Jim Sinur

Quite often process managers find them selves in situations where they have to deal with changing conditions that may require optimizing resources across a business process. For instance a manager might face more cases than expected that require more senior people to deal with them in a narrow time window.. This means that the process manager has to balance timing and cost goals quickly or lose the opportunities offered by the moment. This is a difficult dilemma, hence the tightrope analogy.

Let’s say your marketing and sales folks design some enticing cost savings opportunities for potential new customers. Even in down times, the right offers can motivate potential customers. Let’s say that these new prospects generally have deeper pockets and require more attention. This puts a premium on highly skilled individuals. Processes that have the ability to tap into the skill levels of the individuals supporting the process will allow managers to correctly direct these cases. Skills sensitive processes can schedule these scarce resources around the anticipated and unanticipated peaks of process activity enabling success. Skills sensitive processes can be leveraged in a number of ways. I’ve identified three possible uses so far:

Skills Selection:

Some folks would call this skills based routing. This is where the process has enough intelligence to select the route of a case to the properly skilled resources. Quite often the process employs a separate work list to handle these cases. It can work in a “push mode” where the most difficult cases are given to the most qualified resources. It can also work in a “pull mode” where a group of highly skilled and motivated folks can pull in cases that need attention.

Skills Stretching:

In the case where the highly skilled people can’t keep with the demand, the processes can identify the next most likely skilled resources. This may include people that have been trained, but never have supported complicated and/or difficult cases. Processes can also identify workers with high potential “High pots” and automatically route the intense cases.

Skills Scheduling:

One emerging approach is to link resource optimization technologies with BPM. These technologies keep track of the calendars of the individual workers and know when they are available thus making the resource pool accurate to the second. Managers can even simulate with live data to train the resource optimization efforts.

I’m sure there are more resource skill based opportunities and look forward to hearing from you.