Process for the Enterprise » Gartner

Apparently BPMN is Too Hard

Scott Francis — Tue, 31 Aug 2010 11:47:23 +0000

Jim Sinur has thrown in the towel on BPMN in his latest post:

BPMN for business professionals is just not up to a business level of need. Some folks think that BPMN is good enough for IT and it should be good enough for business professionals. I think the former is true, but the latter is way off the mark.

BPMN really stands for “Business People May Not…understand”

IT professionals can’t really expect business folks to understand cryptic/standard formats when they really want to see a real representation of their processes with desirable icons; not engineering Icons. It’s kind of like someone saying “let them eat cake”. It is this IT arrogance that could sink BPM technologies.

Respectfully, I think Jim is letting the business off the hook. No need to learn any new skills over there on the business side, just draw something on a napkin and hope it turns into a process. Just make up any old iconography you want, no problem if no one other than you can understand it (you know, the value of standards is that more than one person or team can understand what is produced). Don’t bother to learn something that is about 10% harder than standard flowcharting (Bruce Silver has helpfully identified a subset of BPMN that is more appropriate for new-to-BPMN business users).

At a time when we’re asking IT to learn new skills and to be more business oriented, is it too much to ask Business to learn new skills to support process improvement? This isn’t unique to BPM – if the business is going to support ACM, they’re going to have to learn new tools for that as well. If the full BPMN icon set is too much for someone, use the subset that you understand and like to document your ideas, and make use of annotation. If someone shows you a diagram with more icons in it that you don’t follow, it should be straight forward to get an explanation or to look up the new notations you aren’t familiar with. While Jim may not be a fan of standardization of notation – business folks are plenty used to standards of notation (not just in BPMN). I use BPMN basic diagramming shapes to whiteboard processes for businesses all the time (literally on the whiteboard or in collaborative tools) – and they don’t have any trouble following what’s going on.

The problem isn’t that BPMN, as a notation, is too hard. It is that too many people think that BPM starts and stops with BPMN! There is so much more to managing business processes, and improving them, than BPMN. By way of comparison, think about search. Search is a highly technical subject with a very rigorous syntax. But nearly everyone can take advantage of its more simplistic forms – just typing in a few keywords into a Google search field. It doesn’t mean that they can’t understand a more complex query string when they see it, nor guess at the meaning of a phrase surrounded by quotes… nor understand the resulting page of search results (the outcome). In fact, if they find their need for search becoming more complex, they can actually endeavor to learn the more advanced forms (domain filtering, exclusion, wildcards, etc).

So let’s all agree that there is much that must be done in the world of BPM to address businesses better, but tossing out BPMN and letting business off the hook is hardly the solution. One need look no further than a tool like IBM’s BPM Blueprint to see that you can ease the business into BPMN style notation by first having them engage in process mapping or value stream mapping. You don’t have to throw out BPMN to do this. At the first company I worked for, we used to like to quote a line from a business book: “Genius of the ‘And’” – as in, why can’t I have both a simpler mapping notation, and a more detailed process execution notation that make sense together – instead of only one or the other?

It is time for everyone to step up to the plate in BPM, not just the software vendors. BPMN is part of the answer, but only part.

Confusing the Tool with the Work

Scott Francis — Tue, 13 Jul 2010 13:54:12 +0000

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”.

Gartner has a new BPMS Definition. Next Step: Business Operating System

Scott Francis — Wed, 28 Apr 2010 13:11:33 +0000

Adam Deane noticed a change in Gartner’s BPMS Definition:

If you compare it to previous BPMS definitions by Gartner (for example in last year’s Magic Quadrant for Business Process Management Suites), you will see two major additions:
1. Document and content management.
2. Inline and offline simulation (instead of just simulation)

Good catch. Of course, we shouldn’t be surprised that the definition of “what’s in the BPMS box” would change over time – I expect that soon it will be a given that several other features (even products, or market segments) should be included in the BPMS definition. Why? Because too many people view BPM (or BPMS) as the the future “Business Operating System” (in the 90′s, I think most people viewed ERP as the operating system for the business… ). Rightly or wrongly, that puts a lot of things under the umbrella.

The real progress will be when the technology becomes so good it is transparent to the business, so obvious it is as if it works by magic (see Arthur C Clarke: “Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.”).

Mixed Reviews on BPM Conferences

Scott Francis — Fri, 12 Mar 2010 14:29:17 +0000

This isn’t particular or specific to the world of BPM conferences – there’s a general “conference malaise” going on – in which only the “best” conferences are really tearing it up.

Outside of the BPM world, its clear that conferences like SXSW in Austin are doing just fine (and did just fine last year too, by the way). Record attendance and a record number of panels and bands and acts is just the norm at SXSW these days (conference starts today).

But in the world of BPM, 2009 was tough for conferences, when the expectation was that people would still be attending BPM conferences due to how applicable they are to everyone’s business. Several vendors postponed their conferences or took them virtual (Lombardi’s Driven), but the ones who waited until the fall (Appian) benefited from the beginning of the rebound in businesses planning for the future rather than businesses just living in fear of the next shoe dropping.

Sandy Kemsley has pointed out this problem with BPM conferences several times, as has Theo Priestley, and we’ve chimed in as well on the topic. Some fresh perspectives:

Sandy points out that 2010 looks like a rebound year for conferences. We’ll see – Gartner’s BPM summit is in March in Las Vegas, and IBM’s “Impact” is in May – good test cases of the demand for these conferences. Word from the London Gartner summit implied that attendance was low? (I wasn’t there, so its second-hand to me).
Theo Priestley and Mike Gammage hypothesize that Gartner and IQPC could merge events by 2012 – which again sounds like weakness rather than strength to me.
Interestingly, Gammage was more encouraging about Gartner’s latest offering, while Jon Pyke’s contacts were not impressed.

Theo has a separate blog post, and while the bulk of it is about building community more broadly, at the end he makes a telling argument:

“When a sponsor at a BPM conference turns round and says he was perplexed at why there was such a low turnout given how important BPM has become according to what surveys seem to suggest the answer may be in the fact that we can’t even agree on what we’re telling clients in the first place.

For a group that practices change we’re incredibly resistant to it ourselves…..”

I’ve said before and I’ll say it again: I think BPM conferences need to do a few things:

Localize. Have the conference closer to the bulk of your attendees, so that more people can come without travel costs.
Face-to-Face. Tele-presence and high-def video conferencing is great. But a virtual conference is a broadcast medium. If attendees want one-way communication they can read the book or watch the video after the fact. If they want interaction, then you need physical presence to really encourage that.
Respect budgets. Don’t make cost of attendance a barrier – keep it reasonable. For anyone traveling, travel costs should dominate their total expenses, not registration costs.
Crowd-source. Leverage the community to arrive at the topics. There’s been too much top-down sourcing of content at conferences, without soliciting feedback from potential and actual attendees.
Narrow the focus. The narrower the focus, the more involved the people who attend can be. People mistakenly think you have to broaden the audience to get more people – but the point isn’t MORE – the point is BETTER. If the event is BETTER then you’ll get more value out of your investment of time and money.

We’ve followed this philosophy for bpmCamp and it was a great success for us – the feedback has been enormously positive, with a lot of interest in repeating the event next year. But of course, our “unconference” was limited to 40 attendees – and its easier to organize around these principles when you keep the size of the conference smaller. Still, I think there are lessons to learn for those who would put on BPM-focused events, and the biggest one is:

It’s about the audience, not about the organizer.

For more information from bpmCamp, follow this link to our blog coverage of the bpmCamp event. The element that I think is most crucial is the impromptu discussion that can happen in a more intimate setting. Questions don’t wait for a microphone or a moderator – the hand goes up or the question is proposed and people can jump in and contribute. I was really pleased with how this dynamic worked at bpmCamp and I hope we can reproduce this at other events. I think 2010 will be a better year for conferences, but organizers need to keep in mind how to make these gatherings *more* valuable for attendees or they’re going to lose their attention next time.

BP3 Makes the Who’s Who in BPM Services

Scott Francis — Wed, 06 Jan 2010 05:00:24 +0000

Gartner Group’s Michele Cantara just published its list of “Who’s Who” in BPM Consulting and System Integration on December 14th, 2009. 17 Companies are covered, and BP3 is on the list. Michele gives an overview of the BPM Services landscape, and rightly points out:

While many consultants and system integrators offer some form of business consulting or process optimization services, they may not have the capabilities appropriate for business process management. This report profiles the BPM consulting capabilities of 17 external service providers. – from the abstract

The price is $995 for the report by itself, but if you have a Gartner subscription you may have ready access to it. BPM consulting is defined as a special case of Business Operations Improvement (BOI) consulting, which is process improvement tied to downstream technology change. Gartner plots the vendors on the “Gartner Consulting Continuum”, and then provides a synopsis of each vendor, including BP3.

It’s an honor to be included in the list, and to be able to get the word out about what we’re up to – and to get heard above the noise is even more gratifying. It’s a small world in this particular space – we know some of the other companies on and off of this list, and we’ve had opportunity to work together to deliver solutions for customers. We just don’t believe that this is a zero-sum game, because successful BPM projects are growing the pie faster than any one service provider can accommodate, and because it takes a variety of skills to make these projects successful.

While Gartner points out that our size might limit our ability to handle large scale BPM and transformation initiatives, it turns out we’re in the middle of just such an initiative right now – leading a joint team of BP3, Lombardi/IBM, TCS, and customer personnel, more than 150 people in all. We like to think we have impact larger than our size would indicate: the point is not so much whether all arms and legs are provided by BP3 (which wouldn’t make sense in almost any case as you want to have a variety of specialists and disciplines) -the point is where the leadership and experience base is coming from.

That leadership and experience is where we can help, and it is more specific to our value proposition, whether you’re deploying Teamworks or doing an assessment of your processes and opportunities for the first time. We’re going to continue building the most experienced, highly skilled BPM team in the business, and stay focused on our core value proposition. Stay tuned!

Jim Sinur’s take on BPM in China

Scott Francis — Thu, 03 Dec 2009 16:28:31 +0000

Jim Sinur has his usual pro vs. con argument with himself on the issue of BPM in China.

The anti-BPM argument: lots of cheap labor, 300k+ engineers turned out every year -so why invest in BPM when we can throw bodies at the problem.

The pro-BPM argument (presumably Jim’s take):

While I value lower labor costs, I think the battle is producing higher gross domestic product (GDP) with less hours per GDP dollar. Eventually Chinas cost have to go up. It’s already happening in India. Don’t throw out BPM; throw out the programmers !!! It’s probably different in the west where the labor costs are higher.

Actually I think this is a tension that takes care of itself. China (more accurately, firms within China) will invest in BPM when they feel the pressure to do so, and likely not often before that point. That pressure might be higher labor costs, higher quality standards (not all quality improvements can be fixed by more manpower), or increasing pace of change – the same kind of pressures that apply here. But I don’t think, at this point, that China’s goal should be higher GDP with less hours of labor – that is a byproduct of other good data, not a goal in-and-of itself.

For now, labor costs are not pressuring China to explore BPM, perhaps. But that picture is likely to change as the economy grows in China at a rapid clip. But BPM is a “pull” not a “push” sale at this point – the customer has to realize they have the need before you are likely to sell them on the virtues of BPM as the way to satisfy that need.

Lombardi Events in the fall of 2009

Scott Francis — Mon, 23 Nov 2009 18:31:35 +0000

There was a post over on Lombardi’s “Process People” blog referencing all the events they’ve attended in the Fall of 2009, from Gartner BPM Summit to Forrester’s BTF to the Gartner ITxpo. Event schedules have wound down for 2009… but its a great time to start planning to attend bpmCamp on January 28-29, 2010!

Set the Date: A #BPM Unconference #bpmCamp

Scott Francis — Tue, 10 Nov 2009 13:10:11 +0000

Background: BPM Conferences Are Good…
Conferences are a great way for colleagues and peers to network, share best practices, and re-energize and re-motivate their efforts. In particular we’ve enjoyed participating and presenting at Lombardi’s Driven conferences in the past, and at bp3 we’ve attended Lombardi Driven, Appian’s conference, OMG’s Thinktank, Gartner BPM, and Forrester BPM conferences (when we weren’t too busy with customers). Conferences have some of the value of an off-site meeting within the company: recharging the batteries and motivating action. But they also provide a chance to be exposed to much more diverse points of view, to out-of-the-box thinking, to new tricks of the trade, and to new market dynamics. In smaller conferences, or small breakout sessions, real discussions break out that can really be illuminating (OMG’s Round Table format is a well-known example of formalizing this kind of small-discussion format, and it led to the six barriers to BPM Adoption at a very humorous and educational round table that I was fortunate to attend).

…but Missing the Mark.
There are just a couple of problems. First, conferences run by Analyst firms and Conference organizers are often too expensive (especially with today’s budgets). Second, vendor conferences are too focused on the sponsoring vendor’s messaging, and often neglect the real needs of attendees. Attendees to both types of conferences get value, but I often hear them expressing an interest in getting into more detail – moving past concept to tactics. Moving past platitudes to showing real solutions.

Its our belief that it is just too hard to get into the specifics and details in a multi-vendor conference. Even with respect to project methodology, the *right* approach to a project has to take into account the realities of the technology being used. If you’re using a BPM tool that doesn’t provide rapid UI prototyping, you’ll need a different approach to your project than someone using a BPM tool that does provide rapid UI prototyping. And that’s just one trivial example. When we get down to sharing technical best practices, going cross-vendor just doesn’t make much sense- BPM execution level detail simply isn’t that portable.

…So What’s the Answer?
If we put together a conference that is focused on what attendees want to talk about, we’ll get more value for the dollar. If we aren’t looking to clear a profit on the event, we can lower the investment barrier required to attend. If we focus on a single vendor, we can focus all the way down to shared source code if it has value. To that end, we’re going to borrow from concepts pioneered by unconferences and barCamps, leveraging advice from folks who put on the SXSWi barcamp in the past.

With preamble aside, I’m very happy to announce what I believe to be a first: a BPM unconference for BPM practitioners of a single product suite. We’re calling it bpmCamp.

This first event is focused on users of Lombardi‘s Teamworks or Blueprint products. We’re focusing on this community because it is the set of products and practitioner community that we have the deepest connections into, and because we want the event to be a single BPM product event for the reasons stated above.

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 first one: January 28-29, 2010. Mark your calendars.

We hope to host additional bpmCamp events in the future, but this is the inaugural event, and it should be special. Please watch this blog as we’ll put up an F.A.Q. as soon as tomorrow with more details.

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

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

Following Gartner’s #BPM Conference #GartnerBPM

Scott Francis — Tue, 06 Oct 2009 03:49:44 +0000

Unfortunately we at BP3 couldn’t attend Gartner’s conference in Orlando this fall – we’re all busy helping customers with their BPM initiatives this year and couldn’t break free for it. No doubt there are many BPM practitioners in the same situation. This page is dedicated to you.

I’ll do my best to harvest good blog posts and twitter links that are relevant to the conference – but please feel free to add your own in the comments section below (no registration required).

First, Sandy Kemsley is the undisputed champ of covering BPM conferences – as previously demonstrated by her attendance at just about every conference I can think of. For the full coverage from Sandy’s blog, this link should help. I’ll also call out some individual articles.

Keynote coverage by Sandy. BPM remains at the center of focus for many companies, as a way to manage growth or create efficiencies with limited or flat budgets. An increase in interest in the “unstructured” process space. A list of must-haves for your software suite.
Patterns presented by Benoit Lheureux and scribed by Sandy.
Interesting session on the benefits of process tools and which ones to use.
Elise Olding and Carol Rozwell’s session on the cost of unstructured processes (thx to Sandy). I think the real takeaway from this one is that the TRUE cost of unstructured processes are all the elements within those processes that ought to be structured or streamlined out – and then what remains are those well-defined parts of the process that really can’t be put in a box.
A Pega customer (JPM) gives a case study about Centers of Excellence (again, thx Sandy!)
BPM Optimization and Simulation (captured by James Taylor). Jim Sinur emphasizes using simulation and optimization to think outside the box, but in a safe environment (sandbox?).
Bare essentials of making rules work (James Taylor), a session by Jim Sinur and Dave McCoy. Good post and I agree with his assessment on not focusing on “forward and backward chaining” and the like – its a bit like focusing on what kind of fuel injection your car has, rather than just wanting to know if it will be reliable and get you from zero to 60 in some reasonable time-frame.

Of course, check out the twitter stream if you want to see updates in 140 characters or less.

So what did I miss? Any other coverage from day 1? I’ll add some Day 2 links here tomorrow.

UPDATE FROM DAY 2:

Almost every link I saw in the twitter feed today was referencing Sandy or James Taylor, so here are they’re blog posts that captured their thoughts on the sessions they were able to attend. Not as good as being there, but almost! Thanks for sharing you two -

JT’s notes from Jim Sinur’s “Dynamic BPM and Agility” session. Deeper coverage of themes that Jim has covered in his blog. Sandy’s take here.
JT’s notes from Nancy Pearson’s “Business Agility Now!” session (about IBM’s initiative of that name). I guess there are some corporations that might look to IBM for advice about how to become more Agile, but it isn’t the image of IBM I have in my mind. Lots of marketing dollars and real project results are going to be required to change that impression for most folks (or at least, anyone who has had to install Websphere before). Amazingly, they’ve announced “Version 7″ – it seems 7 is the new popular version number in BPMS suites.
Sandy’s notes from JT’s presentation on Advanced Decisioning. A choice quote that I couldn’t agree more with: “Simpler: If you build all of your rules and decisioning logic within your processes – essentially turning your process map into a decision tree – then your processes will very quickly become completely unreadable. Separating decisions from the process map, allowing them to become the driver for the process or available at specific points within the process, makes the process itself simpler.” Good summation.
Sandy’s notes from “The five dysfunctions of a team“. This is a great one to read – and note the emphasis on low turnover, and “health” of the team. And much of a successful team leads back to the qualities and behaviors of the leader. Leadership is essential to successful BPM – and I think anyone deploying BPM solutions should think this through.
Sandy’s notes from the Fujitsu process discovery case study, using an automated process to “discover” a process, rather than manually defining it.
Sandy’s notes on social networks and BPM, clearly something of interest to Sandy and this is one of her best-covered sessions.

Time Boxing – Yes You Can

Scott Francis — Wed, 15 Jul 2009 19:34:06 +0000

Jim Sinur wonders allowed whether you can Time Box BPM efforts effectively… and concludes that in some cases you can, in some cases you can’t. In favor of the “yes” argument:

Benefits flow early and the project sponsors look like heroes. Success breeds success and a BPM program can take off early. Anybody want to say “no” to instant savings?

Indeed, who would want to do that!? And then Jim puts up another strawman for the “No” argument:

What sometimes happens when this approach is taken is that sooner or later a project that implemented benefits may have to give them back to help the overall process. [...]

Not only might it knock out strategic benefits, the conversion costs could wipe out a period of the savings. Why make false starts when you can do it right once?

Well, quite frankly, you can’t do it right once. That is the false choice in the comparison. IF you could do it right once, this would be a valid decision tree – but since you CAN’T do it right once (with any reasonable probability), this point doesn’t hold much water for me.

I don’t believe this is a six-on-one-hand, half-a-dozen-on-the-other issue. Time boxing works – and specifically it works more often than a big-bang deployment. The point is that since we can’t get a software release right in just one release, the goal is to approach the right answer increasingly accurately across a set of smaller, less expensive releases rather than one big release.

Yes, there is the caveat that you must keep corporate objectives in mind, and that in a future time box, some of the gains in one area may slip in order to achieve a bigger overall gain. But in practice I have experienced that kind of “back-sliding” as a pretty unusual circumstance.

When giving back benefits did happen, it was a classic case of “squeezing the balloon” – where one group with relatively inexpensive staff optimized their process around reducing hard costs (measurable as headcount). They neglected that their optimization created additional work for other parts of the organization, where the staff was actually more expensive – and therefore, they increased overall cost to the organization instead of reducing it. But the increase of cost can be hidden as soft cost – a slightly decreased productivity by a large number of people is difficult to notice via anecdotal or sampling data.

Time boxing is key for creating a pattern of delivering, of being accountable, of having a delivery process that has integrity. The alternative has a much higher probability of failure. In this blog, we typically refer to “time boxing” as “Iterative Development” and time boxes as “Iterations”. But both terms are valid taxonomy. They’re also similar to concepts in the Customer Development process (generally popularized by folks like Steve Blank and Eric Ries among others).