Here it is, New Year’s Eve, 2008.  Like most of us, my thoughts turn reflective on the past year:  where we started, what we’ve achieved, and what we hope to do in the new year.

In 2008, we grew our staffed headcount 350%.  We don’t expect to repeat that trajectory in 2009, but we do hope to grow our ability to staff our team by 50%.  We hired some of the best and brightest when it comes to implementing BPM software solutions, and we now have the core team of experienced veterans to build around.

We rolled out a lot of processes for our customers in 2009. In all, we had significant impact on 15 processes.  We had 10 production roll-outs of major processes and major revisions to processes.  We had 3 processes go to production in which we assisted as mentors to the project team.  We had 2 processes complete development with production deployment scheduled for 2009.  Several of these projects were with insurance and financial services companies that are weathering the difficult economic climate quite well.  I think we’ve shown that BP3 is a fantastic partner when customers really want to get projects and processes into production, and off of the whiteboard.

We defined our services framework, which shapes how we think BPM offerings should work in general.

We developed and delivered our Lean 6 / BPM for IT Training class, in partnership with SixSigmaUS (If you’re interested in the class, please click on the Six Sigma link to request a spot in the next open enrollment class or to request a private class for your organization).  This is the beginning of converting the knowledge in our collective heads into teachable content for a larger audience.

BP3 had the honor of contributing to the OMG Certification of Expertise in BPM (OCEB) Examinations as well, which help set the standard for BPM knowledge and expertise in the industry, and really help define what exactly “BPM” is in the first place.

BP3 also participated in several conferences this year, that definitely enlightened us:  the Lombardi User Conference in Austin (Driven 2008), the Appian conference in DC, followed by the Gartner BPM Summit, and finally the OMG Think Tank meeting in Chicago. We had speaking or moderating roles in all of these, with the exception of Appian’s conference.

Most of all, we had the pleasure of working with some very forward-thinking customers who are striving to help their companies succeed through more efficient processes with better customer service.

We had a very full plate in 2008.  And with cautious optimism, we look to a bright 2009.  What do we have planned?

Expanding our implementation team. We’ll be growing our team opportunistically this year, as we continue to find great professionals and great customers to work with.

More education opportunities. We’re going to continue to offer our Lean-Six for IT training offering.

More process consulting. We’re going to leverage our expertise applying Lean-Six to white-collar processes and grow this part of our business in 2009.

More software. We have some ideas in mind on the software front, to augment our consulting practice with useful tools of the trade.

More evangelism for BPM. Expect to see us at a few of the conferences again this year.  We believe in the power of BPM to improve your business, and we’re going to be on the road talking about it.  And we’ll be right here, on the blog.

Happy New Year, and all the best to our customers, partners, and friends in 2009!

Lombardi just announced the latest release of Blueprint, their SaaS process mapping / documentation software.  I just read through their announcement, and logged in to check out some of the features for myself.

The attachments work just as described in the video included in their announcement.  Pretty easy to do, and they stay “in context” in your process, which is also nice.

The password management is a good feature for those who have group accounts, and its one of those “of course” features once you see it (as in, of course we should have this!).  However, what I really want to see is still a better way for two licensed blueprint users to share content, and possibly revoke that access later.  This would allow, for example, a customer to add a consultant to their blueprint access list for a period of time, and then remove them when the project is over.  Or vice versa – I might want to share a process template in Blueprint but then revoke access later.

Unfortunately, this kind of cross-account sharing needs to be fine-grained, I’ll want to pick-and-choose which processes are being shared, rather than having an all-or-nothing approach (or just the nothing approach for now!).

Still, as they say in the announcement, the next release is 6 weeks or so away, so maybe next time! There’s a forum in which you can suggest and discuss features, but I can’t make out from looking at it which features are being planned next, and I don’t see a mechanism for voting features up or down the priority list except in free-hand text commentary. Lately the theme has clearly been around more robust documentation.  I wonder if attention is starting to turn to user administration, or what the next direction might be.

Note:  We previously did a review of Lombardi Blueprint here, and if you want to see all of our posts related to blueprint, this link should do the trick.

There are some pretty neat iPhone apps out there now.  The google app with voice search comes to mind.  I can picture my daughter growing up, never knowing what it is like to not have a little device with her at all times that she can ask questions and expect to get answers… The Pandora app is another great little application.

A friend of mine from way back published a little app called Urbanspoon that I’d been using even before I realized it was his company.  There’s a good interview on Techcrunch with Ethan, one of the founders of Urbanspoon.  I like that it re-introduces the randomness of a restaurant choice rather than just presenting a list.  Invaluable application for the frequent traveler!

I haven’t seen any good BPM iPhone apps but surely its only a matter of time now!

OMG has now released a schedule for exam availability for the OCEB (OMG Certified Expert in BPM) Exams.  This certification is an important step to move closer to a common understanding of what BPM is, and what it means to be an expert in BPM – two topics that have, up to this point, remained stubbornly hard to define in a way that everyone will agree with! Here’s one step in the right direction (though, I’ll grant there is room for improvement, perfect is the enemy of good, right?).

I just got an email from OMB about the schedule, but as yet I don’t see it on their website (If you are reading this, and have seen it on the OMG site, send me the link or put it in a comment, please).

OCEB Fundamental Available           Now
OCEB Business Intermediate            December 22, 2008
OCEB Technology Intermediate       January 12, 2009
OCEB Business Advanced                  January 26, 2009
OCEB Technology Advanced             February 2, 2009

The beta programs have closed, with the exception I think of the Technical Advanced exam, but the official tests are coming in on  schedule, through PearsonVUE.  Also from the email:

“OMG, in partnership with the UML Technology Institute (UTI), developed the new certification exam series to support business analysts, architects and designers building and using Business Process Modeling and Business Process Management techniques to define, improve and automate business processes. Subject Matter Experts from more than 25 companies developed the exams’ coverage and questions, while extensive beta-testing and psychometric analysis validated their final forms. The exams will be available worldwide in English; in the Asia-Pacific region they will also be made available in Japanese in the near future. In India, QAI is OMG’s official OMG Certification Program representative.”

It was a long road (more than a year in the making), and it sure is nice to see it come to light.  Congrats to all the contributors to the OCEB examinations for the hard work and persistence.

So Austin has set up a great site called the Austin City Connection.  The front page is a little tough to navigate, I have to admit, but I link to some of the pages within the site and check back periodically to see what’s changed.

One of these pages buried on this site is a map of local businesses and of local business districts where local businesses are strongly represented.  Right now that includes the districts around South 1st Street (pictured below), East 5th Street, East 6th Street, East 11th-12th streets, Guadalupe, and North Loop Blvd.  Its complete with different icons for art, automotive, health, construction, eateries, engineering, laywers, real estate, retail, service, etc.  There are a few obvious omissions still (South Congress anyone?) but I really like the treatment of each area rather than just trying to look at one map of all of Austin at once.

Buried at the bottom of the page is a set of links for “all business types”, which lets you see the whole Austin map with businesses of that type highlighted.  And sure enough if you click on Consulting, there we are in the northwest quadrant of the map, although you have to zoom in to see us because in this view we’re buried right under Red Velvet Events, which is in the same building with us:

It seems like a great investment any city can make in their community, at very little cost. By focusing on business districts, the site focuses more on the way people shop – hitting several places in one area, rather than jumping around from one area to the next. Cities do so much to promote big business (tax incentives, tax rebates), it’s nice to see the city doing something to promote local providers of all kinds

Just saw this come across my inbox: a new set of vendor assessments from MWD in the BPM space.  It looks like they sell a subscription service, but they’re offering these particular BPM assessments for free in exchange for registration information. Looks like they have assessments for Lombardi, Appian, IBM, Oracle, Software AG, TIBCO, and the newest addition, Pegasystems.

Not sure why they don’t have Intalio or at least some representative from the opensource world, but still its a good set of research to be able to lay hands on at only the cost of some contact information.  There’s also a teaser for a comparison report that will come out soon.

After reading two of the reports, there is a strong product-focus in the reports, but no discussion of financial viability or market presence.  In a way, that’s refreshing as you see too many of these kinds of evaluations colored by areas outside of product capability, as if a healthy balance sheet alone will make the software work better for you as a customer.

On the other hand, like most evaluations of software, some of the subtleties of the software capabilities are missed.  These products don’t all deal with versioning, simulation, integration, and reporting to the same degree of competency, but from reading the descriptions you might feel that they are equivalent in these respects.  I think this is because some of the difficulties of each platform (and strengths!) are not apparent from a demonstration or even the first 5 minutes, but require working on an end-to-end deployment to uncover.  There probably isn’t an economical way for an analyst-firm to get to that level of expertise on all the products in the BPM space.

My complements to MWD for getting these reports out in a publicly consumable way!

Well, the new unemployment number is out today, and it’s a tough one: 533,000 jobs lost in November, which is the most since before I entered the workforce.  Sandy Kemsley just posted on building your social network before you get laid off – and I couldn’t agree more with what she wrote.  I’ll re-emphasize a couple points here…

1.  Facebook is not for professional networking (Its fun, but that’s not the same thing!).  In fact, as far as I’m concerned, for most white-collar workers, the only social networking services worth their salt are LinkedIn and Plaxo (Plaxo does a good job of keeping your contact information up to date, and keeping others’ contact information up to date in your database, but I don’t think it is a good site for networking, compared to LinkedIn).

2.  Don’t wait til you get laid off to start this process.

3.  It doesn’t take too much time, but it IS an investment.  There’s no immediate payoff, but it can pay off years down the road, even if it doesn’t pay off next month.

4.  It may allow you to help someone else find a job.  Be a good friend, help out!

If you do get laid off, look for smaller startup companies that might need help but can’t commit to hiring full-time – perhaps they’ll take some help on a contract basis to get them through a busy season, and that might be just the bridge you need to get a good full-time job.  Be creative and be flexible and you may just find a job, even in this environment.

It seems the most active discussion over the week of Thanksgiving was about Keith Swanson’s post “BPM is not Software Engineering“.  I haven’t read Keith’s Blog too often before, but I’m glad the discussion led me there as he has a series of interesting posts, and this one is one of the best.  The title is a bit misleading – my first reaction was that I was going to disagree with the content of his post, if not explicitly with the title.  However, as I read on, Keith makes a compelling argument as to why we should be precise in terms of what we call BPM and what we call Software Engineering. This started a minor dust-up of commentary agreeing, disagreeing, and quibbling with the post (go to the post’s comment section to see the trackback links).

The key point to glean out of the article is that often Software Engineers (IT) think that Business folks can’t do Business Process Management. But in fact, what the business can’t do well is the software engineering that may be requried to support the business process.  As well, the business and/or IT may not have the “process” chops to define effective business processes.  So you may actually need 3 or more parties to arive at a good answer:  IT, Business, and Process experts.  And, if you don’t have good representation for the customer voice, then you’ll need that incorporated in most processes as well.

None of this says that you can’t have more than one skill embodied in one person, but you need to have coverage of these perspectives.  Keith rightly points out that, for the most part, software engineers assume that the code IS the process, rather than just the plumbing for a process.  At BP3 we take a more wholistic view – the process is more than just software.  So I found myself agreeing with Keith, and only wishing the title had put me in the right frame of mind before I started reading it!

Here at BP3 we were fortunate enough to participate in the creation of the OMG Certified Expert in BPM (OCEB) examinations.  This is a big step for the BPM business because it starts to standardize what it means to be an expert in BPM.  Anyone will benefit from reading some of the reference material cited on the OMG site (it isn’t a complete list, but it is a great primer), and even the test itself will teach you a fair amount about BPM (trust me, you’ll run across a question you don’t know the answer to.  If you’re like me, you hit the books afterward to find out more about that corner of BPM).

One of the criticisms I’ve heard leveled at BPM in the past is that it isn’t easy to communicate what it is – a technology, a discipline, a toolset?  This certification starts to put all the parts of BPM into a context that makes sense.  These are the technical parts that you need to understand.  These are the business parts.  These are the parts that apply equally to both.

Putting these tests together isn’t easy.  All the question-writers are volunteers, and we write a lot more questions than what shows up on the test (except for you lucky beta-testers, who get to answer ALL the questions).  All the questions go through psychometrics and tech reviews and reference reviews, as well as wordsmithing edits.  The process of writing the tests was an interesting process in and of itself.  Thanks to Jon Siegel for working with everyone throughout the whole process and keeping our band of BPM experts in the fold for over a year to get this done.

If you are thinking about taking the OCEB exams and aren’t sure where to start, feel free to ask your questions here, we’ll do our best to point you in the right direction.  Its all computer-based and very easy to schedule and take the tests through the nearest PearsonVue test center.  For another post on the exam, check out Sebastien Stein’s (of Aris) post here. Also take the time to explore OMG’s OCEB home page, linked above.  It has several useful resources, not to mention listing the 25 companies that contributed expertise to the project!  I believe the fundamental exam, and the business and technical intermediate exams, have been published.  The advanced exams are now in the beta period, so we’re very close to the finish line!

Good luck with the exams!

UPDATE: there is an update here on the schedule of exams.