We’re going to share a teaser of our presentation coming on Wednesday at IBM Impact.  The session abstract just doesn’t do it justice now that the presentation is complete.  The outline:

• Business Process Improvement versus Business Process Management
• Five Major Anti-Patterns to Business Value
• Wells Fargo Case
• The Business Driven Delivery Team

You could sum this up as:

• Practical Methods for Keeping the Business in BPM
• A Case Study (Wells Fargo) revealing one good example
• How to makeover your technical team into the Business Driven Delivery Team.

If that isn’t a recipe for transforming your BPM Initiative, what is?

Since the beginning of the SXSW-interactive conference, I’ve posted a few times about the Lean Startup sessions and hinted that they might apply to BPM.

Heading into the IBM Impact conference, this feels like the right time to talk about the Lean Startup as it relates to BPM – it provides a decent segue to the topic we will speak on at Impact – “Keeping the Business in BPM“.

Let’s Review What the Lean Startup is All About

It turns out, I’ve written about this before.  But I think it is time to return to the subject with a little more perspective.  The premise behind the lean startup is embodied really well by three charts (click on this link, slides 20-22).  I’ve given each idea my own poor rendition here in the blog since I don’t see a good way to embed a single page from a SlideShare presentation.

Known Problem, Known Solution: Waterfall method

First, Waterfall development techniques were designed around situations when we know the problem really well, and we also know the solution well, and simply have to make sure we deliver a quality result.  It should be no surprise to anyone in the BPM space that this does not describe the typical BPM / Process Improvement project.

Known Problem, Unknown Solution: Agile Method

The second slide shows an innovation over the first: that when the problem is known, but solution unknown – a different technique is required to solve the problem:  Agile development. There have been many proponents of an agile approach to software development, and it is arguably the most accepted methodology among software engineers.  This does not mean, however, that it is always practiced, or practiced well, nor has it infiltrated all IT projects.

Lean Startup: Unknown Problem, Unknown Solution

The third slide shows yet another innovation: when the problem is also unknown, the solution is unknown.  At this point, we can’t rely on just documenting the requirements or interviewing the known user base.  We have to apply what Steve Blank coined as “Customer Development” – getting out of the building and talking about our problem hypotheses with customers.  When we get our hypothetical problems and hypothetical solutions in front of customers and discover we’ve “missed” the market, we “Pivot” – that is, take the lessons learned, and adapt what we’re doing to find an addressable market we can actually build a business around.  Essentially, the lean startup keeps iterating and pivoting until it finds a business that it can scale (or until it runs out of money).  Once it finds something to scale, the problem is no longer one of “searching” for a business model and solutions, but one of scaling an operation.

The coupling of the Customer Development process with the Agile Development process has been coined the “Lean Startup” by Eric Ries and others.  Why do we call the problem “unknown”? Perhaps you think of course we know what problem we’re attacking – the startup company was formed to solve this particular problem.  That sounds good – but actually startups only THINK they know what their business model will be.  Google thought their model was search.  But it was really targeted advertising delivery, based on Search and alongside search.  Small startups pivot often, but we’ve also seen large companies pivot – as IBM did when it moved to really emphasize its services business.

How is BPM Like the Lean Startup?  “Problem: Unknown”

Some readers should already be seeing a connection between the Lean Startup and BPM.  But it helps to really spell it out.  First, I propose that when you start a BPM project, you only have a hypothesis about your problem and solution.  This is what we mean when we say the problem is “unknown” – that we have a hypothesis but it isn’t proven yet.

How do we know that BPM suffers from this “unknown” Problem situation?

Because the biggest risk to budget, or even success, of BPM projects, is getting the requirements wrong.  As I often tell our team: “No, you’re not going to get good requirements up front for this project. And if you do, they’re probably wrong.” We have to approach projects with an open mind toward how requirements will evolve.

Already, most BPM practitioners approach the solution as an “unknown” or “hypothesized” solution.  This is why, for example, successful BPM projects typically have an Agile, or at the least iterative, approach to BPM development – it allows opportunities for course correction with the Business, getting closer to the “right” solution over the course of several iterations.

BPM Takeaways from the Lean Startup

But, the other side of the coin is that we BPM practitioners need to adopt some of the methods of the Lean Startup and Customer Development:

1. We need to “get outside the building”. For the IT folks developing BPM solutions, this means going outside the IT labs and seeing how the “Business” really operates.  Talk to them.  Observe them.  Read between the lines.  Get their feedback on prototypes and early releases.
2. We need to employ more A/B testing in our solutions. Don’t assume we’ve designed the right improvement to the process – prove it!  A/B testing is de riguer in software circles, but not inside IT shops, and not in process improvement methodology.  But it should be.  I’ve only seen one BPM endeavor really embrace A/B testing – and it was a great success.
3. The unit of progress is learning. This is a core principle of the Lean Startup.  While we’re searching for the right problem to solve, and the right approach to address it, learning is what we want. An A/B test that shows we didn’t move the needle as we wanted to is a success if we have learned a better path forward or avoided a costly dead-end.
4. Shift to Value-Based Delivery over Plan-Based.This means that we have to re-prioritize work throughout the project – to always keep the Delivery team focused on the highest value work.  The plan is your hypothetical plan.  Don’t stick to it when the facts dictate otherwise.
5. Get the Business and the Technical Team working together. Seriously.  Put them in the same space. Or the same room.  Make them part of the same team.  Make it the dream team.  Because when you get the leadership and team right, everything else gets easier.

There is more to it than just this… But if we can just pick up these four things for our BPM projects, we’ll make dramatic progress on improving the process of BPM. It takes leadership to drive these behaviors – but I hope that leadership just needs a little bit of encouragement through education and familiarity with the concepts behind the Lean Startup.

I’ll see many of you at Impact – in our session, I’ll touch on the whys and hows for a business-driven technical team.  And if you read this blog, you’ll have some of the underpinnings behind my part of the talk.  Of course, Lance and Reid have a few interesting points to make too!  Wednesday, April 13, 3:15PM to 4:30PM, In the Venetian – Murano 3205 room: “Wells Fargo – Keeping the ‘Business’ in BPM”

Steve Blank was the star speaker among an incredibly strong cast of speakers at the Lean Startup sessions at SXSW-interactive.  The room was packed, and SXSW volunteers were keeping more people out in the halls to obey fire codes.  There would have been people sitting on stairs and on the floor if allowed.  I guess there were a few of those, but mostly just near the power outlets (people who didn’t have iPads to take notes on).

Steve speaks as well (or better) than he writes.  His talk was engaging and energizing.  He started his talk (and a blog post I’ll quote here, based on the same topic) discussing a quick history of the four waves of startup investing:

• The Golden Age (1970 – 1995): Build a growing business with a consistently profitable track record (after at least 5 quarters,) and go public when it’s time.
• Dot.com Bubble (1995-2000): “Anything goes” as public markets clamor for ideas, vague promises of future growth, and IPOs happen absent regard for history or profitability.
• Lean Startups/Back to Basics (2000-2010): No IPO’s, limited VC cash, lack of confidence and funding fuels “lean startup” era with limited M&A and even less IPO activity.
• The New Bubble: (2011 – 2014): Here we go again….

Not everyone agrees that there is a bubble.  Of course, in order to disarm the “is it a bubble or is it not” discussion, he simply says “if you believe it IS a bubble, then the question is, are the rules different in a bubble than they are otherwise?  Are the rules different now, than they were for the previous ten years?”

It is hard to argue that the rules aren’t different.  Or at least that some tactics that would have been counter-productive or futile before, are now quite effective and productive.

The basic argument is that from 2001 to 2010, the Lean Startup was the way to go – conserving capital, focusing on learning and iterating, and finding a business model that could scale.  As he put it:

Startups began to recognize that they weren’t merely a smaller version of a large company. Rather they understood that a startup is a temporary organization designed to search for a repeatable and scalable business model. This meant that startups needed their own tools, techniques and methodologies distinct from those used in large companies. The concepts of Minimum Viable Product and the Pivot entered the lexicon along with Customer Discovery and Validation.

So far so good.  But what has changed in 2011, and going forward toward 2014?

1. Breathtaking scale.  The addressable market for startups is vastly bigger than it once was.  And so is the ability for startups to serve that scale (via Amazon web services, for example). Mark Suster commented on this in his SXSW recap.
2. New Exits.  There are simply better options for startups to exit now, than there have been over the last 10 years.  IPOs are back on the table.  Acquisitions are at higher valuations.  And the companies that are IPO’ing will have real profits and revenue, and massive customer #’s.
3. Better tools are available – AWS, S3, Google App Engine, Rackspace, etc.  These scaling tools weren’t there 10 years ago.  Moreover, developer productivity is up with new tools like Ruby, Rails, etc.

It seems that the key change Steve is advocating for startups is visibility.  That previously, press exposure might have hurt you by locking you into the wrong path, but going forward, press would help you by expanding your user base, and increasing your visibility for potential acquirers.

But of course, all this advice only applies if you believe there is a new Internet bubble.

There were some great quotes in the talk.  My favorite:  “There are no 10 year startups. There are only 2 year startups attached to 8 year failures.”

Steve pulls no punches, but he does deliver his critiques with a smile and sense of humor.

Slideshow, embedded below, also tells the story quite well:

 
There’s also a great Q&A with Steve Blank on GigaOm – in which he discusses how the total available market has exploded in size, and how he believes a great CEO with a great product could have come out of SXSW-interactive highly visible and talked about. In other words, he still sees SXSW as a place where you could launch.

On April 5th, with little fanfare, IBM updated several pages pertaining to its BPM offering.

IBM BPM v7.5 “provides a comprehensive platform for visibility and management of your business processes“.

First off, I like the simplified name (note the dropping of “Websphere” from in front of “BPM”).  I think it is a good move for IBM to focus more on IBM as the brand.

There are a lot of implications to this announcement and the set of related articles.  But I’ll keep most of those under my hat because, even though I don’t have any insider information on the subject, I fear that people will assume that I do, because of our prior relationship with Lombardi Software.  Reading between the lines of the several product updates, however, I see good news ahead for IBM’s BPM platform.  I’m sure that sessions at Impact will either confirm or debunk my guesses as to the implications of these announcements, and I’ll report on Impact in this space next week.

Key excerpts on features:

• Unified authoring environment – Supports graphical, what-you-see-is-what-you-execute implementation and testing of process applications, services, user interfaces, and rules.
• Standards-based process design – Uses Business Process Modeling Notation (BPMN).
• Integration designer – Delivers tooling for visually constructing services, data transformations, Business Process Execution Language (BPEL) orchestrations, and integration to applications and backend systems.
• Business rule authoring – For expressing business logic in an accessible manner using syntax that is closer to natural language when compared to JavaScript™. The capability provides the same rule authoring experience provided by WebSphere ILOG® JRules.[...]
• Properties sheets – Allows configuration of implementation details instead of coding so that less technical users can participate in design.
• Interactive playback – Enables quick team validation of process requirements at any time.
• Shared library of all process assets – Facilitates drag-and-drop reuse and collaborative implementation.
• Complete lifecycle governance – The solution stays in synch throughout the entire lifecycle from model design to deployment.

Summing it up:  if you like Websphere Lombardi Edition v7.2, you’re going to love IBM BPM 7.5. I read this as closer integration with IBM’s rules portfolio (ILOG), as well as IBM’s integration capabilities (Integration Designer).  And I read this as not giving up on core tenets of Lombardi:  unified modeling environment, shared library, lifecycle governance.

IBM BPM 7.5 is offered in three tiers: IBM BPM Advanced, IBM BPM Standard, and IBM BPM Express.  This sounds like about the right way to stack it up to me, given what I know about IBM’s range of offerings.  No more Lombardi vs. WPS – just a range of capabilities under one masthead. Full compatibility with previous versions of IBM Websphere Process Server and IBM Websphere Lombardi Edition is promised.

Of course, like most product release notes, this is a pretty dry read.  I’m looking forward to the color commentary at Impact to tell us  what to read into these release notes.  Expect to find coverage here!

PS- Browser fans will be disappointed to learn that IE6 is still supported.  I keep hoping that IBM and other big vendors will force the issue by discontinuing support for that product, which even MSFT wants everyone off of.

Activiti strikes again with the release of 5.4.  They have had a drumbeat of releases since the original GA shipped (and even before, but who’s counting), and they’re at it yet again.

I’m once again humbled by the great information available in the user guide.  It only took a few minutes to download and install Activiti 5.4 – but those interested should bear in mind the installation is really targeted at a developer-persona – you have to run scripts to install etc.  Certainly no worse than many commercial products, and in fact, quite a bit easier than most.

There are a few interesting and useful new features:

• Improvements to Activiti Cycle round-trip
• Support for more “case management” functionality – dynamic comments, attachments, dates, etc.
• Looks like you can scan an IMAP account for tasks (often a useful way to detect process starts or status updates).

In related news, Tijs Rademakers joins the Activiti team at Alfresco.  He’s leading the development of the Eclipse Designer, obviously a key element in the framework. I don’t know Tijs personally but he has a great (and relevant) track record and is working on a book about Activiti.

Because the founders give up.  Jason Cohen has written a great piece regarding the #1 reason that startups fail.  The founders give up and pack it in.  This isn’t quitting, to me – sometimes there are good reasons to quit your startup:

• Financial obligations are real – if the startup isn’t producing the income you need to live, you have to find other sources of income (aka a Job)
• Startups can be hard on family life – the work life balance isn’t…balanced… Sometimes people have to choose family or business – can you blame anyone for choosing family?
• A better startup idea/opportunity comes along – this might mean your startup pivots or it might mean a completely new business.

Jason relates a tale of how, even 4 years into a startup, the founder(s) can still be slugging it out with purchasing managers or trying to just get paid a reasonable (or regular) salary – all while paying employees and trying to retain them.  It’s tough to get the emotional energy up to keep everyone else motivated when you’re personally feeling defeated.

Although BP3 is not the traditional notion of “startup” – we’re primarily a consulting company – if your goal is to grow your business you will face all of these same issues no matter what the business is.  We’ve been through those lows – and I’ve always been thankful to have a co-founder in Lance, to lean on – but beyond that, to have a team to lean on that I can trust.  Jason’s cautionary tale of his conversations with a purchasing manager are… highly relate-able, let’s just say:

It’s about sticking through the tough parts, whatever your personal foibles or weaknesses.

Living through it, not beating it. I never have, to this day, “beaten” that PM, not emotionally, not if I’m being truly honest.

I’m not saying tenacity is all it takes. Just that without it, you’ll stop. It’s so easy to stop. There’s so many reasons to stop.

Jason persevered and succeeded – even though he never felt like he “won” the encounter with the purchasing manager.  I’ll just say this: Courage is not lack of fear.  Courage is doing what you know is right, even when you fear the outcome.  Courage is doing what you know is right, even when it may not be in your own best interests.  In business, this translates to running your business with integrity even when you fear that it may cost you business, or the opportunity to grow.  Risking the business outcome to know that you’re “living within your means” in an emotional, business ethics sense.  A good co-founder and good partners will help you remember that yardstick when you need reinforcement.

Getting through these tough troughs in a startup isn’t easy.  But it does make you appreciate the rewards on the other side even more.

The new Blueworks Live update came out over the weekend, and we took it for a test drive.  My impressions were pleasantly positive – this is a more substantial improvement than the last go ’round, and in this case there is something for the user as well as something for the process consultant.

First off, moving the reporting functionality to the forefront (Work Stats) helps a lot.  We can now see how our processes are being used and the performance of those processes, without going to the administrative screens and digging into them.  Nice to know our process on-time performance is in excess of 90%.  Probably especially nice for our employees as the most commonly executed process is the vacation change/request process!

Getting the more mundane out of the way:  Being able to mark any page as your “startup” page is also helpful – because this is the kind of thing that changes depending on what you’re doing.  There’s also a handy “Items I’m Following page” which adequately does what it says.  The Glossary update was utilitarian, not too exciting for me personally.

The two updates that really shine to me are the new Process Templates, and the new Process Playback functionality.

The Playback Arrives

In the Playback functionality, you can outline different scenarios (paths) through your process, so that you can play it back a bit like a slide deck, except directly from Blueworks instead of exporting it to something like MS PowerPoint.  A big part of BPM is telling stories about the process, and getting engagement from the business as to whether those stories are right, valid, complete, irrelevant.  It gives us a chance to set up context, to explore issues, and get them on the table.  I think the playback feature is going to be very popular and powerful for facilitators of process improvement sessions.

To me, it is interesting that this feature parallels investments that Lombardi once made in its UI functionality in Teamworks (pre-dating Blueprint, Blueworks, and the IBM acquisition).  At the time, the product team had observed our professional services methodology of “the Playback” and how we would quickly stand-up storyboard screens in our process and play them through live for customers to get their feedback.  The development of UI Coaches and the Coach Designer was a direct outcome of building product to fit the methodology of BPM deployment.  It was a great fit and enhanced our ability to use that methodology.

I see the Process Playbacks in Blueworks much the same way:  it is especially powerful in that people doing process mapping and modeling previously didn’t have a good way to tell their story other than to put it on the projector and use their finger to point.  This approach will work much better over a Webex, for example.  This is the first improvement to Blueworks Live in quite a while that helps the process consultant as much as it helps a novice process modeler.

More Automation

Oh I know automation sounds like a bad word but trust me, it isn’t THAT kind of automation.  The 4 new process automation templates provided by IBM are great.  Truly, I’m impressed by what they’ve done.  My one complaint:  They’re hiding in the library.  As a user of Blueworks, I had no idea that new templates had been introduced (other than by reading press releases  and blog posts).  Moreover, I had to go to the template library and then filter / sort by “New” to find them.  There’s really no separation between templates of Automation, and templates of Blueprinting. That’s unfortunate because templates of Blueprinting are interesting, but not as interesting as the Automation templates.

Of course, the new templates aren’t doing anything you couldn’t have done for yourself using Blueworks Live.  Maybe that’s the point – to give you a sense of what you could do with it.  I customized the HR Onboarding process, and it is likely that we’ll use it going forward as our checklist for compliance (or possibly even for assigning to the new hire).

Taking a step back, what I find curious is that these lightweight processes are particularly appropriate for small companies like BP3 – I wonder how bigger firms will make use of these processes.  My guess is that they have even more lightweight processes to take on, but theirs won’t be HR onboarding or expense reimbursement.  Instead they’ll be taking some other lightweight processes (lightweight may not be the way to describe HR onboarding at some firms!)

Overall, a very solid improvement to IBM Blueworks Live.  You can definitely see the results of Lombardi DNA in this product group, but also the change in direction that was fostered by merging the Blueworks and Blueprint teams is evident.

Washington Technology has a very complimentary article on Appian, a company that I kept close eye on while I was working at competitor, Lombardi, and since then we’ve kept track as we try to make sure we understand the breadth of the industry.

In it are a few interesting tidbits that I recall, but I was surprised to see come out in a tech journal – including Appian’s roots as a portal product, their opportunistic switch into BPM, and their roots in Microstrategy.

There was just one part of the article that left me scratching my head:

A private company with some investment from Novak Biddle, Appian has been providing BPM services for six years and now has generated more than $140 million in revenue, with about a 100 percent increase in revenue year-over-year, Calkins said.

“We’re very lean,” he said. “We rely on [innovative business] partners mostly. We have fewer than 200 employees directly on our payroll.”

These kind of quotes in a news article are irritating.  Is that $140 million over 6 years, or $140 million in one year, presumably the most recent of the six?  And “fewer than 200 employees” leaves a wide range indeed.  LinkedIn reports 172 employees, so at least this number is pretty accurate (the range between 172 and 200 isn’t too wide).  Is it too much to ask for journalists to report crisp numbers or statements?!

Appian’s free user conference is coming up, if you’re in the DC area or want to head out there for it.

John Reynolds outlines key user interfaces for BPM:

• Task Notification Interfaces
• To-Do List Interfaces
• Task Completion Interfaces
• Process Status Interfaces
• Participant Workload Interfaces
• Process History Interfaces

We could group these together around a few basic principles:

1. Executing the instance of the process (task notification, task completion)
2. Managing a set of process instances (to-do list, status, workload)
3. Improving the process itself (process history, as well as, obviously, tools provided with the BPMS that are focused on authoring)

If you’re not sure whether you’ve covered your bases for UI for your processes, John’s blog is a good place to start.  Good thoughts and explanation around each interface type.

I just read one of Steve Blank’s posts and I just wanted to share my impressions here. Because the internal debate Steve seems to be sharing with us on his blog is not unlike the debate that goes on in BPM circles all the time.  Here’s my comment in its entirety:

Steve, on the one hand, this post is depressing. You seem to be saying that entrepreneurs are born rather than made. That in some sense, this endeavor to teach more people about entrepreneurship is hopeless.

On the other hand, you pointed out not everyone can use these tools equally well. Well good! If they could, what point in striving against all the other people starting businesses if we’re all automatons executing the master plan.

The point is that you can, with the right tools, raise the game of everyone who uses them. With the right education and experience, you can elevate their internal game and process. You can give everyone a tennis racquet, and they won’t all be equally good, even with the same equipment. But you can teach EVERYONE to be better at tennis. I can’t believe you wouldn’t think the same is true for entrepreneurship, management, running a business.
I’m also disheartened to see people referring to science as if it isn’t creative. It is. If it wasn’t, we’d just let the computers do the science and R&D wouldn’t we? The scientific method and the “Pivot” don’t sound terribly different to me.

The Word processor doesn’t make someone an artist- but it has made people who write more productive – allowing, no doubt, more people to get into writing as a side-career rather than starving while they pursue their craft.

Regarding that practice: recall that it has to be practice with a purpose (the learning that goes with the practice, the purposeful working on weaknesses and leveraging strengths). Giving entrepreneurs a better framework and tools gives them a better shot at practice with purpose.

And having said all of that, I find it encouraging that human variance will still mean that some will succeed beyond others. Because individualism still matters too. That sounds like capitalism to me.

Given how many successful businesses there are in the world, perhaps we think this entrepreneur thing is a little bit more rare than it really is.

I think we too easily discount the creativity that everyone doing work exhibits.  We also too easily give up on the idea that other people can improve.  Almost everyone I’ve ever talked to thinks they can improve themselves.  I feel sorry for the folks I talk to who *don’t* seem to have that belief. What Steve Blank is teaching in his classes and through his blog is an improvement over trial-and-error. But, the best entrepreneurs will take great advantage from his concepts and teaching, and the worst entrepreneurs simply won’t.  It will be that way with any improvement tools or teachings. Is it any different in BPM?

Bruce Silver has been teaching the Process Modeling with BPMN class for years in cooperation with the BPM Institute, but this year:

If you were thinking of taking my 2-day class Process Modeling with BPMN at a BPM Institute event in Chicago, San Francisco, DC, or New York… well think again.  Rather than pay me for the classes I did last year, [...] Brainstorm/ BPMInstitute have just now swapped in their own instructor and are trying to pass it off as the same class I have been giving for the past four years.

Bruce Silver is well-known for his writing, reviews, advocacy, and training in BPM circles.  In particular, he is sought after for his training classes.  This strikes me as poor form by the BPM Institute.  Clearly Bruce isn’t pleased.

The good news?  You can get Bruce Silver’s training, directly from Bruce, online in April.  Details here.