International Process and Performance Institute

The recent IIRME Process Excellence Summit was a great event. Speakers were drawn from the local region and internationally with a number of compelling real world case studies and highly refined observational perspectives from industry experts.

I was very impressed with the caliber of speakers and the results produced in many of the case studies (no theory here folks, this was real results from life in the BPM trenches!). The EFQM presentation on their quality framework that is making such a big impact in Europe (and beyond) highlighted the focus of organizations as represented by event speakers where more and more we are addressing all of the stakeholders in our process approach-customers, the organization, employees and society in general.

If you were not able to attend this event, you missed a great opportunity to learn a lot about what others are doing, the results they are acheiving and the lessons they have learned. Oh, and the IIRME team did a great job of running the event leaving speakers and participants the freedom to engage in the learning experience, not in being distracted with "non value add" event details :)

For my opening presentation, I presented a simple model for Process Excellence but one that I think highlights the holistic nature of what process excellence is really all about. Much of what I covered was simple "not in our conversation" in preceding years, so I think it was a sign of the times in how we are maturing our approach to process excellence.

The model is presented here, and I'll cover it in quick overview to give you a sense for the perspective taken. But before I do, let me point out that without pre-event colloboration I found that my opening keynote was reinforced throughout the event by the other speakers and participants. I'll chalk that down to "synchronicity" as I certainly didn't influence the presentations of the other speakers-their presentations were prepared long before hearing my thoughts on the matter!

Focus - the focus of the process is an outcome, or better, a desired outcome. This is the strategic component of the process from which we can derive the organizational and/or process consumer's (customer, internal customer) KPIs. Focus often comes from an existing undesirable outcome however, regardless of why the outcome is identified it sets a stake in the ground for defining the process behind the outcome.

Alignment - if we know the outcome-actually, the desired outcome-then we can challenge the process behind the outcome to ensure that everything that is in the process (activities, workflow, rules, assumptions, data integration, automation, and so on) is aligned to achieving the outcome we desire. Alignment is a process improvement activity, and is essential to maximizing process value.

Relevancy - this is a new area for some of us, but it is growing in our awareness a critical aspect of process. Is our process relevant to ALL of the process participants? The PEOPLE who consume the outcome, do the work, conduct analysis, manage operations, make strategic decisions, and develop ongoing strategy? Is the information we provide directly pertinent to their needs and wants? Are interfaces intuitive to their purpose? Does the process make it easier for them to succeed? Relevance is a critical apsect of process; what effectively determines if a process is "functional"or "disfunctional." This is the "place" where work gets done, and relevance to process participants-in many ways-determines whether (or not) our preceding work yields real value (or not.)

Support - finally there is support, which inlcudes our use of technology to support process and when done sucessfully will directly support-and augment-the focus, alignment and revelancy of our processes. This is really where the "gap" between operations and technology exists that is talked about so often, and it (as with each aspect of the model) it is either done right or we subject the entire process plan to a level of risk that could preclude the creation of value from our process initiative.

I know its a very brief overview of the components of process excellence, but I think it helps us place our process intiatives into perspective. The opportunities to achieve significant gains from process practices remain the best place for us to improve our organizational success and I think this model helps us understand what we must do to achieve that success

I recently had some interesting conversation on business rules - how the way we think of business rules has actually created many of the challenges we face in business process management. The essence of the conversation is that there are two categories of business rules that exist in most organizations; those that act to control work and those that act to direct intent.

While I believe the distinction between these two categories of business rules is not something we formally recognize, there is little doubt that they both exist in every organization.

Control

Business rules used for control, as I would define them, are those business rules we expect our organization to follow rigorously. Exceptions for control rules require formal acknowledgement, via a programmatic exception handling sub-process or approval. For the most part, control rules are inviolate. They are the rules we expect the people in our organization to follow based on what each rule tells us we must do.

BPMS, BRMS and enterprise applications products are often used effectively for these rules, creating executable software with these rules embedded within them. For example, the quoting of customized goods or services could follow a specific rule set to determine product price. Exceptions for pricing other than what the rule set dictates, if this option exists at all, would likely be handled through a formalized exception sub-process.

Intent

In contrast, a set of documents that provide a pricing matrix could exist instead of a formalized pricing rule set in software. A given company could operate under an adapted rule that is driven by sales goals, with exceptions (pricing adjustments) commonly ‘ignored’ as long as sales goals are met. I have seen this before, many times, where the organization has a set of unwritten rules that people know and apply on a regular basis.

The intent of the pricing rules in this case could be interpreted as ‘we need to make sales goals and our pricing should be as close to this as possible.’ Exceptions to the pricing rules are driven by what is accepted by management. These exceptions suggest that the definition of the real rule in place is more complex. The rule is really “we need to make sales goals, ideally at a certain level of profit but at the same time to keep a certain volume moving and with the caveat that volume can offset profit percent, and this pricing is what we really want to be as close to as possible.”

What I want you to observe is that this rule can be almost infinitely complex. When sales are down, the rule may be relaxed more. If sales are up, nearing production capacity, the pricing matrix may be more strictly enforced. Closing business with an important new client might skew the pricing model even to a loss. It is, in affect, a subjective rule that acts as a guide line to achieve an outcome of sales levels and related profit.

Another example of intent-based rules relates to operating procedures. It amazes me that all organizations have rules in place that tell us how to do things, yet they are largely ignored and rarely enforced. The intent may be to comply with external regulations or it could be how the organization has decided certain things should get done. These rules are always documented but often times they are not enforced, or if they are enforced that enforcement is the creation of “documentation” to support rule compliance. Let’s face it, when anyone reviews adherence to procedures, how do they do that? They don’t take the time to observe people at work, the audit the “paperwork.”

A rule of thumb

The takeaway I have from this is that codifying control rules makes complete sense while codifying rules of intent has the potential to produce serious negative consequences. While it may seem logical that codifying rules of intent is beneficial, the realty is that doing so will immediately create a need for organizational change and the consequences can negatively impact performance and morale.

Where rules of intent need codification, i.e. “we need to follow that rule,” then there is a need to factor in education and training to the people affected so that we can successfully go through the change process with at worst a temporary negative impact on performance and morale.

Perhaps if we take the time to think about the rules in our organizations we will find that many rules of intent can remain as they are. I suspect that this is necessary, as people are not machines and they will develop unique work patterns as part of human nature. Control rules are relatively easy to deal with. Rules of intent are far more challenging, requiring us to think hard about the purpose of the rule and the best action we can take (which may be no action) to achieve the outcome the rule exists to serve.

[note - this article is provided by research/analyst firm Hydrasight who I am working with in respect to process technology research]

Hydrasight research confirms that business process management suites (BPMS) continue to be seen as an important component of functional process improvement in many organisations and, to a lesser extent, for cross-functional processes. However, we also observe that many organisations continue to be challenged by their own immaturity with implementing both functional and cross-functional process improvement. This is due to the difficulty associated in codifying processes that often lack sufficient detail or have complex exception handling requirements.

Hydrasight believes that the use of BPMS technology, on both functional and cross-functional processes, can be an appropriate application area for BPMS products. Most BPMS products now offer capabilities to support complex process flows, systems integration, authoring of business rules, automation, operations visibility and modeling standards needed to successfully implement these business processes. However, we caution IT organisations (ITO) and business professionals to recognise that BPMS products provide little support in respect to defining accurate process models where such definitions do not already exist or where processes may be unsuitable for codification (e.g., discretionary decision points).

Hydrasight observes that leading BPMS vendors offer ‘business friendly’ tools to aid users in functional and cross-functional process definition (e.g., Lombardi BluePrint, Metastorm Provision). However, we note that process definition for complex processes, and/or processes unique to the organisation, remains a challenge with all BPMS products. Our research confirms that developing a process definition that accurately represents the way work is performed and optimized to achieve desired process outcomes is the single most important factor in determining results gained - whether BPMS automated execution is utilised or not. Hydrasight further notes this is symptomatic of a larger issue where improvement practices such as Six Sigma and Lean also experience significant difficulty in producing desired results on processes not already clearly documented and understood. From our research, we believe this a key factor in limiting the potential of BPMS products to become the foundation of the integrated process enterprise and of process improvement initiatives in general.

Hydrasight research shows that organisations successfully adopting BPMS often focus on processes that are already well-documented or where best practice process models are readily available, diminishing the value of the dynamic optimisation capabilities of the automated suites. This is often due to greater availability of best practice models and the disconnect between ad-hoc business processes and those that are already codified/encapsulated in software applications (e.g., human resources management as one example). Hydrasight research shows that having access to best practice and/or existing process definition does not guarantee success. We further observe that even when extensive ‘as is’ research is performed before producing a process model, results may still not be consistent with how the process ‘really works’ due to the subjective nature of the people involved (e.g., both interviewers and interviewees).

We typically observe that cross-functional processes are rarely well documented or clearly understood in the majority of organisations. This is further complicated by multiple stakeholders with different functional perspectives. The rise of interest in business process management has prompted many organisations to begin looking at these processes with the intent to support them in a more programmatic way. While we recognise the value of this approach, and the efforts to bring cross-functional processes under programmatic control, Hydrasight cautions organisations that the challenges are great—and that outcomes often fall far short of business expectations.

Hydrasight foresees that the subjective elements of BPM, such as the interpretation of process definitions and/or execution decision points, will remain one of the greatest challenges for organisations to face in leveraging the potential of BPMS products. We caution ITOs and business professionals to ensure they pay close attention to the importance of designing process models that accurately reflect how work ‘really gets done’—or how it will be done if the process includes moving to a ‘to be’ state of improvement. Moreover, we advise organisations to thoughtfully consider the role of the tool versus the general benefit of process improvement, whether automated or not. In general, we recommend a proof-of-process approach as opposed to a proof-of-concept approach. This assists in avoiding project ‘failure’ being directly linked to the tool, rather than the way the tool has been implemented by the business [what's wrong with a proof of concept]. In either case, Hydrasight observes that codifying an inaccurate process model is likely to lead to failure that extends beyond the intended process goal into issues of diminished confidence with BPMS products, other processes in the organisation and the IT organisation in general—whether they are directly involved or not.

IT Strategy for Financial Institutions

What should our IT strategy be in financial institutions as we move forward in 2009? Does the current economic downturn change what we do or how we do it? What strategic imperatives should we be embracing and what initiatives (if any) should move to the back burner? For answers to these questions, and more, read on...

1) Support Current Infrastructure

For starters we must continue to service the current infrastructure and we need to look at IT activities behind that service for quick win optimizations. Service the status quo while freeing up any internal resources that you can right now.

2) Improve Customer Satisfaction

In a “down economy” it is imperative that IT expand their horizons and become involved with improving the Customer Experience. And yes, I do mean the business’s customers not “internal customers.” While this is what we should be doing all of the time, when the economy drops like a chunk of lead in a vacuum it is what we must do to survive.

How can you do that? Start by identifying ways to improve the customer experience. Your customers are the only thing keeping you in business and making sure they are satisfied customers is the only way to keep them your customers.

Rule 1 – Makes things easier. Look for ways to “capture” individual customer interactions that may be repeated, both online and with the front line service people of the business, so that they can be done quickly the next time. For example, if a customer goes through the process of issuing a wire transfer if they need to issue a wire transfer to the same recipient again, don’t make them reenter everything!

Rule – Make things simpler. For example, is there something we could do to reduce the “processing time” for drive-through teller operations? These always seem to take far more time than necessary. Can technology play a role in improving that experience?

Rule 3 – When making things simpler and easier they will reduce operating costs or they ARE NOT simpler and easier. The simple fact is that Customer Satisfaction comes from simplification of “customer processes” and when we simplify customer processes it costs us less to operate and support them (their simpler!). Rule 3 is there to help perform a sanity check on what we “think” means easier and simpler for the customer.

3) Become Involved in Elevating the Customer Value Proposition

Get out your MBA hat and start thinking “business” folks. Who are the stakeholders in the real game and what do they care about? How can you impact that in a positive way?

Key stakeholders are Shareholders, Executive Management and Customers. So we need to raise the CVP (Customer Value Proposition) in a way that increases shareholder value and fits into Executive strategy – oh, and that makes our customers love us...

Reversing that we have the real success formula. Make our customers love us in a way that helps increase shareholder value. With that you have executive strategy. Add in the fact that companies who do this will be perfectly positioned for expanded market growth in the economic boon to follow and we have a very enticing formula for success.

4) Innovate, Innovate, Innovate

What can we do? Innovate my friend, innovate. What do customers care about now? They are worried about retaining their assets, lifestyle and financial position.

Could we offer programs on a bi-monthly, weekly or daily basis for automatic withdrawal loan payments that would reduce their monthly outlay without affecting our cash flow negatively? That’s possible.

What about offering one, two or three months of no payments on certain loan types to our loyal customers by pushing loans out a bit further? Could we do that? Capital One has done so on a number of their products. If our position is strong enough to do things like this it would certainly improve our customer loyalty.

What else can we do to make our customers’ lives simpler, easier and more successful? Have you seen the recent move by Virgin? (here goes Sir Richard – AGAIN) Virgin Money. They are using the knowledge, systems and experience of a commercial business to manage other people’s money without ever taking on the debt themselves. What a novel – and compelling – idea.

What’s stopping us from thinking about things like this? What’s stopping us from looking at the sweated assets we have created in new ways that limit our risk while helping our customers to be successful?

The only thing that is stopping us is our own bad habits.

5) Build Systems Agility... the Right Way

BPM, SOA and other “process & service” centric technologies need to be deployed, but they must be deployed very carefully. Why do we need to deploy these technologies (or employ their concepts in existing technology)?

We need to take process and service centricity seriously because our businesses will place greater and greater demands on us to support different product offerings and ways of interacting between (and within) those products for our customers.

When we talk about agility and flexibility in IT systems, what we are investing in is the ability to quickly align IT systems to changing business directives – and we don’t know what many of those are yet. With IT investment, realize that much of what we do has no “ROI” until the business defines a change we can support that we couldn’t support before, or that we can support quickly and at a much lower cost than before we made the investment.

That requires a balancing act between how much we invest now against what we “think” might be the return later (and how much later). This is sunk cost so it’s a lot like other business decisions, deciding how much we can invest in an “opportunity” with an unknown return means we have to be able to do so without return at all - otherwise it is too risky. The current weak economy makes this even more important than before.

The one safe place to go is improving the customer experience. Anything - and I mean anything - we can do to make the experience of our customers better than it is today, and ideally better than our competitors offer, will protect our current customer base. Improving the customer experience now is a great way to soften the impact of the slow economy while building the business offerings that will position us for greater success when the economy comes roaring back in a boom.

We must realize that our people are the most important part of this equation. Making the choices of where we will adapt our systems to more agile design and how we choose to draw the lines on services and processes is the difference between real payback and a loss few of us can afford to take.

Going too detailed is one example of service and process oriented error. While having the smallest building blocks possible may lead to the greatest possible set of combinations by which we could reassemble these to support a business imperative it can be the difference between building a city from bricks and mortar to setting pre-assembled buildings in place. Determining the right line to draw in regards to how services and processes are broken out in our IT systems is the biggest factor in determining the success, degree of success, or failure such initiatives produce. If you’re going to be on your game in leading IT to support the creation of business success this is your most important challenge.

There are a number of other critical factors in helping IT systems be a business enabler rather than a boat anchor. More and more IT leaders are being tasked with understanding the business in great detail, as good as or better than their MBA colleagues! Being able to balance the stakeholder perspectives of Shareholders, Executive Management, Functional Management, the Customer and IT as a tightly woven ecosystem is no longer an idealistic want – it is a basic necessity.

Support, improve, elevate, innovate and build. I suppose that’s enough to keep most of us busy for awhile...

Terry Schurter

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This is a pretty cool post for me. We have completed the IPAPI "vision of the future" - at least as far as we can see right now - and the result is our process management framework and education program.

So what does the future of business look like from our point of view? While we may not be able to answer that question today, what we can answer is, “How will we get there?” We will get there by reorienting ourselves to an agile, change-embracing style of business with one focus: delivering value to shareholders, customers and employees in everything we do. This is the purpose the IPAPI process management framework serves.

Focused specifically on addressing the need to embrace change, advance agility and deliver success to shareholders, customers and employees in everything we do, the roadmap to the future has now been charted in the IPAPI Process Management Framework.

The Framework identifies the subject areas and skills needed to successfully build an organization that can adapt itself to changes, regardless of their extent, scope, market or economic conditions. Building from core practices of optimization, alignment and innovation, the Framework embraces every level of organizational need – from strategy and governance in the Board Room to delivering success without exception on the front lines. It also sets a clear direction on the role IPAPI will play in organizational success.

There are a number of new and several updated executive briefs we are making available to people interested in the framework (along with the overview of the framework itself). I think that these paint a picture that will help us get a better idea of how we can grow to control our destinies far better than we do today, to create success at levels we realy have not understood as possible before and to build the ability to adapt to whatever happens - when it does.

Have I caught your interest? Then follow this link to learn more http://ipapi.org/ipapi_framework.php...

But wait, did I tell you that we are now making the new Certified Process Professional online training a member benefit? Certification is seperate but the training is included with membership now.

How's that for changing the game of process?

Customer Interactions - How important are they?

Every time - and I do mean EVERY TIME - a customer interacts with a business that interaction plays a significant role in the business's profitable revenue (growth or shrinkage). Every customer interaction is an opporunity for us as a business to differeniate ourselves because the hard reality is that most of us aren't very good at it at all.

The only thing our customers care about are the interactions they have with us. Each contact from a customer should be greeted as what it really is, an opportunity show our customers that we not only care, we care about what they care about and our there to make our customers' lives simpler, easier and more successful.

Things like how we are available, how quickly we respond, how good we are at understanding what the customer wants from us (precluded by our understanding of the customer's need), and (of course) how well we do at fulfilling that need are fast becoming the "make or break" points for customer loyalty.

At the end of the day the only thing that really matters to our customers are these interaction points, these customer-facing or customer-oriented processes. And the ONLY thing that matters is how the customer judges that interaction - and they (we) absolutely judge the businesses we interact with.

The overall game plan is to eliminate every possible reason that we can for our customers to need to contact us, then when they do (there will still be plenty of contacts I promise you) we need to make sure we respond when our customers expect us to, in the way they expect us to, and to help them achieve their goal (why they contacted us!) as quickly and easily as possible.

This stuff should be on every CXO's agenda... period.

The Institute has just approved a new Certification course - the Certified Process Manager program - and it's an important step in giving people the ability to drive new levels of success in their business. Considering the economic "challenges" we seem to be facing now it couldn't come at a better time.

What need does this program serve? For more indepth information on the course and its purpose you should visit https://ipapi.org/open_courses.php#CPM. Under Learn More there are several resources that should help you place this program into perspective.

In a "nutshell" though, this course addresses the high level view of the organization via a new perspective on Enterprise Architecture (no, I'm not talking about IT Enterprise Architecture I'm talking about Business Enterprise Architecture). The CPM program takes us to a "place" that enables us to understand, visualize, set goals for, and act upon those goals as an Enterprise - without getting snared in the complexity of details normally encountered when we try to build this kind of enterprise perspective. Once again we are taking people to a new place characterized by simplicity striving to reach that ultimate state of sophistication as denoted by Leonardo da Vinci.

The course also covers Process Strategy to increase customer value propositions, improve customer satisifaction and achieve internal buy-in. No matter what we do the need to get the right goals in place along with building internal support for our goals. Building internal support of those goals is a critical part of making postive change happen quickly. The Process Strategy component of the CPM course does just that.

Lastly, the program includes a section called Process Management - where we show how to develop process "Health" measures that make all the difference in evaluating the performance of our improvement activities and protecting process gains as we achieve them. Left unprotected, most process gains are subject to a slow but steady slippage away from the original value enhancement - and that's something we want to make sure NEVER happens. This section also addresses key auditing techniques and ways to expand organizational behaviors supporting customer-centricity, quality, and process efficiency.

Implied within the program is something very important, perhaps more so now then at other times though I think that is more a perception than a reality. When economic challenges exist, the ability to achieve changes that dramatically increase customer satisfaction - quickly - means we can improve our customer retention. When the economy is "down," retaining our customer base is a really big deal. Having the means to do so quickly, with gains often seen within 30 days, is the kind of help many of us are looking for. The CPM program is now here to address that need.

In the longer view though this kind of approach is a different value. The more successful we are at retaining our existing customers, at building very strong customer loyalty, at delivering on customer value propositions that are seen as a real differentiator by our customers; the better we are positioned for strong business growth and market expansion when economies are stronger - or booming.

I think that is the most interesting dynamic of the current world market. Call it a market reset, recession, depression, slow-down, melt-down or whatever else you like - we are in a economically challenged environment. Guess what is waiting for us on the other side of this "down-turn?" That's right, a market boom.

Have you any guess as to which organizations are going to reap the benefits of the boom to follow? How do you think those organizations that improve their customer experiences, increase customer satisifaction, build customer loyalty, and develop enhanced customer value propositions NOW are going to do when the "boom" comes?

It's not hard to figure that one out, is it?

There is a certain amount of gloom and doom surrounding us right now. We are in a time of change, one that is pressing us with financial and economic impacts. I know some people see a bleak picture ahead. Not me. I see nothing but opportunity that is waiting for each and every one of us!

Am I an optimist? I don't think so. I believe I am more of a realist, and the reality is that right now there are opportunities all around us!

NOW is the time to focus on value creation, doing those things that create customer value. There is plenty of purchasing money still flowing, the opportunity is to make sure you have as much flowing to you (your business) as possible. How do you do that? By making your customers' lives simpler, easier and more successful!

It's a GREAT TIME to build market share. What happens if you do that? You will "weather the storm" in good shape and be perfectly positioned to reap the benefits of the boom that will follow (and it will follow).

If you DO THAT while decreasing costs (efficiency) then you are going to be in a really sweet place. The world will become your "oyster," and the business success you will achieve will make your Thanksgivings in the future ones of great bounty. And you can do that, for a lot less (time, cost) than you are spending trying to hunker down and survive until things get "better."

For me, I see this time of change as a great opportunity to challenge the "status quo." With the approach we take to process (the CPP and CPM programs) we KNOW that identifying the right actions to take WILL increase customer value WHILE decreasing costs. That's what I'm talking about folks. While we can't "afford" to sink costs into expensive and complicated "initiatives" we CAN identify low-cost opportunities to improve the experience we provide to our customers while reducing OUR COSTS for delivering that.

Can you imagine a better time to do just that?

(if that sounds good drop us a line through our contact form, subject: Building Market Share)

http://ipapi.org/pg/contact

Process Efficiency

Process efficiency is the measure of a process's ability to be performed without activities that are non value-add or unintentional.

Process efficiency - The ratio of value-added work to non value-added work plus unintentional work created by a process.

A process that is completely efficient (100% efficiency) creates no unintentional work, nor does it have any non value-added work within it.

Every process represents a certain amount of work performed by people, machines and sometimes systems. When determining the efficiency of a process, we need to identify the causes of work in a process and then try to place those causes into perspective in respect to value-add, non value-add and unintentional work (which is always non value-add).

Process Quality

There are three measures of process quality.

Statistical Process Quality is a measure of the likelihood that the process will deviate from the intended “process flow” in such a way that the consumer of the process outcome will not get what they expect – at least not in the way (what, where, when, how) they expected it. In a perfect process (Quality of 100%) no deviations would ever occur.

SPQ is a direct measure of process quality. The higher the percentage, the higher the quality of the process.

Obviously what we are looking for in process quality is the ability of a process to produce its intended outcome exactly as it is intended, including the underlying process it went through to get there. In a perfected process, there would be no deviation - ever.

The Points of Failure factor is the second quality measure we can use to assess process quality. It applies to customer-facing processes and processes where we have identified the internal consumer (customer) of the process outcome.

The POF factor is a key measure of customer satisfaction, assessing the impact of Moments of Truth and their exponential affect on the customer of the process (each “process deviation” experienced at a Moment of Truth exponentially increases the process customer’s dissatisfaction level). Obviously when contrasting Current State versus Future State we should see a decrease in the POF factor in the Future State if we are expecting the quality of the process to be improved.

The POF factor is a relative process quality measure. The lower the value, the higher the quality of the process.

Finally, there is the issue of Fitness of Use – the quality definition made so famous by Dr. Juran in the 1940’s. Juran defined quality as “Fitness of Use as determined by the User”. This brings into question our intended outcome of the process (and there better be an intended outcome that is clearly articulated or things are in a real mess).

The question of Fitness of Use can only be answered by the User, or at least by developing the perspective of the user from their Point of View (for customers of the business this is termed the “Outside-in” perspective).

So the third process quality measure deals with how well the process is aligned to its “customer.” That requires a clearly articulated Intended Outcome that can be tested against what the customer (User) desires from the process, within their personal context and even in respect to any higher-level process they are actually engaged in.

This is a highly subjective quality assessment although in many ways it is the most important assessment we have on process quality.

How often do we know these impacts when we take on business process management and improvement initiatives? Very rarely to be frank and honest. Far too often we fail in our role as process stewards, to hold ourselves accountable to the fundamentals of process improvement. It's a choice that we don't often realize we have or that we are making by our very actions.

The choice is whether or not we are going to be true professional professionals. What choice have you made?

So you think you know process, right? Perhaps you work with process regularly. Maybe you are even a process professional, working with process all of the time. But have you ever seen a REAL PROCESS? Chances are you haven't.

Now wait a minute Terry! What do you mean, "I haven't seen a real process!" I work with process all of the time, I live and breathe it. I see processes every single day...

Maybe you do, and maybe you don't.

One of the dicussion points that comes up over and over is how do we bridge the gap between our technology and business perspectives? Why does there seem to be such an insurmountable gulf between us? Oh, and while we're at it, what about bridging the gap between expected benefits and realized benefits? Both technology and business perspectives share in that frustration.

And yet the answer to these questions is so obvious. While the questions may differ, they are variations of the same issue and the answer we seek is the answer to both.

All right, come on! If you know the answer then just say it, already!

Okay, OKAY :)

The answer is that REAL PROCESS is much like a theatrical production. It has a script. It has actors. It has sequence. It has props and it has a lot of different people involved in the overall production of the show.

We can break down a theatrical production in many ways, like the timing chart and all of the activities the supporting people must do at certain times to make the show "work" right. You know... lights, props, sound and so forth. That actually is very similar to the kind of process models many of us work with in IT.

We also have the script, which includes the actors, when they enter and exit, what they are supposed to say and do, and in what order. That is also very similar to the kind of process models we often create in "human-centric" BPM products and business analysis.

But the SHOW itself is the actual process! The process only becomes "real" when we put on the show. The real interactions of Process Actors (people, systems, machines) - with all of the nuance, contextual character, and "in the moment" relevance that really exists in our organizations - is what makes up a real process. Anything else is at best a lifeless caricature of a real process and at worst a travesty...

Think about it. What makes anyone actually THINK that a process model or something in a software product is really "the process?" It's not something we should ever need to discuss. It's not something we should ever consider and it's really a sad reflection on us that most of us are willing to do just that.

Of course there are many reasons why we do what we do. But if you want to become a real process expert. If you want to improve real process. If you want to make a real difference then understanding that the only expression of a process that is truly real is the STAGE SHOW that happens when work in the process actually gets done must be part of your process perspective.

It's an easy concept to visualize but it's not so easy to act on. Process "experts" rarely find themselves experiencing real process first hand. But understanding what real process is gives us that one needed ingredient for us to find new ways to create value in the work we do. Without this ingredient you are doing nothing but wasting your time, your company's money, frustrating your fellow workers (especially those that must live with the affects you have on their work), and driving away your customers.

And while some people may point to cases where discrete "process initiatives" produced stellar results, I suggest you look under the covers a bit deeper to see how much real benefit is there. But of course sometimes even without the magic ingredient something will work... as my Grandpapa used to say "Even a blind hog finds an acorn every now and again."