The Problem

A good friend, John Reynolds, has eloquently commented on a subject near and dear to my heart: Leadership.  More specifically, Project Leadership vs. Project Management:

My job lets me work with talented programmers and business people all over the world.  These folks all know their jobs – the programmers know how to write good code and the business folks know how to run their business – but when you bring them together they often can’t get a project finished.

The objective of all projects is to deploy Business Solutions. Requirements grow up to be Plans, Plans grow up to be Projects, but many Projects just don’t grow up to be Solutions. Like the Energizer Bunny, these Projects just keep going and going and going… but they never get anywhere.

I blame a lack of leaders.

John has captured the essence of the problem.  The projects that become successful solutions have leadership.  And this is something we’ve written about quite a bit. BPM especially requires leadership because you’re asking different constituencies to play nice together, despite the fact that the changes wrought by BPM will have uneven benefits and consequences.  The leader can coerce, cajole, persuade, confront… and can bring the resources and willpower to the project to get it done.

Leaders: Born or Made?

I fear that leaders are born, not made (although training certainly helps improve them).  When a project is stalled, a hero can’t just “take charge” and get a project back on track.  Leaders aren’t leaders without followers.

There have been many variants of this debate with regard to athletes, entrepreneurs, CEOs, leaders.  I come down on the side of nurture more than nature.  I’ll not deny that we are each born inheriting our own gifts, bestowed by our parents.  But how we develop and hone those gifts and shore up weaknesses it what makes us the adults and professionals we grow to be.

A Solution?
How do we develop leaders?  We might first ask, how do we develop heroes?

Step 1: expose your high potential team members to people you consider to be heroes.  Let them work in the proximity of great contributors to learn what it means to be a great contributor.  Try to awaken in them an awareness of what it is that makes the hero admirable, and an awareness that they, too, could be a “hero”.  Work with them to leverage their strengths.  Let them learn by following the example set by your heroes. Give them opportunities to succeed AND fail.

If I can distinguish between a hero and a leader – a good hero “leads by example” – not by consciously thinking about leading, but by doing all the things that we would want others on the team to do.  They work hard, they are focused on what’s good for the team, the project, the company.  They care about their colleagues and will help them.

The first step in evolving a leader from a hero, is to create self-consciousness (let me explain).  We have to wake in the hero, that self-awareness that they can lead intentionally, rather than unconsciously.  The key difference is intention.  A leader intends to have the effect of leading others.  A hero may lead others but isn’t intending to do so, and may even be alarmed and uncomortable when it happens.  There is a fear of responsibility, fear of failure, fear of letting others down.  If you want to foster that leader, give them the opportunity to succeed and fail.  And invest in teaching what you expect from leaders, and what their team will expect.  It takes a fair bit of coaching or self-awareness, but people can learn to lead.  I’ve seen it happen, and I’ve seen it happen even within our own projects among the customers we work with.  Soon, someone walking the path to becoming a leader, acting with intention, will learn from the feedback loop of consequences.  They’re on the path.

This is important because, for BPM to continue to grow and succeed, we need a lot of leadership.

John has a few more important points to make:

What we need are Project Leads… People who command the respect of both the Business and Technical folks.  We need people who have met both Business and Technical challenges in their careers, and who can show all of us “how to get there”…

That’s why we lack leaders for our projects.  There simply aren’t many Business people in the world who are respected by Techies, and not many Techies in the world who are respected by Business people.

This is not by any means an easy problem to solve – but if we want success for more of our projects, we need to find more of these leaders.

This is why, at BP3, we have tended to focus on developing our technical heroes into leaders who care about business.  But we also try to make sure that they understand the value that business leadership brings to the table, so that we’re ready to embrace it when we find it within our team or within our customers’ and partners’ teams. I agree with John: not an easy problem to solve, but sometimes the ones that are worth solving aren’t easy.

Ann All poses the question: “Is CIO the Right Person to Champion Process Improvement?” on the ITBusinessEdge Blog:

I’ve written about this idea several times. It’s hard to argue against the need for a chief process officer. Yetmany organizations do not designate a specific function for process improvement. What’s less clear is who is best positioned to fill this role. Vizard writes it “may be the chief operating officer or even the CIO.”

I think a good case can be made for the CIO. Because IT touches the entire business, the CIO has a high-level, cross-functional view of the organization shared by few other executives. IT also tends to have more hands-on experience modeling and mapping processes than other areas of the business. CIOs clearly recognize the need for process improvement. They named business process improvement their top priority for 2010 in Gartner’s annual survey.

Honestly, I’ll take anyone at the C-level or just below who is passionate about process improvement and empowered to make a difference.  Having *someone* take the lead is better than no one at all.  And in some organizations, which are heavy on IT to support the business, the CIO may be particularly well positioned (as his or her staff may know many of the business processes as well or better than the business folks who use the software, because the processes are already “encoded” in legacy systems).

However, Ann goes further in her post:

Samir Gulati, vice president of marketing for business process management software provider Appian, is another believer that a CIO or other senior IT executive is the right person to champion BPM throughout an organization. Business leaders tend to focus narrowly on the needs of their own divisions and opt for point solutions, he said when I interviewed him recently.

A lot of software companies prefer for BPM to be led by IT.  Why? Because when it is led by IT they can go for the strategic sale:  buy this software and you can apply it to all of your processes that come up!  Many IT organizations look at this a bit like setting up a utility:  we’re providing “electricity” (BPM), so that the business can turn on the lights, computers, etc (improve process). Its a comfortable relationship for software folks to build with IT organizations.  Speeds and Feeds, features, bells and whistles.  Comfortably avoiding too much discussion of business-oriented ROI.  Proving that the current topic is an emerging meme, Mark McDonald of Forrester has written about this subject as well, advocated for an expanded role for the CIO:

Well because no other executive is responsible for the long term operating model and no other executive has the resources that determine company productivity in the long run.  IT is now a significant source of leverage across the enterprise as information spans operational groups and fuels processes, communications connects people and processes and technology offers new service channels and methods. and throng time.

But this doesn’t mean that the CIO is the ideal candidate in most organizations to lead process improvements.  First of all, the most important criteria are not which three letters make up the title.  The most important criteria are specific to the person:  passion, empowerment, and capability.  Put another way, the most important criteria is leadership, and these three elements tie into the ability to lead an organizational change.

I believe a broader study of BPM would support the empirical data that we have at BP3 that organizations that lead BPM initiatives from the business generally yield higher ROI, tackle more processes, and roll them out more quickly.  Perhaps the secret sauce is that the projects are initiated out of such a close relationship to a business need, combined with accountability to that same business organization.

Having said that, we will take leadership on process over none at all any day.  And if the right person happens to be the CIO, COO, CMO, President, CEO, VP of Sales – it matters not as long as they have the passion, empowerment, and capability.

Update: Even before publishing this, Ann has added to her own thoughts on her original piece:

Of course not just any CIO can lead a BPM effort. It would have to be a CIO who is well-versed in the overall business, not one suffering from technology tunnel vision. In addition, he or she will need great communications and change management skills, since introducing BPM requires folks to make fundamental changes to the ways they work. A CIO without those skills shouldn’t be the go-to person on BPM. But guess what? A CFO or COO lacking those skills probably won’t fare any better.

Like most questions, I think there might be no one right answer to who should lead a BPM effort. lt will vary from organization to organization, depending on the skill sets of their executives.

This sounds much more in alignment with our own thinking at BP3.

bpmCamp is back, and it is coming to Austin, Texas!  We’re very proud to announce that we’re holding the second bpmCamp here in Austin.  Time is short – only 52 days until the event starts!  It is an aggressive time frame but with urgency comes creativity.  Following is the F.A.Q. with all the most important questions addressed.

F.A.Q.

Why bpmCamp?

We really think the BPM community/ecosystem needs events like this to foster growth, success, and maturity.  We believe maturity requires:

• technical breadth and depth
• project methodologies to support the roll-out of processes and improvements to those processes
• process improvement techniques and strategies that can actually be implemented and maintained in BPM suites

Also, we actually want to learn something new.  When we get the right  practitioners in a room, we’re going to learn from them, and help propagate those best practices into the BPM ecosystem.  We’re also going to share what we know from prior experience directly with the conference.  This cross-pollination is good for everyone.

Finally, we decided to put action behind our words.  We’ve long agitated politely for more tactical, focused topics at BPM conferences, but we’ve reached the point where it is time for us to contribute back to the community by creating an intimate event that fosters that kind of discussion.

When is bpmCamp?

We’ve selected a date for the Austin bpmCamp:  October 14-15, 2010. Mark your calendars.

We hope to host additional bpmCamp events in the future.  The first was at Stanford. This one, in Austin, should be special because of its proximity to ground zero of the Lombardi ecosystem (Lombardi’s headquarters was Austin, and IBM has a very large operation in Austin, including the Lombardi team).  It is also the headquarters of BP3.

If you have any questions in the meantime, contact us at:
bpmCamp at  bp-3.com

How Much Does it Cost to Attend?

bpmCamp Austin does not benefit from the free space that Stanford provided to the inaugural event.  Still, we’ve managed to find an affordable venue with great food, and therefore the impact on event costs was reasonable.  We’re charging $150 to attend the two-day conference (early-bird) from now until September 17, 2010.  Regular pricing will be $200 -  and the last day to register is October 7, 2010.

How Do I Register for bpmCamp?

Please go to:  http://bpmcampaustin.eventbrite.com/ to register! ( Early Bird Rates apply until January 1, 2010).

Where is bpmCamp Austin? Who is hosting?

Having the right host for any activity is a plus.  And having the right setting can really frame an event and set a backdrop for a good collaborative and rejuvenating experience.  BP3 will be the hosts for the event.  We’ve been working with BPM and Lombardi’s products for more than 7 years, and we’re looking forward to hosting the kind of informal conferences we always wanted to attend, right here in our home town.

We’re having our bpmCamp 2010 @ Austin event at III Forks Austin – one of Austin’s finest restaurants, but also a space that has a great historical Austin vibe to it, even while housed inside one of the more modern “Austin Architecture” buildings in town.   Importantly there is a lot of informal gathering space available, as well as a main room and at least two break-out rooms. III forks has been great collaborating menu options and space with us.  We’ll be a stone’s throw from Town Lake (aka Lake Lady Bird), right across the street from City Hall, and within walking distance of many restaurants and other venues.  Austin itself is home to Lombardi, and the base of operations for Lombardi as a part of the larger IBM campus here.

Travel Logistics

Please refer back to this page for travel logistics.

Where is the Landing Page?

UPDATED:  www.bpmCamp.org

Who’s Invited to bpmCamp?

The goal is to have a high-quality gathering of people who know the products well and are looking to collaborate and exchange ideas with peers and colleagues.  We’re inviting customer / users of Lombardi products (Teamworks/Lombardi Edition and Blueprint) who participate in deployments to attend, and we’re extending an invitation to IBM/Lombardi to participate as well.  If you’re a Lombardi or bp3 partner interested in attending/sponsoring the unconference / bpmCamp, please reach out to us at the email address below (there are limited sponsorship slots).  If you’re an analyst or blogger and you think bpmCamp would benefit from your attendance, contact us.  If you don’t fit any of the above descriptions but still want to attend, drop us a line with your thoughts.  All attendees will need to register, once the registration site goes live.  If you’re interested in receiving an invitation to register, send us email at the bpmCamp email address.

How do I Contact the Organizers?

The best way is via the bpmCamp email address:

bpmcamp at  bp-3.com

I want to Sponsor bpmCamp – how can I help?

If you think your organization would be interested in being a sponsor for bpmCamp, please contact us at the above email address and let us know you’re interested.  Please respect that we are keeping sponsorships limited to prevent over-commercializing and to make sure the sponsorship is worth something.

What will bpmCamp Cover?

We will beat the drum for topics and themes that we think will resonate.  However, we want this conference to cover topics that YOU care about.  In particular, we want to crowd-source topics for the event so that we can make sure we cover topics that attendees really care about.  The expectation is that the setting will be ripe for interaction among attendees during the sessions – that very few of the sessions will be presentation form rather than a loosely-moderated-discussion format.  However, we think it likely that attendees will be interested in a keynote address or two with Q&A to follow.  What kinds of things are fair game, you may be asking?  How about:

• Building Teamworks Coaches with YUI or GWT?
• Actual use of Optimizer in the wild?
• How to make Teamworks scale Really Big?
• Design reviews of actual Teamworks Processes?
• Making my Waterfall organization more Agile/Iterative?
• Tools for managing BPM projects (something better than MS Project??)
• Incorporating A/B testing into my process
• How much requirements gathering is too much?

We’ll have room for breakout sessions to accommodate more than one interest at a time.

Go HERE to add your ideas to the Agenda Wiki.

Who is Coming?

We’ll release information about attendees and speakers as we get closer to the event date.  Expect the bp3 team to be there!

Why focus on a single vendor? Why not another BPM product? Is this a Lombardi- or IBM-sponsored Event?

In short, we want the specificity and detail that we can get from a single-vendor conference, but the independence of a crowdsourced event.  bpmCamp isn’t sponsored nor endorsed by Lombardi.   We chose Lombardi Edition and BPM Blueprint because it is the BPM suite, and community, that we have the most extensive contacts with (and because we had already decided that a single-vendor conference could be interesting).

While we’ve worked with other tools and vendors, our network is not as deep in those communities.  If you work with another software vendor or geographic location and you’d like our help to run a similar event with you, get in touch with us, perhaps we can help.

We now have our venue chosen for bpmCamp 2010 @ Austin, October 14-15, 2010.  We’ll be at III Forks Austin, right in the heart of downtown, next to City Hall and the Lake.  III Forks is one of Austin’s best steakhouses, but it also has a great interior space for meetings of our size, and they have agreed to open their doors during the day (when they are normally closed for business), to host bpmCamp!

I want to thank III Forks Austin for allowing us to u

se their space.  We’re looking forward to some fantastic food and snacks during the day.  Moreover, thanks to Red Velvet Events for helping connect us with III Forks along with other finalist locations.

We’ll have more announcements on this space, regarding bpmCamp, as we get the wiki, mailing list, and other travel logistics sorted out.  Please let us know if you have any questions – either in the comments here, or on our various email addresses.

Keith Swenson has announced a case management mentor meeting (or ACM Mentor Camp) following the BPM 2010 conference, at the same venue:

The “Adaptive Case Management Mentor Camp” has just been announced.  This will be a meeting of minds for people interested in learning effective techniques for using case management for knowledge work.  It is right after the BPM 2010 conference, at the same venue, symbolically representing ACM as the next thing after BPM.

I think it is a great idea to put something like this together – these informal gatherings are often more valuable than more formal conferences – the only danger is conference burn-out!  At BP3, we’re looking forward to bpmCamp in Austin.   Sadly, I can’t make BPM 2010 this year unless my schedule changes, and therefore I also can’t attend the ‘camp.  Its a great gathering of people, definitely recommend attending to anyone who can make it.  Keith argues that the symbolism is that ACM is the “next thing after BPM” – but I’d argue it also supports my point of view – the same vendors, practitioners, and customers are going to be interested in BPM and ACM…  Keith and I just draw different conclusions about what that means for what will be defined as the “BPM” market.

According to the Kansas City Business Journal, 40% of US Professionals want to quit.  Wow.

But lets turn out attention to why so many professionals want to quit: their employers view them as a liability rather than an asset (read the article, it is there, between the lines). And with all the layoffs over the last 18 months, there’s more work spread across fewer employees.  In an environment of more work and stress, and fewer bonuses and benefits, we can understand why people might want to quit.  I’ve heard people say that someone should feel lucky to have a job- but equally, the employer should feel lucky to have their employees stick with them through hard times. It is, after all, your best employees who can still leave when the economy is down, and find a new job.

In another post, I tried to explain the dark side of the staffing service “body shops” out there: BPM experts are not a commodity, despite their best efforts to treat us so.  The big staffing firms I previously wrote about are also not committed to their people in any meaningful way.  When a project kicks off, the firm staffs up via hiring and contracting. But what happens when the project is over?  At these big firms, they just let go of all the people that can’t immediately place on another project.  People aren’t an asset to these firms, they’re a liability:  An obligation to pay salary and benefits. This is especially true of firms based outside the US who  leveraging local resources on a temporary basis (the locals are staffed up and down for each project independently in many cases).

We recently reached out to colleagues from a previous project – and we weren’t going to be surprised if they weren’t still working with the same customer.  But you could say that we were surprised they didn’t work for the big consulting company any more.  You might be thinking, sure, some low-level programmers got let go when the project finished. But no.  We’re talking about the people who were entrusted with running the project and managing the customer relationship.  Rather than leveraging their talents in another project, they were shown the door.

It must, at times, be hard for people who work at Fortune 500 companies, with a wealth of people walking their halls that have worked more than 10 years at the firm to understand the amount of turnover that happens at a typical big consulting body shop.  Or to understand how these firms put their teams together on short notice, and disband them equally quickly.

As a small firm, we sometimes have to hire talent to meet the demands of a project, but we’re hiring talent to reach a new plateau, and we’re taking on a commitment to continue their employment beyond just the project (otherwise, we’d just offer a contract).  We just celebrated a colleague’s one-year anniversary at BP3, and he’s about to embark on his 4th project with us.   And it isn’t a burden to pay salary to these employees. They’re our only real asset as a firm – their knowledge, experience, and commitment to our customers.

I hope in this time of economic turbulence, more employers will realize how much their people mean to their success.  And I hope we never forget that at BP3.

Max J Pucher has written recently that BPM is, essentially, common sense management that could be gleaned from dozens of management books:

In these times I would call BPM common sense management. It is no longer new or a mystery! We are rather going backwards with BPM to Tayloristic management concepts. Is there really anyone left in a management position in larger than SMBs who does NOT KNOW what the idea behind process management is? If yes, he/she shouldn’t be there. And once someone understands the acronym does he really need more than a day to understand what the idea is and how to implement it as a management approach? There are numerous books that will tell you how to do it.

Respectfully, Max is both right and wrong.  Yes, BPM is “common sense management” – but, you can read about the Himalayas and look at pictures all you want – it will not prepare you for BEING THERE.  You can read about playing tennis all you want, but playing it well requires practice, practice, practice… and… coaching.  You need a good coach to become a good player.

The point is, many things can be read about and understood in principle.  You can understand the what.  You might understand the how.  Or the when.  But the magic happens when you know what to do, you know *how* to decide what to do, and how to do it.  And you know when the time is right to do it – and you know why.  Business requires not just common sense but practice, and a good feedback loop as well.

Having said all that – the rest of his blog post is quite an interesting read, as usual.

The Process Cafe posits that Humans are your Process’ Greatest Failure Point:

Humans are your most crucial failure point in a process. When ever you are designing processes (or systems to support processes) you should ensure you try and minimise the ability of the human to cause a failure. Google Mail now, for example, can scan your email and look for the words such as ‘attached’ which might indicate that an attachment is expected. If you send the mail without an attachment it will warn you. But how many other email systems have that functionality?

Of course, it is process-improvement 101 that anywhere a human touches a process you expect to find various failure modes there.  Even the process of finding process failures can be error prone because it is performed by humans.  Often these failures are couched as “measurement error” (a  euphemism for human error or variation in that case).

But I prefer to take a more positive view of the human condition.  The humans in your process are your greatest opportunity for improving your business:

• By personalizing service for your customers
• By creating a personal relationship with your customers
• By leveraging their experience to make difficult decisions that can’t be trusted to algorithms alone
• By identifying opportunities to make their own work more effective, as well as that of those they work with (improving the process)
• By identifying new sales opportunities via direct communication with customers

And the list goes on and on.  Your humans are the critical element in your processes.  They’re your differentiating advantage.  So by all means, give them all the automated assistance you can.  Tee up all the information they need.  Double check their work and make sure it appears to be consistent in action and word.  But this is, to me, a bit like applying 5s to office work.   Sure, the knowledge worker doesn’t have to have their desk identical to their neighbors’.  Because they’ll have the same desk tomorrow.  But we can “clean up” the spaces around their process interaction, so that they’re more consistent, more useful, and more pleasant to work with.

I think BPM and process improvement proponents need to take a more positive view of human involvement in their processes.  It isn’t all about raw efficiency or cold accuracy.  Borrowing from a recent “Process Ninja” post:

So when thinking about automating processes, think about the number of moments of truth that are occurring in the process, and look to eliminate or improve them. Process is not just about time and cost, it is fundamentally about the customer experience.

True words…

Great post by R “Ray” Wang on Enterprise Irregulars about building a “Star Analyst” Firm.  While it is targeted at star analyst firms, most of the points apply well to any services firm that intends to trade on the idea of being “stars” in their requisite space. Tenet #1:

Almost everyone I spoke with began by saying, “Start with star talent.  Don’t make compromises on B-players.”  Then they added, “Most will fail to keep this up over time because the firm gets greedy and focused on leverage instead of client quality.  Keep in mind, if you lack stars, you won’t attract stars.  Set high standards for recruitment.”  The experts are right.  Buyers, sellers, and the media have to recognize your team as market leaders.

I couldn’t agree more.  It is exactly why, when we started BP3, that we started by thinking about who we wanted to talk to and build our team with.  It is also why we focus on what Ray refers to as “Star” potential.  Lombardi used to refer to these people as “heroes” – the people who could do it all: technology, process improvement, coaching, and thought leadership.  There was also a note about alumni.  I agree with Ray that it is important to recognize that people will leave over time – and to keep in touch with that alumni network.  By taking an active role in two previous employers’ alumni efforts, our business at BP3 has benefited directly and indirectly.  Of course, that wasn’t the goal, but it was one of the side-effects.

Mike Gammage posts the question:  is BPM ethical?

Against this background, the hard reality is that the business case for any significant BPM project is almost invariably based on job losses.

The jobs may be lost through automation, or through productivity increases.  The BPM project will typically enable the same work to be done by fewer people.  More positively, the BPM project may enable the same people to do more work – that is, there are no jobs lost immediately.  But, even so, the societal effect is not dissimilar because economic growth will now create fewer jobs.

Put crudely, and for the sake of this argument, BPM seems to be a job-killer.

Now I believe, as will many of you, that work is about far more than simply generating wealth and meeting basic needs. Work provides each of us with a role in the community, it enables us to develop our talents in service to others, and to contribute to the advancement of society.

So it’s a serious question that deserves attention: Is BPM – my work– ethical?

I commend Mike for undertaking a post on this subject.  I have a few thoughts for him to consider when he returns:

1: Competition is the Job Killer.

The first thing to realize, is that BPM isn’t the job killer.  The job killer is the competition for your customers. If you can’t win that competition for customers, you will have a massive dislocation of jobs.  That competition is faceless and unrelenting, unfortunately.  You don’t get to look into the whites of your competition’s eyes and try to agree on a reasonable pricing model – if you do in the US, it is called collusion or anti-competitive behavior (there are similar rules in other locales).

So you have to invest in improving the cost structure and performance of your business, in order to remain competitive.  BPM is a tool to do that.  Just like Microsoft Word and computers put a generation of typists/secretaries out of work, BPM and other software will put a generation of manual paper-movers out of work (or copier repairmen perhaps?).

2. BPM can Save the Jobs of the People you know

A Good BPM implementation can save the jobs of the best people in your company.  By making each unit of work more valuable, it is easier to justify paying them, even increasing their pay.  You’re increasing their economic value add to the system.

Moreover, if the people doing the work become the people improving the work, they can really maximize their positive effect on the business. It also frees up labor to focus on other value-adding areas of the economy (though, I’ll grant, that is an easier macro- than micro- argument – individually not everyone can make the shift, and not everyone has the savings to bridge the gap – which is why I’m a big fan of unemployment benefits and insurance).

Finally, if you can sell the value of these process improvements to your customers, you can actually use process improvement as a way to increase your top line, not just your bottom line.

3. Manage for More than one Bottom Line

BPM and the like can help you achieve more than just cost savings – BPM can help you more reliably achieve any outcome you set out to achieve – higher customer sat, a higher net promoter score (NPS), reducing impact on the environment, increasing customer lifetime value, etc. This is sometimes called the “Double Bottom Line” or “Triple Bottom Line”.  But realizing that your business is about more than just money, why shouldn’t you use process improvement to increase your odds of hitting ALL your business goals rather than just some of them?

Although BPM causes us to examine what we do, and second-guess the positive outcome, I believe overall it is not only ethical but necessary.

We’ve set our dates for bpmCamp 2010 @ Austin:  October 14-15, 2010.

Watch this space for additional announcements about bpmCamp 2010 @ Austin.

We had a great success with the original bpmCamp @ Stanford in January, this year.  We’re now ready to start the ball rolling for a bpmCamp in Austin.  We’re just at the formative stages, but we are targeting dates in October, and currently scouting locations in Austin.  We’ve also had tentative discussions with Stanford about having another bpmCamp at Stanford, but a bit later in the year 2011 (maybe even in the summer of 2011). Our goals and thought process are much the same as last time:

1. BPM Conferences are good, but BPM Conferences are (usually) too general, too big, too expensive, and stuck on platitudes because of the above.
2. bpmCamp is intimate. It was 40 people (max capacity) at Stanford.  We’ll figure out our max capacity for Austin, it might be just a tad bigger.
3. bpmCamp is specific.  We will be focused on the Lombardi Software products acquired by IBM earlier this year, and now known as IBM BPM Blueprint (aka Blueprint), and Websphere Lombardi Edition (aka Lombardi Edition aka Teamworks).  (We would welcome the chance to organize a bpmCamp for another product offering – but we need a partner to help)
4. bpmCamp is affordable.  Exact price is TBD, but it won’t break your budget.
5. bpmCamp is focused on what attendees care about.  Topics are crowd-sourced, so anyone attending can help shape the agenda.

If you’re interested in attending, watch this space, or keep an eye on posts with the tag bpmCamp. If you’re interested in sponsoring bpmCamp, we’ll have more details about that soon.

If you have any questions in the meantime, contact us at:
bpmCamp Email:

(editor’s note: bpmCamp is not affiliated with or sponsored by IBM.  bp3 is not acting on IBM’s behalf, nor is bp3 an affiliate nor subsidiary of IBM. )

This seems like a great BPM Thought for the Day from John Reynolds:

Just came across this short but sweet posting from David Novick:
BPM consultants should be SME’s in… well BPM

David’s “point” is that it’s our skill at approaching problems from the Process Perspective that provides true value to our clients.  The details of the business problems are known by our clients – Our skill is in knowing how to develop solutions for those problems through process analysis and process management.

Its a great thought.  Be a subject matter expert in BPM.  That is, after all, what our customers are asking from us.

Mike Gammage points out that a recent Gartner report touts BPA for the masses, but fails to understand how absurd that sounds:

Within this context, how can BPA possibly be an activity for the masses? This kind of analysis is understood and undertaken by a small group of IT specialists.

Each kitchen has only a small cadre of pastry chefs. Diners, waiters, the maitre d’ – they may all be involved in continuously improving the mille feuille aux amandes – but it’s the pastry chefs alone who sift the flour and need the rolling pin.

I think Gartner may have, in this instance, gotten tools and work confused.  Some of the tools they are reviewing (BPM Blueprint, and ARISalign) are designed for the masses – but not to turn the masses into BPAs.  The goal is to turn the masses of business users into real participants in continuous process improvement.  Of course, they have features to support BPA activities – but those particular features are primarily intended to support the analysts, not the “masses”.

Keith Swenson has another post where he compares Case Management to BPM:

“The two approaches are very different:

• Sherlock Holmes will use a case management approach, not a BPM approach, when solving a case.
• Bank of America will use a BPM approach, not a case management approach, to support signing up people for new regular accounts.
• Admiral Thad Allen will use a case management approach, not a BPM approach, when responding to the oil disaster.
• Amazon will use a BPM approach, not a case management approach, to handling sales of common books.”

I’d propose another example:  I sure wish BP had been using a BPM approach on that oil rig, rather than a case management approach that allowed winging it with decisions like whether or not to use drilling mud.  I wish there had been a little more BPM going on in the mortgage business pre 2008 – not just signing up new accounts but making sure that customers actually met credit and income requirements.

I think there are more than just mundane examples of where a little more BPM would be a good thing.

Keith has another interesting comment:

To say that these approaches are the same, because they both help to get work done, ignores the very essence of BPM and case management. Yes, they are both techniques to help accomplish work, but they achieve this result through different means.

[...]

This has nothing to do with any vendor’s product. I am not making a sales pitch here. Those that say their favorite BPMS can do all of this are simply pointing out that these two management practices can be supported with similar technology – and many products will support both approaches. But remember, BPM, and Adaptive Case Management are not technology, not products. They are both approaches to managing work.

Interestingly, because they are both approaches to managing work, the same people are likely to be involved in both approaches.  One can argue about which approach “wraps” the other approach, but as BPM is an amalgamation of techniques and approaches, the question (to me) is whether case management is just another one of those, or whether it is a whole “methodology” unto itself.  A relevant example:  Six Sigma and Lean are examples of different approaches to process improvement that, today, most people lump together because they both represent useful sets of tools for the same set of people engaged in process improvement.

Steve Wood, in the comments, captures my thoughts well:

“So, for example, when I look at how an agent supports a customer through an issue. At the high level, it’s very BPM-like, at the implementation level it’s very hybrid. I can optimize some tactical processes to improve performance and also optimize tactical experiences to improve case management.”

And of course, Max J Pucher has a well-worded  comment also:

“Analytic knowledge provides conversation pieces but no practical how-to knowledge and is thus quite useless.

The ‘war of who owns ‘adaptive cases’ is thus quite senseless. I do agree that I am chasing windmills in asking for a common sense approach, but at that is also the reason why the question whether BPM, ECM, E20 or ACM will bring adaptiveness won’t be agreed upon.”

Its an interesting read in the discussion / comments and the wealth of different perspectives – even from people who co-authored “Mastering the Unpredictable”.  Unfortunately, as with most of these discussions, there is a little too much focus on the arbitrary limitations of software tools (the specific experiences of the authors with either specific ACM or BPM tools), rather than sticking to Keith’s original premise that we’re talking about two different kinds of work, but it is a small blemish on a good discussion.

Bruce Silver writes about the “right amount” of BPMN for the business:

In a way, we’re still back to the question Michael and I were wrestling with a couple years ago.  Do you want to limit the BPMN palette to what business users already know (or think they know) from traditional flowcharting, and allow them to bend the semantics and rules?  Or do you want to raise the bar and say here is a common process language that can be shared between business and IT?  That takes a bit of education or training, since they probably don’t already know how to use it properly. But it’s not rocket science.

He goes on to say that he prefers the latter.  In general, I do too.  Once upon a time flowchart symbols weren’t familiar to businesses either.  People can adapt to new notations and skills.  BPMN isn’t *that* hard conceptually.

Of course, using a subset for white-boarding makes perfect sense because you are in a conversation, and if you draw something that isn’t precisely the right kind of gateway but write a note next to it or explain what you want, the people in the room will understand.  I use a form of shorthand BPMN when I whiteboard that works well for me.  You know someone does this a lot if they draw the message events in one continuous pen stroke (envelope and all).

Inc. has a fantastic article adapted from Tony Hsieh’s upcoming book, it is a riveting read, to me. Tony and his CFO championed a culture as the key means of differentiation in the difficult online shoe and apparel retailer segment.  Competing against Amazon online isn’t easy.

What makes Zappos different is that they don’t compete on price:

Zappos sells shoes and apparel online, but what distinguished us from our competitors was that we’d put our company culture above all else. We’d bet that by being good to our employees — for instance, by paying for 100 percent of health care premiums, spending heavily on personal development, and giving customer service reps more freedom than at a typical call center — we would be able to offer better service than our competitors. Better service would translate into lots of repeat customers, which would mean low marketing expenses, long-term profits, and fast growth. Amazingly, it all seemed to be working.

They compete by differentiating on service.  And they’ve bet that by taking exceptionally good care of their employees, that that would translate into better customer service.  By all accounts it was working quite well, but the board wasn’t supportive of “Tony’s social experiments”, but rather tolerated them as long as things went smoothly and the risks to the business weren’t too great.

I think it would be too easy for business owners and managers to conclude that Zappos, and by inference, Tony’s “social experiments”, failed because they sold to Amazon (albeit at an attractive price).  I believe precisely the opposite is true – that they were able to command north of a $1B value precisely because of the culture they created – which made them both an interesting business for Amazon to acquire, and a separate culture which Amazon would find worth preserving (despite the normal tendency of acquirers to stamp their culture upon acquisitions instead).

At BP3, we also pay 100% of insurance premiums.  We invest in our employees’ retirement plans (through matching – not just through paying the administrative fees) – more companies should be doing this.  But we’re also looking to increase our investment in other team growth opportunities – including events like bpmCamp.  We’ve invested here in there in other personal development opportunities but if I’m honest, we haven’t done enough yet.

As a professional services firm, we can relate to Tony’s thought process on culture.  If you take care of the people who touch customers, you are, by inference, taking care of your customers as well.  If you take the people who touch your customers for granted, you are borrowing trouble and relying on people to swim upstream to provide a positive experience for their customers.  You’ll find it harder to retain the best talent, and you’ll find your competition acquiring the best talent.

Taking care of your team is job 1. My hat is off to Tony and the whole team at Zappos.  We’ve been fans, and we’ve been happy customers, here’s hoping that Zappos continues the culture crusade into the future.

(Thanks to Sandy Kemsley for this link.)

Ann All writes that companies are increasingly opting for automation over outsourcing:

Is process automation the new offshoring? I made that case several months back, noting that companies may increasingly opt for automation over outsourcing as a cost-saving measure.

I cited a New York Times interview with Infosys CEO S. Gopalakrishnan, who shared his belief that advanced automation eventually will eliminate many of the labor-intensive, back-office functions now being performed in India and other lower-cost countries, and my interview with The Hackett Group’s Erik Dorr who told me “the biggest competitor to globalization is automation.”

In my opinion, outsourcing (off-shoring) delayed the adoption of many automation technologies and projects.  Quite simply: for a while, it looked cheaper to get less expensive labor, than to increase the productivity of the existing workforce through automation (or, more generally, cap-ex).

But, inevitably, as the cost of human capital around the world gradually averages upward – especially for skilled functions – and the cost of automation is, in many ways, declining – thanks to SaaS, BPM, SOA, etc. – attention is turning to automation.

Growing businesses focus on automation as a way to free their scarce, knowledgeable workers to focus on value-added activities.  Mature businesses focus on automation as a way to reduce headcount or reduce the skills required to perform a specific function.

In the short-to-medium term, this is going to hurt employment.  But in the long run, these advances will make each unit of labor more efficient, and at least offer the possibility of more hiring in the future.  Past experience in the US has shown that while employment may decline in one area, new job markets open up as human capital (people) is freed up for mundane work to do more specialized work.

The bulk of the jobs HP is eliminating will likely come from operations it acquired from EDS in 2008, a purchase that made HP the world’s second-largest provider of commercial technology services, behind rival IBM. HP has already cut nearly 25,000 former EDS jobs. HP’s services division is now one of its biggest sources of revenue and profit, accounting for $8.7 billion in sales and $1.4 billion in operating profit in 2010′s first quarter.

Sadly for those involved, those 25,000 jobs are unlikely to come back.  But the economy in similar situations, historically,  provides other opportunities that mean the overall output of the economy grows faster than the number of people employed.

Unfortunately many people assume that BPM is all about workforce reductions.  But BPM is just as much about planning for growth or peak loads, better customer service, regulatory compliance, visibility to operational data, elimination of errors and defects.

Mark Suster (@msuster) makes a (somewhat) controversial argument that one should not hire job-hoppers.  Apparently what makes it controversial is the judgmental tone of the email, and the black-and-white nature of the initial statement.  The title of his piece?

“Never Hire Job Hoppers. Never. They Make Terrible Employees”

But, if you read it more carefully, and his comments below – he is quite clearly saying that some people develop a pattern of job-hopping.  If someone is a “job hopper” they will not make a good employee.  People take issues with both parts of his argument:

First, that you can determine (pattern match) on job hopping.  They argue for circumstances and exceptional situations.  But Mark really was quite clear that 2 or 3 of something does not define a pattern.  its 6-10 data points that define a pattern.  I think even if you disagree with his exact definition, you can arrive at your own definition of what a job-hopper is, and match people to that pattern (or not).

Second, that job-hoppers make for bad employees.  However, most of the arguments made on this point started by describing someone that would not meet Mark’s definition of a job hopper.  Moreover, Mark didn’t argue that these employees wouldn’t do good work, necessarily.  His argument is that you want to build a team that lasts – and these job hoppers can really undermine your company and your team’s morale when you are trying to get to exit velocity (and critical mass) at your firm.

I think Mark’s right.  Building sustainable value requires hiring people who share your values (select to the best of your ability), and who are interested in building the enterprise at the same time that they are building themselves.  When you have shared values and commitment, it is easier for the the employer to compromise to enable employees to reach their aspirations as well as aiding the firm in achieving its collective aspirations.

Some would argue that you can align long-term incentives that build with longevity – to encourage job hoppers to stick around.  But in my experience those incentives don’t work on someone in this job-hop mentality.  On the one hand, the rewards are too far in the future to motivate them. On the other, during any significant rough patch in the business, they may perceive those long-term incentives as being worthless or unattainable.

Its hard enough to retain people through inevitable troughs when they’re not job hoppers.  And employees, like investors, often buy high and sell low – joining a firm when things are great, and leaving when things are tough, but often right before the firm rebounds again to a higher plateau.

Having said all of that, I also feel that employment is not a blood pact, nor is it a marriage.  While you need people to stick around to grow your company, they also need the employer to give them enough leadership, financial reward, and emotional energy to be motivated to help you build it.  Its a working relationship based on mutual respect and trust.

Of course, lots of people follow Mark, and Paul Dix took it upon himself to have a full-blown response about hiring job hoppers.  He does make some good points, but misses the mark.  The basic argument he makes is that you should hire people that won’t stick around for more than a year, two at the most.  The most undermining point in the whole post: “…while I’m currently bootstrapping my own [company] and haven’t hired anyone yet.”  So really, Paul needs to go through the experience of hiring employees and retaining them before he can speak well to both sides of this equation.  Having been on both sides of the equation myself, I can summarize a few things nicely:

1. If you’re company is growing, it is easier to retain talent.  Sales fixes a lot of problems, because it creates opportunities for the people on your team.
2. When people stay less than a year, the company tends to burn a lot of resources on that employee without earning the investment back in revenue (or product improvements that will drive such revenue).  As a result, it is natural for companies to hedge their risk of hiring someone who is likely to leave quickly.
3. When you stay at a company longer, you definitely get the closed loop feedback of your own performance.  You can see if your customers are successful or unsuccessful.  You can see if your code performed well in production or failed miserably.  You can see if techniques you thought would scale, actually do.  You can see if organizational and hiring decisions you made actually work out – was that brilliant engineer you hired really a great employee, or just a great interviewee?  Sticking around gives you that data.
4. None of this absolves the company of the responsibility of making the firm an attractive place to stay.

I think the spirit of what Paul is missing, is that you’re trying to build something bigger than yourself – and you want to attract people to that cause that share that desire.  If you find people that fit your definition of “job hoppers” – by all means contract them if they can tackle specific problems or have specific skills you need – but don’t hire them, because it isn’t what they really want anyway.  Their goals and your goals as the company hiring, are too misaligned for it to work out well.

A conversation with a friend went something like this:

Friend: When are your HR folks going to act on “Descriptions will be added soon”

Me:  Oh, actually, I think *I’m* the HR person that needs to update the descriptions.

Friend: in that case, when will u describe the role of a process improvement consultant?

Me: Good question. I wonder if we should describe it on our site or leave it a mystery.

I mean it.  Should we really explain what we want?  If I describe it all would anyone sign up for it? Am I giving away the secret sauce?  Maybe its better to leave it open ended and just describe it as it is: a person with the objective of improving processes.  We then veered into a discussion of roles.  Some of the analysts have proposed roles like the new business process analyst or the roleplay actor.

But there’s too much discussion of new jobs and roles to hire for.  We should be focused on developing our people.  Focused on skill, capability, and competency.  Ideally, all three in one person.  Too much focus on a specialist for every niche, rather than on investing  in creating exceptional multi-disciplinary team members.

And we got to talking about “generational differences”.  If you’re to believe the majority of media coverage, all the “millenials” are using twitter and social networking sites like crazy, running circles around their elders.  I really detest this sort of generational stereotyping, because it strikes me as intellectually lazy, prejudicial, and smacks a bit of endorsed age-ism (As an aside, I just listened to a podcast on Millenials from Forrester that quite literally made me cringe.  Mere words can’t describe it).  It also misses some interesting points:  the real professional value of all these networking tools is for people aged 30+, or more precisely, people with some work history in their chosen profession who have had time to make meaningful connections with colleagues from say, the last 3 jobs.  Quite a few of my 20-something friends don’t use Twitter and don’t see the point.  But nearly every business owner I know uses Twitter (most of those business owners are too old to be “Millenials”).