Starting the BPM journey (2)

So you have chosen the correct path for your business vis-a-vis drive down admin costs or attack high value/risk operations and for good or for bad you now need to "do something".

Common and worthwhile advice is to map out the process "as is" - this means draw out the logical steps and decision points of the process as it currently exists and you understand it today. Invariably this means setting up workshops with the various stakeholders, recording their comments and then extrapolating your notes into a pictorial representation of actions, responsibilities and directional flows (perhaps prepared in Microsoft Visio or - shudder - PowerPoint. There are some very powerful tools to help here - more on this later).

So now you think you know what the process looks like and you may be able to identify some of the problems/challenges/breakdowns/fractures/bottle necks etc.

Next step for most if not all protagonists is to map out the process as you would like it "to be". Look to iron out the wrinkles, reduce the number of handovers, drive down human errors and remove the areas that cause iterative queries, rework and indecision. Especially look for where things get stuck in the lifecycle and concentrate on driving down time wasted whilst nothing happens (time lag).

Now what? Workshop it - take it into the boardroom and expose it to the rigour of team thought. Allow the stakeholders an opportunity to assess and critique your thoughts and plans and give you guidance on improvements and problems. Take them seriously - you will get a better outcome. This is a good change management tactic too - people involved in the design of new ways, and educated early on why and what any changes will be, are invariably more willing and supportive of the change when it comes.

Rework the "to be" and re-workshop it. When all done start asking the stakeholders to commit to some service levels around the handover points from one org-chart responsibility to the next (or be more radical). If you go on the premise that "the customer deserves a quality experience" at each point (starting with the real end-customer and working back through the supply chain) then at each handover point you will be able to identify a factor that directly impacts on the quality experience of the customer-end of each handover. A sales manager may say "my team will commit to placing correct orders on service delivery 100% of the time". That's a good start, now work back from there. (You will need to measure these commitments so keep them tangible and objective).

Looking good - you now have a documented, commonly understood, consultatively honed and improved process ready to be implemented with service level agreements for quality at each responsibility point in the process lifecycle.

Whew, take a break, you deserve it!

Starting the BPM journey (1)

A noisy and opinionated little group of us were "workshopping" (shooting the breeze) the perennial problem for most companies which is where to start the BPM journey. Peeling away the layers of enthusiasm and passion and looking at the hard cold facts we have seen around the traps there seems to be two schools of thought:

(1) under the radar, low cost-low value, administration/HR style processes
(2) pick a strategic process involved in delivering high cost services to an important client

The first option takes a path of least resistance approach and builds an inoffensive, but perhaps undervalued, reputation for the project which may cause it to stumble when the real meaty challenges are faced.

The second option takes a braver stance in the business and needs a visionary to see it through however the final outcome has much greater potential.

Comparing two professional services firms we know - one desired the benefits around automating their HR and admin processes vis-a-vis employee benefits and the like - the other was dismissive of that and was far more driven towards a commoditised process to build a new line of revenue by packaging existing practices. Horses for courses.

Based on our watercooler conversation it all came down to the business imperative and the project champion - are you looking to drive down basic costs and increase consistency, predictability and visibility or looking for strategic opportunities for revenue generation and high value transaction commoditisation?

Does your company listen to you?

It is a rare beast indeed that empowers people throughout an organisation to truly initiate changes to "business as usual" in the pursuit of efficiency and productivity. Many talk the talk but how many really walk the walk?

The impetus for significant change struggles to bubble up from within. It depends on senior management for the oxygen and nutrients necessary to survive. This is the reality of the business world we live in and good sales people cut to the chase in their qualification very quickly - am I dealing with a decision maker and is there a budget for this project - if the answer is not "yes" to both of these questions then they know there is a challenge to success lying ahead.

This pragmatism relates directly to the issue of process change and change management within an organisation. No matter how well intentioned and passionate a middle manager may be about their visions for efficiency gains and improvement - if there isn't a senior manager sponsor on board (and at least a little bit of budget) it is going to go nowhere. The passion and vigour will be beaten out of the provocateur and over time they will fade to beige.

So how do you get a senior manager sponsor? You need to ensure that you are focusing on what keeps them up at night - and remember, what keeps you awake at night may not be the same thing so you may need to extrapolate your tactical worry up to their strategic worry. You will most likely need to put a business case in place. You might need to build a return on investment model.

If these are new concepts to you then you probably need a coach or mentor to help you through the journey. Beware however of the coach dogmatically telling you what to actually change, only you have the intimate exposure to what the problem is, however a coach can provide great thought processes, strategies, comparisons and ideas to look for innovative ways of attacking things.

New Account Opening (NAO)

It appears that Phil Ayres and I stumbled across each other from two different sides of the world at pretty much the same time. While I was reading his excellent blog on New Account Opening last night he appears to have been responding to one of my posts on risk removal - gotta love that Internet.

Phil's background and experience are perhaps in a strata of business that we don't have much of a footprint in and the challenges of efficiently and effectively managing NAO in a mid tier organisations are admittedly less complex and far less volume driven than the banking industry - but just as important and challenging for the mid tier enterprise. In the pursuit of bringing process improvements into the SunSystems arena we have perhaps developed what has been coined by Gartner a Composite Process Solution (CPS)

WARNING - unashamedly commercial plug from this point on:

Workflow for SunSystems from Professional Advantage is a "boxed set" of predefined, non-transactional process templates within a BPMS that allows SunSystems installations to automate the control of their master data management (MDM) or customer data integration (CDI). Boy there's a lot of three letter acronyms (TLA) in that - and they're all for real - I don't make this stuff up!

What all that actually means is ...... when you want to open a new account in SunSystems you initiate, direct, manage and complete the process through a browser based set of workflow rules and screens that control things like:

- who is allowed to request a new account be opened (in our business just sales department and management people)

- what initial information about the account is required before the request can be submitted (like division/business unit engaging with the client, client name, address, company registration (needs to be unique in our customer database and gets auto validated against the online government portal), primary contacts etc etc)

- what is the first step of review and approval (in our business the Sales Manager confirms we are willing to sell this product and service combination at this price point etc).

- what is the next step of data gathering, verification and approval - classically at the B2B trading level we want to check trading references (force a minimum of three perhaps?), credit agency reports (rating must be greater than "orange" perhaps?) etc

- then what information do we need to issue the client in terms of bank details for electronic payment, contact details for query resolution etc for their financial systems (afterall if we are setting them up as a client they are setting us up as a supplier). This can be sent as an email or as a link to a web page for them to review and complete as required.

- penultimately a senior fincancial manager reviews all the steps to date and approves the work to date

- then a client, chart of account and contact record are automatically created in the target SunSystems database (optionally supported by the creation of equivalent records in other line of business applications - CRM, sales invoicing, distribution etc etc) - nobody logs into SunSystems to do all that, it just happens automatically with all the data collated during the approval process, and hey, no keyboard errors either.

- and finally an email to the original sales executive confirming creation of the new account with the relevant reference code if required and the whole lot gets archived away

Throughout the timeline there are activity and bottleneck reports available and extensive reporting options for auditing and compliance management (hello SOX, Clerp 9, Basel 2 et al)

In the real world it's not just new clients of course, so we have the same for suppliers, assets, account and transaction analysis codes (A codes and T codes in Sun-speak). In the background we have stacked up a few HR processes as well including leave management, employee onboarding, travel request and advances management, employee expenses and the like.

These templates come out of the box in Workflow for SunSystems and seamlessly integrate to SunSystems 4 and 5 installations on the MS SQL and Oracle database platforms. They can be implemented "as is" or modified slightly or substantially to better fit the company policies and procedures. I would be the first to acknowledge that this is just the tip of the iceberg when it comes to risky processes in a business. However the added benefit of Workflow for SunSystems being contained in a BPMS is that other processes identified in the organisation can be mapped and automated over time within the one common framework (even if they have nothing whatsoever to do with SunSystems itself).

Phil Ayres challenged me to be able to "show it in action" with "an implementation of less than 30 days" - we can install in an afternoon! I can "show and tell" by Webex - gotta love that Internet.

UPDATE - 16 June 2006: Access to Workflow for SunSystems doesn't have to be restricted to within the corporate firewall - being browser based it can easily be published to customers, suppliers, the supply chain in general - to enable people to initiate and be involved in processes specific to them. For example, we can allow suppliers to enter their own invoice online (forcing a valid PO number to be entered if required), attach a document image as support and submit for processing by accounts payable. How's that for a way to drive down those administration costs? Just one of many that can be addressed with Workflow for SunSystems.

Entering the SOA and BPM debate

Plenty of blogs and mainstream press these days are focussing on SOA (service orientated architecture) and in the business process management world there is lots of debate about are SOA and BPM the same thing? Is one a subset of the other? How do they interplay?

I'm a simple old soul really and perhaps not sufficiently learned about the various, and assuredly complex, layers in all of this however as I see it:

SOA serves the IT community and BPM serves the business community.

My thoughts are guided more along the lines of where the budget holder and project sponsor is than affinity to any church on this.

If the dollars and sense are in the IT division then there is a reasonable likelyhood that SOA will get the nod - it comes with lots of techno-speak that sufficiently disguises it as a complex and IT-driven dark art.

If the champions are from the business then BPM may be more involved in the outcome as the push comes from the outside in and the business will most likely be focussed on costly customer-driven interactions and processes and looking for tangible ways to salve those pains.

If there are drivers at both ends then I think there is a comfortable place in the middle where they intersect with a common goal of driving efficiencies and improvements in service delivery for all parties.

Do you manage risks or remove them?

Lots of meetings and conversations I am having at the moment seem to have a "risk management" component to them - everyone is looking for ways of managing the risks they have in their business. But hang on - if you are into risk management then you go looking for risks to manage - why not be into risk removal? Go looking for the risks and then identify how to remove the scale or nature of the risk rather than "manage" it through continuity/crisis planning.

Yet again Business Process Management comes to the fore in this - so many risks described to us invariably boil down to people or process problems - and rarely anything to do with the individual person - more often it is how the processes or procedures are allowing the person to fail in some way.

Plenty of risk always revolves around where people interact with eachother or a business management system - particularly those grey fuzzy areas of inter-departmental responsibility transfer. Opportunities for delay, ambiguity, misunderstanding, keyboard error etc abound. The classic time and cost driven risks. A Business Process Management Suite gives you a great framework for building rule sets and process steps around the people-to-people/system activity flow thereby removing a huge percentage of those potential risks.

Risk management struggles to add tangible value to the business process - risk removal catapults you into a new place entirely.

eProcurement and the dreaded catalogue management

Catalogue management is one of the trials and tribulations of implementing an eProcurement system. There are many reasons why managed catalogues make absolute sense and yet so many businesses fight it off during process design and system implementation workshops - "it's too hard - we won't be able to maintain it - our suppliers can't give us their catalogs electronically" etc etc.

The following is an excellent article on this topic by Debbie Wilson in Cool Tools for Purchasing.

http://www.purchasingautomation.com/articles/articles173.shtml

I particularly liked the section "Maximizing Catalog-Based System Performance" - as always it's all about people and their behaviour rather than systems and their operation. I smiled broadly when I read this bit.

The final line is a cracker - "if someone tells you that in order to successfully implement eProcurement you must normalize your data, offer requisitioners millions of items to choose from, and insist on certain formats from your catalog suppliers, don’t believe a word of it."

It doesn't have to be hard and it doesn't have to be every item on day one (or ever). It's all about mindset - look for the benefits to your business, pick the targets appropriately, keep it simple and remember the 80/20 rule - probably 80% of your spend is with 20% of your suppliers - focus accordingly and turn the heat up in your negotiations.

However let's not forget about online/web catalogues that a supplier maintains themselves. This can be an excellent way to outsource the responsibility of catalogue management to the supplier - "but how does that help me?" you may ask. With a sophisticated eProcurement solution (like iPOS for SunSystems) you can optionally punch-out to online catalogues and allow users to select items for their shopping basket as normal. The "check out" function on the website actually returns the item list back to your internal/buy side system for processing through the normal budget control and delegated approval rules.

In my experience this is most applicable for the classic low value - high volume suppliers such as office supplies etc where once a contract is in place you want the end-user to be able to select and purchase items with the least amount of fuss and effort. There may be "millions of items" for people to choose from but someone else is doing the hard work of managing them.

Punch-out is also the best way to interact perhaps with government or commercial buying hubs where multiple supplier catalogues may be aggregated. The challenge in leveraging these online marketplaces is the lack of real-time integration to the backend financial management system and the ability to overrun budget and approval controls through poor data integrity.

Punch-out comes with some downsides however:
- You rely on the supplier to maintain the currency of the catalogue and also to accurately apply the service levels of your contract.
- It may not be possible for the supplier to build restricted views of their catalogue for different user profiles in your business - it may be a one-size-fits-all approach.
- They may have more detailed views of your buying habits and trends than you do when it comes to contract negotiation.
- There could even be the ability for "push selling" in their catalogue management that leads people to buy upgrades or additional items or volumes based on the choices they make for their shopping basket.

In reality many organisations may decide to live with a combination approach to their purchasing procedures, internal catalogues for critical business purchases and strategic suppliers, online catalogues for "consumables" and free-form item description for those exceptions that invariably exist (controlled by increased levels of supplier selection, review and approval).

The sensible and reasonable wish of the business is for all options to be managed within a common, process-driven purchasing channel that delivers aggregated spend control and reporting with single source of truth in the financial data.

What's the asset number for that process?

Last week I was at the inaugural meeting of the Sydney chapter of BPMG. We had an interesting little get-together with an assortment of players in town. Thank you Bryan for an excellent venue and breakfast. During the general discussion Bridget B from Telstra asked a probing question - why don't processes get treated like assets?

I am two-finger-typing this out on a very uninspiring notebook PC - a modest machine and one of hundreds in the business of course. Flipping it over I spy a little yellow sticker with a barcode and 10 digit number. That's comforting - somebody knows about it and will care for it and come and replace it for me when it dies. But let's face it - it's a commodity that brings little or no value to the business other than what I grind through it each day. Indeed if I drove a stake through its little electronic heart tomorrow I would only have to walk 100 metres in any direction to be able to replace it with a swipe of my credit card. Not much of an asset really.

This afternoon a few of us were workshopping a case study of a fantastic FlowCentric BPMS implementation. Not something I was personally involved with but a great story. An insurance company that automated its stolen vehicle assessment and recovery processes with integration and involvement with complex backend systems and external stakeholders in customs, law enforcement, crash repairers etc etc. The return on investment of this project was only three weeks and the ongoing benefits to the business will I am sure be measured in hundreds of thousands if not millions for years to come.

Does that process have an asset number? I bet not.

What's the big deal - why make it an asset? Because assets get budget allocation and processes need the same level of respect. An effective business process has an intrinsic value to the business but to maintain that value it needs budget. Things change, things that were not possible before are possible in the future, new opportunities arise and legislation interferes in the daily drone with a monotonous regularity. So a process needs to have a budget allocation that ensures it will be improved, rejuvenated, redirected or replaced during its lifetime.

No budget - no love. Give your processes a little yellow asset sticker.

Is darkness your best practice?

Michael Rosemann told a very BPM orientated joke the other week - how many people does it take to change a light bulb?

None - if darkness is best practice.

Hmmm, OK, don't try it onstage at the comedy club but it has a certain drama hook.

Are there monsters in the dark corners of your business that keep you awake at night? Go out and find yourself a process doctor with a bag of light bulbs.

Business Process Owners touch other peoples stuff

This is a big conundrom in the process management world - when your business is structured in a vertical org-chart or traditional cost centre model and you start down the path of business process improvement just about everyone will tell you that you need Business Process Owners (BPO). They are champions responsible and accountable for the process end-to-end regardless of the edge-to-edge execution across divisional lines.

What that actually means is the BPO needs to be authorised to make changes to processes and tasks within the divisions that intersect with their process. In other words - they touch other people's stuff!

How do you reconcile that in senior management meetings?

I don't think there are any easy answers to this however I have heard of a few approaches to it, some very radical, others less so.

Extreme radical approach - transfer the IT budget out of the CIO role and into the CPO (Chief Process Officer). Budget only gets allocated on a process basis rather than a divisional basis. Of course you probably need to appoint a CPO first. This is for the maturity level 5 organisation perhaps.

Less radical - identify a set of KPIs for the Divisional Managers that are based around the performance of end-to-end process quality and link them to the annual performance bonuses.

Least radical - define service level agreements between the divisions and measure and monitor the process hand off activities and publish the measurements (effectively a leader board/shame list).

BPO's need the authority to make changes in order to improve a process even though the executors of the changes may not be in their reporting line. Indeed, an improvement to a specific process in one area may directly correlate to an increase in cost or responsibility within a division and come with little or no direct benefit. People in general loathe to have multiple bosses as the prioritisation of issues inevitably clash. Companies need to find ways of achieving the process improvements necessary without tearing the business to pieces.

I think in the end the relationship, and maturity, of the senior management team is pivotal in resolving this challenge. Finding common enterprise level goals and methods of measuring and reporting on these is perhaps a good place to start.

Bringing the adminaphobes into the fold

Remember our adminaphobic colleagues with the aversion to administrative tasks outside the areas of their important expertise? Well I have a few thoughts on how we can bring them back into the team.

An empowering strategy in addressing human conflict is the willingness to accept what the other person is saying as true for them in the moment. (Don't get me wrong - you don't have to agree with them, you just need to acknowledge that for them, what they are saying is true).

So take some time to listen to the argument and assess the situation from their point of view. Also, don't fall into the trap of looking for solutions within software systems from the get-go. Pretty much every problem can be solved within the people-process-product continuum (product in this case being software applications) however the people/process corners of the 3P trinity are always the best places to start in my opinion.

Perhaps the problem lies in change management. Does he understand the process? Does he understand the importance of the process? Does he understand his role in the process? Has he been trained in his role? Has he understood and absorbed the training or does he require additional support? Why has he not been able to adopt the expected behaviour as a norm? Is the completion of the process at odds in some way with the goals or KPI's of his job role or team?

It may just be that he is unsure, unconfident, concerned about making embarrassing mistakes, threatened by what the process means to his empire, or just plain missed the communications and education up front in the project.

Now, what about the process? Is it too complex? Can it be simplified? Are there conflicting elements or responsibilities. For very casual executors of the process is there too much collateral information? Or too ambiguous a data/job flow? Are there components of data coming from different sources that may be misunderstood, or overpowering or ambiguous for casual users?
Look into how that process can be improved, simplified and clarified. Other people will appreciate this effort as well.

Sometimes though he may have a valid point. Perhaps there is something about the "product" that is inefficient or ineffective for his role in the process. This then is a great opportunity for the business to improve its processes and enhance its relationship with important members of the workforce. Unfortunately most software applications struggle to adapt flexibly and agilely to very specific user requirements.

This is one of the many sweetspots for a business process management suite (BPMS). The wonderful thing about a BPMS such as FlowCentric is its inherent ability to define and control business processes outside of, and around the edges of, existing applications very cost effectively. It gives business the opportunity to hone areas of process that need to dovetail perfectly into human expectations whilst still leveraging the quite significant investment made in whatever the underlying application is.

A BPMS isn't generally concerned with the transaction end of a process, although this may be part of the outcomes, it is more generally successful in addressing the human element, and that of course is exactly where our adminaphobics sit.

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.