Earnings Before IT

Thoroughly enjoyed the Christmas User Group and drinkies at one of our partners this week. They produce a fantastic process mapping and modelling suite that just goes from strength to strength - some very smart guys. This tool is becoming pivotal in how some of our clients approach their business improvement and I will elaborate a bit more another time.

One of the team was regaling us with stories from a previous job in the retail space - he had a client that referred to EBIT as Earnings before IT. Before IT they opened the shipping container, counted up what was in there, shipped to the stores, put a price tag on it and sold it - easy, cheap, very profitable.

Then they grew beyond the "mom and pop" size and started installing technology driven systems - and this is where they claimed their problems started. The system demanded that you receipted the container contents based on what was ordered and what was on the bill of lading. Unfortunately most of the suppliers were shipping from China where the main aim was to fill the container and get it off the dock rather than worry about little things like PO details.

In the old days, the retailer didn't really care what arrived as long as the container was full and on time (DFOT rather than DIFOT!), but "IT" didn't like this - if the order says "100 widgets" and the bill of lading says "100 widgets" then there better be "100 widgets" or we have an exception situation. Up went the costs, down went the profits - "bring back the Earnings Before IT".

We all shook our heads and had a good laugh - but it is a salient point to remember - don't try to lock down the business rules around what "should" be if the business doesn't really aspire to live to those rules in the first place.

SunPundits building SunSystems user community

I came across SunPundits a few months ago and posted a comment or two on SunSystems Collect which is our debt collection / credit control module for SunSystems. It was pretty embrionic at the time but I like the idea and the premise - sharing tips and tricks on operational issues around Infor SunSystems at a grass roots level.

I dropped back in on the group the other day and was pleased to see lots more activity and plenty of calls for assistance and advice responded to in an accurate and timely way. This bodes very well for building the community to a meaningful level. I did my bit with a few updates and will keep an eye on my patch from now on.

As a software author I love the idea of the user base building a self-service attitude to addressing some support issues - at a purely commercial level it has the opportunity to reduce the pressure on the support desk. But that is just a small benefit - the real gain is to hear how genuine end users put the products to use, how they implement their business processes within the constraints of the application, what they struggle to achieve, what they want to add, what they love and hate.

We can learn how we can do better directly from the people that really matter - the end users. Bring it on.

Disaster Recovered

We had an interesting corporate experience the other week - our Melbourne office basement was flooded with 7 feet of water by a burst main on Sunday night. The building was closed down until it could be pumped out and re-certified for safe occupancy. Now this is not a 2-up-2-down humpy in the suburbs, this is a major sky scraper in the Melbourne CBD - a significant event. Press coverage here for more details. I am based in Sydney and was not directly affected but my colleague Tim Wragg was peering through the door at the chaos and brings some personal experience to the event.

What I thought would be worth sharing is the basic learnings for us from what could have been a lot more catastrophic than it was. There were probably three main areas of recovery - people, systems and real estate - to get our business back to normal - and it was of primary importance that our clients experienced as little disruption as possible.

The problem with the real estate was that in the affected building all the electricity and communications terminals were in the basement and therefore completely debilitated by the flooding. So regardless of any plans for dual carriers etc, everything was wiped out. Also because the building occupancy certification was cancelled by the council and would not be reissued until after the water was pumped out we were not allowed to have people at the desks anyway.

Many of our corporate systems are delivered from a central Sydney infrastructure so the main operational functions that needed to be switched over were the telephone help desks. That was done in short order without any problem and only seconds of interruption to service, probably unnoticed by anyone. We also flew a few of those team members to Sydney for the week to continue business as usual in that area. We already run a full VPN based framework to allow people to work from home, on site at clients, whilst travelling overseas etc so the physical location of the teams affected was not a concern. We didn't need to rush out and get temporary desk space - the combination of mobile phones and Internet access allowed most people to work as normal, just from a different physical place.

People - this was the trickiest area - how do you notify large volumes of people that the office is not open and they should stay at home or arrange to work from a client site (for those in consultancy roles). Well bulk SMS was the way we did it and it worked reasonably well - for the employees with company issued mobile phones that is. Within 2 hours of notification by the building management we had passed on the initial "stay at home, await further instructions" alert. Of course there are lots of people in the business that do not have a corporate mobile phone and the lesson learned was that we did not have accurate up-to-date mobile numbers for many of these people so there was a fair amount of time spent dialling land lines. Even still a few were missed and had to be repelled at the door.

Also, the SMS system that we used required data entry of the target phone numbers for the text message - when time is of the essence this is not ideal - so we have changed the bulk SMS system we use to one that allows us to keep an online list "ready to go". We will also be updating our corporate processes to ensure we capture and update these details for employees in future.

Some people responded that they had left their laptop pcs in the office over the weekend and we were lucky enough to be able to access the building under supervision to recover these and a few desktop pcs for key staff. If this hadn't been possible then some individuals would have been left in the lurch whilst we cobbled together spare machines for them.

As it was, although the building was out of commission for a full week we were remarkably well protected from the affects of a lock-out. The real question is what shape would we have been in if it had been the Sydney building that was uninhabitable and we are assessing that in light of the Melbourne event.

Walk out the front door of your office, lock it and shut off the lights and think about what you would do to get back up and running. Document it - that's the start of your disaster recovery/business continuity plan.

Old pain salved, new pain surfaces

Process improvement is a funny old thing when you look at it over an extended period of time. When the journey started the focus was about relieving some very explicit "pain" in the system and all thought, money and effort would have been addressed to that task. Over time that pain was dulled and was replaced by another "pain" further along the system. Again with time and money this second pain abated - only to be replaced by a third and a fourth etc etc.

As you travel around the continuous improvement mouse-wheel you never get to the end of the pain and of course in reality you probably never will. There is always something else that is the "next best pain" to salve.

The frustrating part for the pain doctors can be the lack of thanks from the patients. Very occasionally you come across people who have been there from the start and still vividly remember the excruciating pain that triggered the whole relationship in the first place - and they realise that the current pain is invariably far less than those of times gone by - and they know it will get eased - and they thank you with a smile and their patience and understanding around the challenges of today - and it is a pleasure.

The 80/20 improvement kicker

Another comment by one of the BPMG Sydney chapter attendees was very pertinent - he claimed in a recent process improvement project that 98% of the benefits came from only 2% of the improvements and all of them were human related process improvements. Now that is a huge ratio and if you were the sponsor looking back at that you would probably be frustrated at the return on investment (ROI) for the other 98% - that budget could have been spent on something else.

I am a big proponent of the 80/20 rule (officially known as the Pareto Principle). Just for the fun of it let's say that most projects have the same outcome, 80% benefit from 20% of the improvement. Turning that into value, 80% ROI comes from 20% investment - as opposed to the other side where only 20% ROI comes from a massive 80% investment.

So 80/20 gives you a 4 times payback whereas 20/80 gives you a measly 0.25 payback - I know which bank I would invest in.

The challenge of course is identifying in the project planning stage where that truly valuable 20% improvement goldmine actually is.

Do that and your project will soar with the eagles.

BI is nothing without process focus

We hosted the BPMG Sydney Chapter meeting this evening and there was some spirited discussion on a range of topics - the one that tickled my fancy was a forceful statement from a Professor in academia.

" BI is nothing without process focus" - and it rings so true - in fact I have blogged it separately here. You can measure to your hearts content and configure dashboards and guages and graphs and "top 10's" until you are blue in the face but until you link the data source to process and the decision outcome from the metrics back to process they are all pretty meaningless.

If you are going to build a BI capability then it may be wise to consider the various levels of KPI applicabale in the business. There will be the strategic KPIs pointing to market share, territory volume sales etc, then there are the process group style KPIs such as inventory management etc, and then there are the individual task KPIs such as supplier invoices with POs declared, DIFOT ratios etc.

When looking at KPIs you need to know how they interrelate to each and what the actual value chain of the business is. Then as the metrics show signs of offending benchmarks you know where to go looking down the line for the problems - and those problems will always be process issues. You have to link performance and process together for both a healthy, wholistic view of the business and also to know how to react when things show signs of stress.

My B-Performance-M = B-Process-M hypothesis was reinforced.

Talk about an NAO headache

I've covered New Account Opening here before and the other week I had a meeting with a client that has a monster NAO headache. They are a global organisation running a centralised implementation of SunSystems with 200+ separate operating entities in the enterprise.

Many of the businesses operate in common territories so the rationalisation and management of suppliers is a fiscally and administratively sensible strategy. Easier said than done of course because after you have decided to trade with a new supplier you have a monster job to update all the relevant businesses in the territory with a great potential for human error - oh, and did anyone mention SOX compliancy?

Workflow for SunSystems to the rescue - they "get it" and they got it and they are rolling it out for Christmas!

Browser delivered process automation for core operational tasks like this is a no-brainer. It covers all corners of the threat trinity - risk, cost and compliance. The install is quick, the uptake is quick, the wins are quick and the ROI is a pleasure.

Ask me for a free MSAS cube building script for SunSystems

We have been building OLAP cubes over SunSystems for some time now and more and more the realisation dawns in people's heads that process and performance are just two different ends of the same spectrum. I have blogged on this topic before and won't torture you with any more on that (yet).

What I will do is offer interested parties a free - yes, that's right, gratis and for nothing - SQL script that you can run against your SunSystems MS SQL database to build a little Microsoft Analysis Services OLAP data warehouse.

You will then need a snazzy viewer to allow you to look at your data in a way that you have never seen it before and truly turn it into "information". We recommend Executive Viewer - it is one of those user display tools that just blows people's socks off - and it does exactly what it says on the box - lets executives view their data in a browser (without doing any damage) and allows them to dream up almost any spontaneaous (crack pot) way of wanting to view the data without having to come back to system support to get a report written.

So - do you want a free SunSystems cube builder? What I will need from you is your company name, an email address and your SunSystems serialisation number, then I can make the magic happen.

By the way, this comes with no formal support because once you start tinkering with the script (and I know you, you will!) all bets are off - if you break it, call somone who cares! (I'm not that heartless actually, come back to me and I can give a little help around the edges).

09 Nov 2006 update - While I'm at it, I'll give away a Time @ Work cube builder for those interested - same deal as with the SunSystems one.

Respond to this post in confidence - I won't publish the recipients.

The difference from LHR to Kingsford Smith in Sydney

Time has passed and I have calmed down over the Heathrow shocker (although it still gets me hot under the collar when I think of it) sufficiently to do a little comparison with the people and processes at the airport in my home town of Sydney.

We have a tricky thing called curfew here that restricts flight arrivals prior to 6.00am - and fair enough, the airport is close into the city and surrounded by residential areas. So at 6.01am planes start to pour out of the sky into the airport - we were 3rd to touch down and I watched out the window whilst we taxied to the terminal and there seemed to be one ever 2.5 minutes back to back, headlights twinkling in the distance.

So duty free, immigration and customs are swamped as thousands of people pour down the aisles. Generally the queue moved quickly and efficiently - first sign of a problem at the immigration desk and the offender was whisked off to a separate area for processing and the bulk of us weren't held up. (There is a bit of smarts in the commercial sector as well - the exit from duty free (booze, perfume and tobacco products mainly) funnels you into a dedicated passport/immigration queue rather than back into the main queue which means you aren't penalised for stopping for that last minute gift - now that's joined-up thinking.)

Baggage pick up is a tricky area and a little slow and that is due partly to every bag being xrayed on its way from the plane to the carousel. Then there is the queue through the green and red customs channel and this is where the queue really built up last trip. Australia has very strict quarentine laws, we don't have many of the agricultural nasties that the rest of the world has - think mad-cow, foot-and-mouth, rabies for starters - and customs takes a very hard line on stopping unprocessed foodstuffs entering the country with international travellers. Unfortunately many arriving passengers either don't understand, don't "get it" or don't care and forget to mention the fruit/dairy products/pigs innards that are in their luggage as gifts for their Aussie mates.

You approach the customs queue with a little declaration card you filled in on the plane. This is where Sydney whips Heathrow big time - there were people all the way down the line checking the forms, guiding you into the correct queues, confirming your understanding of the rules and regulations, pointing out the dump bins for discarding those forbidden fruits.

So there could be no mistaking where you were to go and what was expected of you long before you got to the top of the queue. That's the way it should be done - good signage and cheery, friendly people - a completely different experience.

These ushers had a little delegated authority as well. Scattered amongst the tourists were obvious local business travellers who know all the rules, have the frequent flyer baggage tags etc and they (including me!) were efficiently weeded out of the thronging mass and sent on their way after a swift bit of questioning.

This international travel thing is no longer any fun but the pain can be salved with a bit of common sense and courtesy. For some of course, hard work is easier than thinking.

Process chaos at London Heathrow

Having had the misfortune to pass through London Heathrow airport twice in the last few weeks I can personally vouch for the chaotic, careless, rude and unprofessional way in which that airport is processing its customers since the latest round of safety threats regarding UK to US flights and the threat of liquid explosives.

I fully acknowledge the (unfortunate) need for enhanced security measures and the added stress this entails for all parties in the international travel supply chain - however, the operations and behaviour I witnessed and experienced by the Heathrow systems and people was dismaying and disgraceful.

I traveled through LHR almost 3 weeks, and then again 4 weeks, after the security alert regarding liquid explosives occurred and I naively thought that they would have had their act together and systems and processes in place to be able to efficiently handle the congestion that the enhanced security measures would cause. I was sadly, badly and madly wrong - this place is a disaster. I am writing this 10 days later and it still makes me angry.

Let's just quickly summarise those additional security measures (which weirdly enough were rather inconsistently applied):

• reduced size hand luggage (a wooden board was attached to the top of the steel "does your hand baggage fit in here" frame - basically halving the width of the acceptable bag. Interestingly if your bag had soft sides and malleable contents and you could literally wrestle it through the slot that was OK! And business/first class was not restricted - I don't think terrorists intent on personal annihilation would be concerned about the price of the ticket they bought but obviously not a concern for LHR.
• no liquids or pastes of any sort allowed in hand luggage - very distressing for a lot of women who had to abandon their perfume and cosmetics
• all pocket contents, belts and footwear to be scanned at the security checkpoints into the departure areas
• thankfully they had relaxed the "no notebooks, cameras, mobile phones etc" policy as apparently a huge volume of these had been stolen during the period this was applied and I didn't want to join that statistic (says a lot about the security vetting in the HR recruitment process and exit controls for employees when thousands of expensive, portable items can be willfully stolen so easily).

OK - fair enough - restrictions were called for - although the smaller hand baggage allowance was certainly very inconsistently applied as I looked at people going through ahead of me all booking into similar flights and destinations - however I digress.

The nightmare started at dawn when arriving at Terminal 4 and transferring to Terminal 1 for a connecting flight. The human congestion was so bad that even the transfer buses were backing up, unable to disgorge their tired and grumpy passengers due to the queues ahead in the processing area. And this is where the shocking process and behaviour occurred.

Imagine a queue of many hundreds if not thousands, of passengers pouring in from all destinations and connecting on to many more being funneled into a single queue for security processing at the very front - idiocy. I got to the top of the queue to be told that my hand luggage, that had been acceptable out of Australia, was now too big for the new regime, so I had to join a different queue to check it in to the hold for my connecting flight. That's OK, I am happy to do that, but why have me wait in a line for 45 minutes to get that instruction? A sign and a size tester at the start of the queue would have had me processed and out of the way in seconds. Madness. And it was the same for fluids and pastes, only when you got to the top of the queue were you told there was another queue for those (and a tiny table on which to dump your offending liquids absolutely groaning under the pile of discarded items - this was not day one of the change - where was the big dumper bin?).

Throughout this nightmare a couple of uniformed comptrollers paraded up and down rebuffing all pleads for assistance in meeting tight connecting flight times - I literally heard an official snarl to an elderly woman in tears "that is your place in the queue now stay there" - disgraceful. (At another potential "flash point" area the supposed crowd management official was sitting behind a desk reading a novel whilst queue jumpers barged the doors and elderly couples started to faint).

So - that is my rant - but could I have done better? I don't know, I don't work in the business, I don't understand the constraints of the location, staffing, job demarcation, emergency legislation etc and haven't been exposed to their disaster/emergency planning and change management challenges. However, call me old fashioned, call me a fool, some simple "streaming" via large (and cheap) signage and cheery folk guiding and advising at the start of the queue would have been a massive productivity improvement in my opinion.

"If your bag doesn't fit in the size-slot go right - If you have fluids and pastes go left - If you have connecting flights within X mins from now join that queue - Everyone else join this queue". Not rocket science, not expensive, not hard, not training intensive.

How about having announcements in the buses on the way to the terminals - "you will soon be arriving at Terminal 1 and the security procedures are as follows ...... Please note that these will strictly be enforced and we advise you to pay attention to the signs and officials as you get off the bus" - hey, have it in a couple of languages too.

The Heathrow passenger processing methods were disgraceful, their communication was shocking, their people training would appear to have been appalling and there was no sign of improvement a week later when I did it all again so there was no intention of improvement. Very sad and a lesson in "how not to" for all of us interested in process.

Continuing the BPM journey - is it a map or a script?

So here you now sit with a finely honed process model in your hot and sticky hands. What do you do now? Well the first question to ask yourself is probably - is this a map of how to get somewhere or a script of how to do something? How you answer this will radically direct your next steps.

A map is the easy one - this process flow records the path that is taken to get from one point to another in the business continuum. It is something to be referred to if you lose your way or are starting on the journey and want to understand what the destination is. In effect this is a reference document and can be managed appropriately - published on the Intranet? Or bound into a handsome manual? How about laminating it and sticking it on the wall? (I know one company that was driven to dementia by the abuse of the kitchen facilities and the mess they were always being left in. So an impressive, colourful and explicit process map was drawn up that clearly identified the role of the dishwasher and the wiping cloth to those who were in doubt. Laminated of course for easy cleaning!). By the way, remember to keep it up to date as the landscape changes as there is nothing more frustrating to the intrepid traveler than an out-of-date map (this issue of currency is invariably a painful and tedious process and something I will be coming back to in due course).

The script is the harder answer to deliver against - for this means the process is to become procedural law, every time we perform this process, no matter by whom, these are the rules and regulations that are to be followed. This of course is the great challenge - how do you get everyone in the organisation to follow these laws? How do you communicate them? How do you implement them? How to you entice, enforce and police them? How do you handle the crises of non-compliance? This is the area where technology and the automation of business processes comes into their own - the land of the Business Process Management System/Suite.

But beware, before you launch off on the next great technology hunt, spare a thought for the herd of white elephants that may already be cluttering up your cupboards, there is little room in there for another, choose wisely and choose well!

Deconstructing BPM journey (1) and (2)

To read my previous posts on starting the BPM journey you could be mistaken in thinking any old fool could do this and what is the big deal about it all. Unfortunately the reality is that these type of improvemnet projects have a glorious history of failure or catastrophic under delivery. We recently ran an internal workshop of the core stakeholders of our own improvement project and the following points are straight from that forum - warts and all.

• these things take time and it needs to take time, you will not see all the options and complexities in the first pass
• look for the key influencers in the various pools of employees and look for high levels of involvement with these individuals
• the level of involvement of these indviduals will signify the level of takeup and enthusiasm later
• some people are habitual sniffers and just sit around the edge waiting for things to be proven for them
• without the support at least one of senior management and the business management the project will fail
• maintain credibility through the project - come clean about missed targets, changed objectives, challenges faced and not yet overcome etc
• you can only force people to turn up - they must be personally interested and motivated in improving the process (particularly if it is cross functional) to be able to achieve a quality outcome - if they don't give to the project then they will not achieve all the benefits possible to them
• people always underestimate the amount of time they will have to commit to the project - it is not a one meeting wonder session
• Visio is a reasonable one-dimensional tool and easy to use but the challenge is to cover all the interconnected layers of people, process and applications in a digestable and manageable ways - there are modelling tools available that do this better - we have now selected one to move forward with
• be prepared to be flexible and don't be surprised if things change around on you
• face reality as it is not as you would like to be
• communicate regularly and at appropriate times
• have the resources as available as possible when they are required for the project - if everything goes into stasis waiting for resources then the project is going to suffer in credibility
• do iterative boardroom prototype workshops with clear thinking stakeholders - more than once
• don't just follow the "happy path", question hard around where things go wrong, exceptions occur etc
• There are complicators and simplifiers - always hunt out the simplification - and be aware - it's amazing how complicated cultural issues can be
• think about the level of tolerance to compliance requirements that you may be happy to live with in line with your capacity just to "do business" - for some processes there may be zero tolerance, others may be less rigid
• you can't abdicate your process improvement to third parties - all good athletes have coaches and mentors but they have to run the race themselves - don't try to outsource the project, only the business can do it for itself
• think about setting up a "process office" so that as people come in and out of the project they are situated appropriately within the team for their involvement
• be organised and be seen to be so - if that is a problem for you then you are probably the wrong person to be managing this project
• "fight" for this internal project as hard as you would fight for a customer project
• An interesting point - when you get properly involved stakeholders workshopping around the table it is quite likely that technologies and BPM application/solutions etc don't get discussed
• Name the project other than the technology platform - problems are invariably people rather than application system issues but the project will be tarnished unfairly if it is named the same as any technology component being implemented.

Progressive implementation and continuous improvement

Another week - another iPOS for SunSystems eProcurement client management workshop. This organisation really has its head screwed on:
- senior management level (director) project sponsor
- believes that progressive implementation is the pragmatic way to improve the business
- a focus on continuous improvement "and in our business that improvement means iPOS" (this is an enterprise whose demands for cost control and quality service delivery far outweigh the revenue generation function).

So what are they focussing on improving this year?

Approx 10,000 of their supplier invoices last year - over 30% of their purchasing spend - were generated before the purchase order - oops, plenty of maverick spending there but now at least they have all purchasing going through the one channel. With a single source of truth in the data they now have the opportunity to report and reflect on their users' buying habits and supplier delivery patterns.

Big improvements will be made in contract adherence when the culture of "PO before invoice" for the workforce and "no PO-no payment" for their suppliers becomes business as usual.

Great opportunities for administrative cost reduction and efficiencies in supplier invoice processing when they can be loaded from PO rather than punched in like last year.

Supplier rationalisation is another likelyhood, and while we're at it let's punch-out to the online catalogs of major suppliers and a preferred buying hub, hence outsourcing the administratively demanding catalog management to the suppliers. And maybe some new contract negotiation based on actual volumes.

Good days ahead for this client and a great opportunity for all stakeholders as some potential merger style activity is on the radar.