Stanford has offered to reduce the regular registration price to the early bird price- $100 for a two-day BPM Conference on the beautiful Stanford campus. Can’t ask for a better bargain.

Still a few days left to register…

Travel logistics have been updated, click here for details.  The short version:  we’ve secured a discount to the Stanford Guest House, which has the advantage of being on shuttle routes and being on campus… and being highly affordable.  But there are lots of other options in the area as well.

We’ve also posted some directions from the airports, and recommendations on trains and shuttle routes.

See you at bpmCamp!

Registration for bpmCamp is now open.

Please Register Here.  All registrations are subject to approval to make sure that we fill our limited space with Lombardi practitioners first.  If you’re a partner or employee of Lombardi, rather than a customer-practitioner, please drop us an email (email address can be found on the bpmCamp wiki) to discuss attending and how you can help.

We’re pleased to announce the pricing for bpmCamp will be $100 for early-bird registration, and $150 after that.

Early Bird registration ($100) ends January 1, 2010.

Regular Registration ($150) closes January 21, 2010.

bpmCamp 2010 @ Stanford will get started on January 28, 2010.

Also, thanks to a tip from Sandy Kemsley, the bpmCamp wiki is now easier than ever to view – just go to http://www.bpmcamp.org/wiki/ .  Join the Google Group for bpmCamp to get editing privileges – there’s a link on the left-hand-side of the wiki that makes this easy to do, or drop us an email and I can invite you directly.

We’re looking forward to seeing everyone at bpmCamp in January!  57 days and counting.  Registration site will go up as soon as tomorrow.  More lodging and transportation logistics are coming this week as well.

Following up on yesterday’s announcement of bpmCamp, here are the most crucial details for bpmCamp, to answer the most obvious questions you might be asking.  There are many more details to come, and all of this information will find its way into a bpmCamp landing page soon enough.

When is bpmCamp?

We’ve said it before, but it bears repeating.  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. 

Where is the First bpmCamp? Who is the host?
Having the right host and location for any activity is crucial.  And having the right setting can really frame an event and set a backdrop for a good collaborative and rejuvenating experience.  I think that we have scored on both counts with our hosts for the inaugural bpmCamp.

I’m very proud to announce our host for bpmCamp:  Stanford University -  specifically, the Stanford SeRA BPM team. I’ve previously blogged about their potential contributions to the BPM community.  We share a vision of a more collaborative and communicative practitioner community and this is our collective attempt to initiate something that can really improve all of our efforts with BPM.

Lee and his boss Minh Nguyen are graciously donating the use of a beautiful conference setting for this event,* including A/V and wireless Internet.  We’ll send out exact location details as we get closer to the event, but our tentative location includes a fully equipped room and two fully-equipped breakout rooms.  The outdoor space surrounding is beautiful, and Stanford isn’t the kind of place that gets snow in January.  We couldn’t be happier about the location, and we couldn’t be happier about the spirit of collaboration and community our hosts and location will help foster for this event.

We’ll follow up with information about transportation logistics, hotel options, and other sundry details as we get closer to the event date, but in plenty of time to make plans with that information. Stanford has excellent transportation and lodging facilities surrounding it, so we’ll have some top notch options available to us.

*The free space is limited, however, and if we outgrow it based on interest, we’ll have to either limit attendance or explore other options on campus that will cost a bit more. Also, bpmCamp is not *sponsored* by Stanford – but Stanford is hosting the event, donating use of facilities, and Stanford BPM community members will be full participants in the event – Stanford is not endorsing the products or services of any of the sponsors or attendees of bpmCamp.

Where is the Landing Page?
The landing page for bpmCamp will be coming soon.  We’ll send out pointers to it when it is up.  In the meantime, you can keep up with announcements by following the RSS feed for the bp3 blog, or by bookmarking posts tagged with bpmCamp.

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 and Blueprint) who participate in deployments to attend, and we’re extending an invitation to 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.  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 to contact us:
The best way is via the bpmCamp email address:

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.

How Much Does it Cost to Attend?
We do expect to charge an attendance fee, which I believe is a departure from typical unconference protocol, but we’re doing so for a couple of reasons.  First, we have limited space, and we want to make sure attendees are serious about coming.  Second, if we need to go to a larger back-up space, that may require additional expenses (which attendance fees would defray).  We have a nominal fee in mind – primarily to cover catering meals- and are in the process of proving out the budget.  As soon as that process is complete, we’ll update with pricing information.  I don’t want to publish tentative numbers, but if you need to know ballpark just drop us a line and I’ll tell you privately what our working numbers are.

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??)
• <fill in the blank!>

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

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

Why focus on a single vendor? Why not another BPM product? Is this a Lombardi-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 products 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.

(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. )

Turns out, the folks at Stanford are doing BPM.  Last week I had the good fortune to visit my Alma Mater (Stanford).  I had heard through the grapevine that Stanford was embarking on BPM, so I took advantage of the excellent mass transit in the Bay Area (Austin, are you listening?) and went to visit Lee Merrick at Stanford. Lee is in the Office of Research Administration and he’s the driving force behind BPM at Stanford.  Lee was gracious enough to let me track him down in his office at Terman Engineering, where we spent a couple hours talking BPM strategy, tactics, and vision.

Quoting from Stanford’s SeRA project page on vision and purpose:

SeRA Vision and Purpose

• Major administrative systems overseeing research will operate cohesively
• Investigators and staff will be able to effectively manage their sponsored projects from conception through closeout
• Administrative burden will be significantly reduced for investigators, departmental staff, and central offices
• Streamline research administration processes to minimize inefficiencies and eliminate duplication
• Improve turnaround time, reduce audit risk, collect better data

SeRA will be a system of inter-connected modules, pulling data from existing sources or prior modules to eliminate points of duplicate entry wherever possible.  The system will be developed by critically looking at current business processes to eliminate non-value-added steps and provide full process transparency for faculty and departments.  The system will be designed with significant input from stakeholders and subject matter experts involved in research administration.

In short, Lee and his team are attempting to revolutionize the way Stanford manages research in order to make research more efficient and effective.

With Lee’s permission, I wanted to share some of the takeaways from our discussion.

1. The problems driving corporations to BPM are not unique to corporate entities - academic institutions are also being pressured to reduce expense, waste, and inefficient use of talented PhD’s. Stanford’s efforts are focused on freeing up time for research while providing higher quality transparency to both the university and the federal government.
2. The processes Stanford seeks to address don’t fall into the sweet spot of any commercially available shrink wrap software packages.  BPM allows Stanford to address a space that doesn’t fit these packaged software offerings well.
3. The processes Stanford seeks to address require agility. Lee’s team can’t predict how their processes will change, because much of the process change is driven by external factors (e.g. The Federal Government).  Stanford needs to be prepared for both the changes they are planning, and the changes they haven’t anticipated yet (Jim Sinur would call this Scenario Planning).
4. Focus on producing material, hands-on results in the bake-off. In Stanford’s BPM bake-off, they really focused on how much of their solution could be built by their team in a finite period of time. They evaluated two pure plays and a stack vendor, and actually building a solution in the BPM suite was what really differentiated the products to the SeRa team.
5. This isn’t a 3 month project, this is a significant investment with a serious team. Lee and his team on the SeRa (Stanford Engineering Research Administration) project are embarking on a 3 year effort, with a staff of more than 10 people focused on this project.  That’s a significant commitment against the backdrop of budget cuts going on at Stanford at the moment (recently Stanford reporting canceling or postponing over $1B in construction projects, for example).

Stanford is going to be a great contributor to the BPM community, and more specifically to the Lombardi community.  They have an interest in sharing best practices, design patterns, and even software solutions to common problems.  I fully expect that Lee and his team are interested in bilateral or multi-lateral sharing. I think that their long-term perspective will help counterbalance some of the very tactical focus on quarterly efforts in many corporate solutions.

I left our meeting with renewed optimism for BPM, Lee has a certitude and optimism that makes you believe he and his team are going to deliver.  And they have the ambition to really tackle the hard problems and build good solutions around them.  I think we’re going to learn a lot from these guys in the next 3 years.

I took the train ride back to San Francisco to meet my wife for dinner, and on the way back I started thinking about opportunities to collaborate in the Lombardi community.  More to come on that thought process in another post.  Thanks to Stanford and to Lee Merrick for taking time out to share their BPM story, I hope we have opportunities to collaborate in the near future – on best practices, methods, and/or technical solutions.