I’m now onto my next challenge…effective Feb. 1 I have joined the Program and Portfolio Management team. They are a great group and I’m looking forward to expanding my research into this area. I will be taking the organizational change research with me and also continue to work on the intersection between the PMO and BPM – what Donna Fitzgerald has defined as the enterprise PMO. (And hot news off the press: we are continuing to see the convergence of the PMO, BPM and organizational change.)

I’m looking forward to keeping connected to those of you with whom I’ve worked with while on the BPM team and look forward to new connections in the PPM world.

Overview

The land of BPM is awash in opportunities but also speckled with landmines. This year’s predictions offer some of both. Starting with the landmines, organizational politics is emerging as a challenge and will continue to haunt BPI leaders Those not realizing the force of this challenge will face the stalling or demise of their BPM program, and we anticipate that will be one-third of the organizations today. The good news is that the opportunities offer hope to deal with this challenge and have a direct and positive impact. The enterprise program management office (EPMO) ties together people, technology and process enabling a better, more comprehensive reading on political challenges, and gamification offers engagement and motivation techniques to rally opposing forces to work toward collaborative goals. Shadow processes diminish the value of BPM, and creating visibility offers opportunities to coordinate work across organizational boundaries. The bad news is that politics will be a challenge that some will not overcome, but the good news is that this year’s predictions point to a path that will lead to BPM success.

Predicts

• Through 2016, organizational politics will prevent at least one-third of BPM efforts from moving beyond one-off projects to enterprisewide adoption. (John Dixon, Elise Olding)
• By 2015, 25% of all redesigned processes will include one or more of the engagement practices known as “gamification.” (Elise Olding, Brian Burke)
• Driven by the need to innovate, by 2016, one-third of enterprise-level BPI groups will combine with the Program Management Office (PMO) to form the EPMO. (Elise Olding, Donna Fitzgerald)
• By 2016, 20% of “shadow business processes” will be supported by BPM cloud platforms. (Michele Cantara)

Thoughts?

Social media is really about engaging communities in new ways to achieve otherwise impossible business value. It is about strategy. It is about thriving, surviving or disappearing in a new age of human behaviors fueled by mass collaboration.

In this Gartner Twitter Chat, we’ll explore the critical trends that are upending social programs as business get social. Key topics will include:

1. What makes social media so powerful?
2. How can organizations take a strategic approach to social media?
3. How can social media transform how you do business?
4. How do you measure the value of social media?
5. What are the major best and poor practices that mean the difference between success and failure?

The Gartner Twitter Chat will take place October 4, at 3 ET (noon PT for me!) on Twitter with Anthony Bradley, Carol Rozwell, and Elise Olding. Please join us on Twitter using #GartnerChat. Follow our hosts: @BradleyAnthonyJ, @CRozwell, @EliseOlding and @Gartner_inc

I’m looking forward to connecting with you!

By fully completing this survey you will be provided a special $300 discount code to attend the Gartner Business Process Management Summit in Baltimore, Maryland, April 25-27, 2012. In addition, you will automatically be eligible to win two free passes, one for you and one for a colleague.

Some interesting results so far: 

Which of the following BUSINESS PRIORITIES are driving your investments in and development of Business Process Management? Please select all that apply.
         75% answered “cost savings”

What are the biggest obstacles preventing you from improving processes? Please select all that apply.
         56% answered “lack of resources”

The survey will guide us to develop content that is relevant to attendees. Topics trending are: organizational change management, resource development, achieving results, business process modeling and simulation/optimization.

Please give us your thoughts and we will use this input to develop the agenda.

My first immersion into enterprise-wide process improvement was at Levi’s in the 90’s. I attended one of the first course’s taught by Dr. Michael Hammer and poured over his book “Reeingineering the Corporation.”  His messages resonated with “blow it up” and “start with a blank sheet of paper.” We spent time visiting other companies, gaining insights from customers and creating a vision for how we could work in the future. Then we did the heavy lifting of figuring how to get from here to there.

Unfortunately this style of work became associated with downsizing. It also suffered from trying to take on too much all at once (changing everything) and ignoring the impacts to people in the organization (change management). But most unfortunately, we also lost the essential message – to think differently, to challenge the status quo – to strive for something completely different.  We need to bring this back – soon!

A friend (an enlightened BPM sage) said to me a few days ago, “the only place automation should come before discovery is in the dictionary.”  So true!  We have taken a detour down the BPM tinkering path – with benefits of increasing productivity and delivering an ROI predominantly achieved by automating manual processes. 

They are certainly great examples of breakthrough thinking – my favorite is BAA and the rethinking of airport capacity/gate handling to increase retail sales, using Pegasystems. These seem to be the exception lost is  a sea of workflow projects. At some point we will exhaust these incremental opportunities – let’s keep BPM at the forefront and top of business executives minds – let’s continue to reinvent, rethink and radically redesign. 

Send me your radical redesign successes.

Follow on Twitter: EliseOlding

There was a great turnout 209 attendees – more than expected.  We also had a nice group of vendors and service providers. The attendees represented 11 countries and covered the full spectrum of practitioner levels.

Dr. Michael Rosemann from the Queensland University of Technology was our keynote speaker.  He also conducted a workshop on process innovation. Some of the highlights of his sessions:

In the workshop Dr Rosemann discussed 16 techniques to consider when designing the future state. There is no technology that facilitates break-through thinking when doing the to-be design.   Some were obvious ones that we all consider – stop doing things or reorder activities. Some required rethinking a process by using models from other types of business.  As an example we looked at redesigning a visit to the top of the Empire State Building. The as-is process from a customer experience might look like this:

Wait in Line  ->   Buy Ticket   ->    Wait in Line for Elevator   ->   Enjoy View   ->   Leave

Looking at the as-is the obvious changes were suggested, such as buy the ticket on the elevator to remove the customer wait times.  The interesting concepts were to think about how other business models work and could be adapted here – for instance, consider a taxi or parking lot model where  customers pay based on the time they use. Applying that to this example might yield an approach where customers would pay based on how much time they spent enjoying the view. In this scenario, they would go to the top – removing the wait times, enjoy the view and pay on their way out while at the top.  (Realize this is for example purposes and we weren’t looking at capacities or other risk issues.)

Another example was a customer loyalty card at a grocery store, contrasted with an airline frequent flyer program. In general, the card at the grocer gets you promotional coupons and price reductions but consider rewarding elite shoppers with services such as personal shopping service, expedited checkout and rewards that are on par with the airline program and you may come up with a process that provides a (perhaps fleeting) competitive advantage.  Great opportunities here.   

Thinking your industry or organization is unique could possibly bias you from considering proven ideas from other sectors. “My organization is unique” resonated strongly in Australia – just like the rest of the world!  See my previous blog.

My favorite example of rethinking a process from Dr Rosemann was creating a mobile process for buying groceries while in the subway. (Click here for Tesco Homeplus video) Along the wall is a store shelf displaying products – exactly like in the store. A customer points their mobile device at the desired product’s QR code and completes the purchase.  When they get home, the groceries are delivered. (The objective achieved is “Change waiting time to shopping time.”) 

Hopefully some of these examples will inspire us to quit tweaking processes and really get closer to process innovation.  (If I could start a rant, it would be now…STOP THE TWEAKING…but more on that later!)

It was a great first conference and I enjoyed meeting a lot of the attendees. From a social media perspective, this was not really a Twitter crowd, with most of the tweets coming from vendors and Gartner analysts. If you want to review the Twitter stream check out #gartnerbpm.

• “We are a government organization with long-time employees.”
• “We are a privately owned company with creativity at our core.”
• “We are a medium-sized business with US-only employees and growing rapidly.”
• “We are a large global manufacturing firm that outsources all our back office functions and fosters innovation locally.”
• “We are a non-profit organization operating in 33 countries with a passion for helping others.”

What follows is an explanation of why practices from other organizations are not of interest and won’t work in this instance. This approach is risky, as generally organizations aren’t very good at organizational change and communication to begin with. Let’s look at this from another angle. Imagine if the medical profession held these same beliefs. A visit to a doctor could go something like this:

      Patient: “I am having problems with my left knee. When I run I feel a pain on the outside. Is there something that I can do to stop the pain?”    

      Doctor:  “Well you do realize that you are a 38 year-old female, who runs, is a project manager and lives in Boulder, Colorado at a high altitude. In addition, no two human bodies are put together exactly the same, which makes it hard for me to use examples of others with knee pain to diagnose what is wrong with your knee.”

This would be the last time you visit this doctor! Many organizations hold onto the belief that they are unique, missing the opportunities to learn from leading practices of others.  It is important to understand the nuances of each culture and use these to guide the development of the organizational change plan that leverages a litany of great techniques and pitfalls from other enterprises. Successful organization change requires both. I believe in using frameworks that are culturally sensitive while leveraging leading practices in successful organizational change. Don’t handicap your change efforts from the start – understand the body of available techniques and leverage those that will resonate with your culture.

Getting over the fact your organization is unique and can’t learn from others is likely your first organizational change challenge!

The Common Thread

Both groups of attendees struggled with organizational change.  During my presentation at the EA summit I asked the question to the audience attending my session on BPM: The Catalyst to Deliver Outcomes – “How many of you feel you are doing a good job with organizational change?” In the audience of more than 60, not one hand went up! This tweet says it all: “@chrisoneoa: Crickets & no hands when @eliseolding asked if anyone did Organizational Change and Communication well. Hoot!”  EAs, you have some work to do.

Change is Hard, But it’s Harder with NO RESOURCES!

PPM attendees understand the value of change. They do find mastering the discipline a big mountain to climb, but my conversations with them revealed they struggle mostly with getting support for the change efforts. No resources = No change! Their challenges focused on how to communicate the value of this work to get resources.  It was mentioned many times, when the budget gets cut, organizational change and communication is the first thing to go.

How Can BPM Help?

This was the topic of my presentations at both conferences.  The changes to the business process are the result of PPM work and are guided by the strategies of EA.  BPM can be the vehicle to get from strategy to results. BPM is the connection to the business. 

My Challenge to You

Let’s figure out how to work together from soup to nuts. EA + PPM + BPM = results. That’s change we can live with. What do you think?

This was followed by an entertaining and mind-expanding external keynote by Gabe Zichermann on gamification. He presented some interesting case study examples. Zichermann states that “engagement is core metric of next decade” and includes: recency, frequency, duration, virality and ratings.  The most “fun” quote from Gabe was “gamification is the new black.” (Personally I would have been more excited about pink…)

A case study presented by David Cotterill, Head of Innovation at the UK Department for Work and Pensions, detailed how they used gamification techniques in an idea generation application. Cotterill asked the audience how many would introduce gamification into future applications and 25% to 30% of the audience said they would. Cotterill sees gamification as a method to drive social and collaborative behaviors. He stated that those who are influencers in the organization can now tap into and engage the larger group to promote organizational change. Cotterill advises “build the culture first, worry about the process later.” This means that you need to focus on developing collaborative and team behaviors which are often not a part of the cultural norms. (Back to the chicken and the egg – see my prior blog post here.)

I presented a session on how EA and BPM can work together.  Approximately 50% of the session attendees were responsible for leading BPM programs. I found this a surprising but welcome trend. BPM is the way for EA to tap into delivering value and the critical enabler to Burton’s challenge above. By connecting EA strategy to BPM implementation a clear connection can be made to the measurable value delivered by the BPM project. The key is to connect the EA enterprise context (EC) which defines the anchor model or value chain to the process hierarchy used by BPM. This provides the traceability for BPM project results back to the EA strategies.

It was a great two days and the attendees left with a lot of valuable ideas to take back with them.

Follow me on twitter @eliseolding

As we shared at the conference “by 2015, the ability to embrace and master continuous change will define competitive advantage.” I believe that there is a strong connection between how brittle processes are and how inflexible (or change-averse) the culture is. Focusing process efforts on goals such as efficiency and standardization tend to reinforce more rigidity in the organization’s culture. There is little room for improvisation and no tolerance for failure. Focusing on visibility, accountability and adaptability (our tenets of BPM), enable organizational learning and can move the dial towards a more adaptable, resilient culture – what we call “organizational liquidity.”

Some of the ways ways of making processes less brittle include:

Think outside-in rather than the tradition inside out view of our processes. Our organizations have been designed to maximize efficiency from an internal view. The whole process reference model needs to get turned on its head to represent an outside in view. This model embraces responsiveness and drives accountabilty into the organization. I believe that we will see that evolving over the next five years.

Think about the outcome of the work and not so much about how it gets done. A baseball pitcher doesn’t throw one type of ball. He/she assesses the game situation, who is up to bat and what their capabilities are. The throw is an outcome. Sure all the mechanics and talent are there, but each throw is made up of repackaging individual steps to reach that outcome. We will need to manage process risks and costs, but must also look to engage the knowledge, expertise and passion that can be locked up in process participants heads. Variability is not the enemy if you are trying to achieve process effectiveness.

Think about how to embed collaboration and social interaction into the work that happens inside your enterprise. Social BPM techniques enable work to happen more naturally and lets processes to mirror the way people work. When people work together they create and creativity is fluid. We are social animals and the sum of the parts add up to more than the whole.

It’s always back to the chicken and the egg. Does a great culture drive better processes or do good processes enable a great culture? I’m going to put a stake in the ground that it starts with process and as BPM practitioners we can make a difference.

What are your thoughts? Are these statement true?

• Brittle processes = brittle culture
• Socially enabled, changeable, adaptive, transparent processes = socially enabled, changeable, adaptive, transparent culture