Sourcing Shangri-La

Why Is BPM Delivering So Little?

Gary Comerford has posted a thoughtful and widely circulated piece on his Process Cafe blog about The State of BPM.

It makes dismal reading. After looking at the competing definitions of BPM, and the high rate of BPM project failures, he concludes: 'Is it any wonder BPM is in such a state?'

So why is BPM delivering so little? 

Actually it's not. From where I sit, every day BPM is demonstrating its value as the key to successful business transformation:

In SAP implementations, for instance.  And Finance Transformation. And Supply Chain.  And Outsourcing and Shared Services. And in boosting knowledge worker Productivity.   

BPM has gotten hijacked by vendors many times over the past decade and forced to perform some unnatural acts. But everything I see points to a return to its roots.

There's an emerging consensus that BPM is an enabler for operational excellence and continuous improvement. Which means, as a happy consequence, that the long separation between BPM and the mainstream Lean and Six Sigma practitioners is coming to an end.  

Process is the language, and the BPM platform is the essential enabler, for the effective collaboration that underpins operational excellence and continuous improvement. 

It's a framework for collaboration that is comprehensive.  How could it be otherwise? It's an enterprise framework. It enables collaboration across the IT-Business Divide, across functional and organizational silos, across the extended enterprise, even pulling in the Risks and Controls teams. And it's not just documents, email and shared folders: it includes the governance features that make it a sustainable framework.

That BPM is finally discovering its true self is good news for everyone.  It provides the framework for collaboration that will make BPMS automation projects bankable in the eyes of the CFO.  It will draw EAs and BAs, and the technical BPA vendors, into the real world and get them walking in step with the business.  It's the key to working together to achieve something. 

Normally at this stage I would issue an appeal to Gary to please step back from the ledge. But I see he's got two more posts to come on The State of BPM ;-).

Related Posts 

21 Feb 2011    Now That's What I Call BPM!

 

19 Jan 2011    Reaching Out To BPM Platform Skeptics

Supply Chain and BPM: Now It Gets Interesting

The virtual enterprise of the future is fast taking shape - and at its heart is a BPM platform. Says McKinsey. Well, as good as.

There's a growing convergence between Supply Chain and BPM thinking. What was once a distant acquaintance is blossoming. 

BPM went through a teenage phase when it was a bit obsessed by automation.  Older and wiser, BPM now focuses on enabling operational excellence and continuous improvement - and, as a consequence, is converging with mainstream Lean and Six Sigma.

BPM thinking now sees process as the language, and the BPM platform as the enabler, for the effective collaboration that underpins operational excellence and continuous improvement. 

Supply Chain had a teenage phase as well when it obsessed about logistics, and wanted to be separate - even changed its name to Value Chain at one stage. But Supply Chain too has matured and its new horizons make BPM look a lot more interesting than before.

McKinsey made the case last month in Building The Supply Chain of The Future that future supply chains will need to be more splintered, flexible and resilient - and that effective collaboration will be more important than ever:

“Making these kinds of moves isn’t easy, of course, since any alterations to a company’s supply chain have far-ranging implications throughout the organization. For starters, such changes require much more cooperation and information sharing across business units than many companies are accustomed to. Indeed, the organizational challenges are so significant that for many companies, a hands-on effort by the CEO and others across the C-suite is needed for success.” 

In a parallel article Is Your Top Team Undermining Your Supply Chain? McKinsey highlights the need for more effective collaboration and concludes:

"Poor collaboration and silo thinking have long thwarted the efforts of companies to get more from their supply chains. In a future characterized by rising complexity and uncertainty, solving this perennial problem will change from a valuable performance enhancer to a competitive necessity."

It's not just McKinsey of course seeing this uptick in the virtualization of the enterprise.  Phil Fersht, CEO of HfS and renowned sourcing industry commentator, speculated yesterday that one of the drivers for KPMG's acquisition of EquaTerra is that KPMG's clients are rapidly 'morphing into global outsourcing operating models'.

Starry-struck lovers have fallen out before so our Romeo and Juliet could yet call it off. But actually we all know this storyline. It's an inevitable union - and their offspring is the virtual enterprise of the future.  

The enterprise of the future will be capable of innovation at pace. It will likely have a slim core with very little in-house; sourcing and supply chains will be fused; process and analytics will be inseparable; the divide between IT and the business will be bridged. And at its heart will be a BPM platform. 

Holistic, intuitive, on every desktop, the real DNA of the business, the BPM platform will be the essential enabler for the effective collaboration which orchestrates change and underpins operational excellence - across the entire extended enterprise.

Related Posts

7 Feb 2011    Productivity, Wellbeing and Process

4 Jan 2011    BPM Truths We Hold Self Evident

8 Dec 2010    Fostering High-Value Collaboration

The Process-Centric Organization

I never met a client who aspired to be process-centric as such. Most are looking for process maturity as a stepping stone to operational excellence.  

Nit-picking aside, there's a dramatic example in the MIT Sloan Management Review this week on the value of becoming a process-centric organization.

It's a case study in a persuasive article on leadership in global organizations: Flat World - Hard Boundaries: How To Lead Across Them.

Butch Peterman, the president of Abrasive Technology Inc., a globally integrated manufacturer of precision grinding and tooling products based in Lewis Center, Ohio, decided that his company should transform itself from a functionally organized manufacturer with strict division of labor to an innovative, customer-focused and process-centered organization — a goal that required people at ATI to change how they define themselves and their company.

Responding with vigor, they tossed out the use of traditional managerial roles and created nontitled roles around core tasks. All employees were assigned a process and thought of as associates fully responsible for managing the work, as well as for continuing to develop themselves and others. Today, the company is team-oriented, coaches have replaced supervisors, and horizontal cross-training and role flexibility is the norm. The organizational benefits? Among others, ATI has reduced product returns, improved the performance of lower-performing plants, and decreased staff turnover rates to near zero.

It's worth noting too what the best leaders are doing, according to the authors: they are striving for ways to enable effective collaboration by spanning the multiple boundaries that inhibit people from working together.

No way can a process management platform replace leadership.  But more and more organizations see it as an essential component in enabling the effective collaboration that good leaders inspire. 

Related Posts

 7 Feb 2011    Productivity, Wellbeing and Process

8 Dec 2011    Fostering High-Value Collaboration

 

Enabling Finance Transformation

CFOs have been striving to reduce costs, inprove service levels and increase agility in Finance operations since Adam was a lad. But we seem to be opening an interesting new chapter in Finance Transformation programs. 

The easy savings have been made; the search now is for incremental and ongoing performance improvements. 

And in this new narrative, there is a character who has, so far, been only in deep background but now comes to the fore: the process management platform.

A Nimbus podcast interview released yesterday - Enabling Finance Transformation at the BBC - provides a great illustration of the value of a process management platform in orchestrating transformational change.

BBC Group Finance is not large - around 330 people - but it has the complexity of most large organizations: shared services, outsourced operations, a rapidly changing systems landscape and evolving business requirements that constantly move the program goalposts.

The BBC's use of Nimbus Control - branded as How2 - has underpinned the program's success, and is set to become even more valuable in the current phase with the integration of KPI metrics, risks and controls with the live Finance processes.

Beyond the BBC, in the Finance function there seems to a new recognition that effective cross-silo collaboration is the bedrock for the design and delivery of transformational change and continuous improvement - and, to achieve that, a fit-for-purpose process management platform is essential.

It's an exciting growth area for us. We are currently involved with clients  around the world - several of them Fortune 100 companies - on Finance Transformation programs.  So watch this space - more case studies and insights from clients and partners to come shortly I hope.

Related Posts

16 Dec 2010    EquaTerra and HfS on F&A Outsourcing

9 Dec 2010    FAO and The Cloud: Managing Transition Risks

15 Nov 2010    The Future of Outsourcing Governance

Now That's What I Call BPM!

Beat this for exec engagement in using process as the language of business transformation. Even better, it's a turn-around where BPM has been the pivot.

This was an $80m SAP project heading for a derailment. The client's SI had configured 'vanilla' SAP without much reference to the business requirements (which had been 'captured' in a Word document).  

So when the SI presented the business with a preview of what its new SAP world would look like, there was panic: the business didn't recognize any of it.

One month later, the client and its SI are using Nimbus Control - delivered as a Cloud service - to describe the end-to-end processes, with Storyboards showing role-based views of typical user activities.  Everyone now speaks the same language.

Now there is shared visibility and understanding: across the client organization, especially between IT and the business, and between the client and its SI. Requirements are rapidly becoming precise. Process improvements are being identified. And the user experience is being transformed so that processes will be integrated with Storyboards, documents, metrics, risks and controls to create a personalized 'intelligent operations manual'. 

The next step is Visualization Workshops to fine tune the design and the SAP configuration requirements.  Then the same Storyboards created for the Visualization Workshops will be used for UAT, training and user support - so there will be no gaps and no overlapping teams re-creating the same thing slightly differently.

But what's really interesting is that both the CEO and and CIO now carry iPads - and not as bling. They use them to pull up the latest versions of the processes and Storyboards in their discussions with the various program stakeholders as they move around the office. 

Nimbus clients such as Carphone Warehouse adopted the iPad early on to support their Lean process excellence people walking the floor.  But hats off to this client: this is the first time that I've come across a CEO and CIO rolling up their sleeves and getting so involved with process in this hands-on way.  

The bottom line is that this client has, in one month, turned an IT-led systems implementation that was heading for disaster into a business-led transformation program that will be enabled by SAP - and with every chance of success. 

Related Posts

19 Jan 2011    Reaching out to BPM Platform Skeptics

18 Jan 2011    Michael Krigsman on IT Project Failure

 

And The Winner Is...Yes, It's The BPMN Awards

A Friday Column

We've all done it. In an industry like ours - scientists calculate that a small town could be warmed all winter if the hot air generated in the world of BPM could be captured -  we've all written something that we later regret.  Gone over the top. Looked back and cringed.

So it's in this spirit of joint culpability that this blog is inaugurating the BPM Nonsense (BPMN) awards.  It's an occasional feature, a time to laugh at ourselves (once we're sure it's not our own purple prose).  And it's from snippets sent in by readers.

In Third place in these inaugural Awards is this gem, forwarded by a reader who spotted it on Appian's website after being invited to attend a webinar featuring Appian's 'extreme ease of use for business users':

"Typical SOA objects such as web services and EJBs can be abstracted into a drag-and-drop configuration, making it easy for business users to understand and incorporate into their process models."

Mmm. Not the business users most of us deal with perhaps.

The award for Second place goes to a BPTrends Discussion on Linkedin that seems particularly inane.  

The discussion - "What is the most popular software used for process discovery and mapping?" - was kicked off, and I'm not making this up, by a VP at SmartDraw Software, vendor of a process discovery and mapping tool.  Most of the seven responses have a commercial ax to grind though it's not necessarily explicit. One of the 'independent' responses is actually from the CEO of a process tool vendor; another is from the author of a 740-page reference guide on a particular tool.

For those of us who feel like they've already wasted too much of our lives looking for intelligent life on Linkedin discussions, this might be the one that finally clicks the Unsubscribe button.

But the weekend beckons and so on to happier things... because the worthy winner of these inaugural BPMNonsense Awards has to be a gushing piece this week from Metastorm on 'the power of crowds in the cloud', an image which many of us might have been struggling to envision anyway, before the writer's enthusiasm finally went beserk:  

"Within our customer base, we have found that our Cloud modeling tool (Metastorm M3) is enabling business people who have not been engaged in enterprise modeling in the past to create, reference, maintain, and share all kinds of models – strategy, rule, organization, process, etc. – with no technology installation and virtually no training. We are seeing spontaneously formed crowds of business people capturing models, sharing them with their colleagues, and then using the resulting models to communicate issues, changes, and recommendations to management, business architects, and even IT."

Oh, to be able to work at Metastorm and see 'spontaneously formed crowds of business people capturing models'.  And to see that this buzz of communication about change includes 'even IT'.  Now there's an idea... 

Keep them coming! We'll have another BPMN Awards ceremony in the summer.

When 'Social' BPM Gets Over-Familiar

'Social' BPM drives collaboration. So it's always good, and more is better - right?

That's the core idea that underlies the rush for 'Social BPM': that maximising communication is what matters. 

Best results will come, it is assumed, when process owners, end users and other stakeholders are communicating all the time, and in whatever format suits them.

But real life is more complex.  'Social' BPM that will drive effective collaboration needs a degree of subtlety.   

'Social' BPM took off with the BlueWorks Live launch in November, incorporating for the first time Facebook-like features and a Twitter feed in a process mapping tool. Others are scrambling to catch up. Metastorm and Tibco just made Social BPM announcements. There's many more in the pipeline.

At the risk of sounding like the old guy in the rocking chair in a Jack Daniels whiskey commercial: at Nimbus we're taking things a little bit more slowly.  Deliberately. We want to get it right.

We've had collaborative features in Nimbus Control for more than a decade. Features to encourage user feedback, to organize change, to analyse impact, to communicate.  Not Facebook or Twitter it's true, but proven and valued collaborative features. So we are not starting from scratch. Our challenge is to understand the ways that will best extend these features [and avoid what will undermine their value]. 

Recent McKinsey research on the impact of information overload on productivity and wellbeing, together with Tom Davenport's call for a radical new approach to meeting the needs of knowledge workers, reinforce the idea that Social BPM needs to be about much more than just maximising communication.

What every enterprise needs is a framework for effective collaboration. As Professor Davenport argues, that calls for structure, and some governance as well.  The optimum communications mix, he notes, will depend upon the degree of interdependence of those involved, and the level of complexity of the work.  So free-for-all or cookie cutter approaches aren't going to find traction, or last for long. 

So Social BPM is much more than Facebook or Twitter-inspired features that allow everyone to see, follow and comment on everything. It's about leveraging the innovations in social media to nurture more effective collaboration.

These are some of the thoughts that have been informing our own product development - and one of the reasons why we were keen to deploy Chatter internally, to learn first hand.

A topical reminder if you know anyone who needs reminding that effective collaboration really matters...

Stephen Elop, the new CEO of Nokia, in a memo to all staff, sets out the enormous challenges facing Nokia as its stands on a burning platform, with flames coming from all sides:

"We fell behind, we missed big trends, we lost time. We thought we were making the right decisions... we now find ourselves years behind. The first iPhone shipped in 2007, and we still don't have a product that is close to their experience. Android came on the scene just over 2 years ago, and this week they took our leadership position in smartphone volumes. Unbelievable."

He concludes his call to action with these words:

"We haven't been delivering innovation fast enough. We're not collaborating internally."

 

Related Posts

7 Feb 2011      Productivity, Wellbeing and Process

21 Jan 2011    Think Simplicity, Think Process

4 Jan 2011      BPM Truths We Hold Self-Evident

 

Cloud-ed Thinking in Outsourcing

My historian son was talking over breakfast about Tulip mania in seventeenth century Holland.  The Dutch were amazingly sophisticated: they had spot markets and futures trading.  They even had an Edict in 1610 banning short selling.  But, at the height of the mania, it was a mad time - people took leave of their commercial senses. In February 1637, just before prices collapsed, a single tulip bulb sold for ten times the annual income of a skilled craftsman.

It seems to fit with the current Cloud mania.  There's a similar sense of mass delusion, and nowhere more than in the world of outsourcing. A.T. Kearney's Arjun Sethi created a stir last year with The End of Outsourcing As We Know It, arguing that Cloud services will replace existing IT outsourcing within five years. HfS published Cloud Will Transform Business As We Know It, quoting results from its research collaboration with the LSE on Cloud in outsourcing.   

The hype about Cloud is obscuring some truths that won't go away. Many of these clouds are going to precipitate as tears before long.

At Nimbus, we've seen a lot of systems implementation failures. Often we're the first process paramedics on the scene. The consultation with the distraught exec usually ends: "So let me get this right - you set about this ERP implementation without a clear understanding of your end-to-end processes, or of how automation would impact them, or a means of effective collaboration for the stakeholders, or a means to publish the new processes in a way that would make it easy for the end users who would execute them, or a governance framework?".  

The truth is, of course, that whether it's a Cloud service or on-premise, a successful implementation requires exactly the same rigor.

So it's no surprise that we are getting involved as paramedics in an increasing number of Cloud failures.  Some of them are very large organizations which have made strategic commitments to a Cloud services, then spent millions on implementations that have failed. Not just 'under-performed' but totally failed in a 'switched it off and don't use it at all' sort of way.

And it's for exactly the same reasons that old-school software implementations have failed. The client bought the vision of how easy Cloud is, and took leave of their senses.  They ignored process and collaboration and governance and all that boring stuff; they thought they could just switch it on.

The good news is that it is all very do-able.  Cloud has great potential -  Nimbus has itself been a cloud services vendor for years, and we were a very early adopter of Salesforce - but gravity still applies.  Embrace Cloud services without the right perspective and tools and you're heading for a fall.

One theory, by the way, is that the Dutch went a bit mad because there was a resurgence at that time of bubonic plague. If you're quite possibly going to die next week, you may get a bit care-free about risk.  Thankfully, we don't have that excuse.  But that just makes us that bit more culpable.

Related Posts

16 Dec 2010    Equaterra and HfS on F&A Outsourcing

9 Dec 2010      FAO and the Cloud: Managing Transition Risks

15 Nov 2010    The Future of Outsourcing Governance

 

The Process Hall of Shame Re-Opens

It's true that the Process Hall of Shame, which opened its doors just a year ago, has been closed for a while.

I faltered. I was worried that I might identify an organization and cause embarrassment (not to mention litigation!).  And there seemed to be others far more expert than me writing on project failures.  And frankly we're all suffering a bit from failure fatigue.  There are just so many examples where a failure to communicate effectively leads to project failures, cancellations and over-runs.     

I'm inspired though to push open the creaking door, brush the cobwebs off the candelabras - and announce the grand re-opening of the Process Hall of Shame.

Inspired by two things. Firstly by Adam Deane's brilliant description of FDBPM, the 'new mainstream' implementation methodology for process projects. 'Faith-Driven BPM' would be hilarious if it wasn't so on the money.

And then by hearing of a project which almost defies belief.

I hesitate to tell this story because I have some dear friends working in IT who will wince at this. But it's true, and genuinely surprising because it's a throw-back to twentieth century thinking - in an organization large enough that it really ought to know better.        

I have to be careful in disguising this, so I'm not not even going to reveal on which continent this little drama is taking place...

This is an organization that is planning to go live shortly with a major SAP implementation that will transform its business.  Except that it's totally being driven by IT. It's a software implementation, a technical project. 

So some of the details have been overlooked: like what exactly are the end-to-end processes and the business requirements; what are the potential improvements that this project could enable; how the transition will be made between the existing processes and the new processes; and how the operational people will use the new SAP capability in practice.  Admin details, really, you can see how they might easily get neglected in the excitement of the software...   

We have been called in at the eleventh hour by business people aghast at the train wreck they can see about to happen.  They can see only one connection between IT's new SAP system and what their people actually do: the desperate calls that their people will be making to the IT Helpdesk when it goes 'live'.

But what takes the biscuit - and prompts me to throw open the doors of the Process Hall of Shame once more - is the resentful attitude of the IT folks involved, who are, you'll never guess, totally invested in one of the technical BPA tools and see no need to change. 

One of my colleagues was harangued last week by one of the client's IT team, who was keen to point out that Nimbus Control was inappropriate because it isn't designed for data modelling. No, it's designed to enable effective collaboration, right across the business, on operational excellence and continuous improvement. Oh, and to support people in doing real work more efficiently, which might arguably be this organization's bigger priority right now. [And anyway it integrates with SAP Solution Manager, so the IT perspective is well covered.]

Let's have a bit of hush please, ladies and gentlemen, so we can hear the drum roll - and then put your hands together please to welcome this new entrant to the Process Hall of Shame - Ta Dah!

Related Posts

18 Jan 2010    Michael Krigsman on IT Project Failure

21 Jan 2010    Whoops! A $50m Overspend. Inaugurating The Process Hall of Shame

    

Productivity, Wellbeing and Process

How to make knowledge workers productive and happy is a hot research theme. 

In Recovering From Information Overload, McKinsey last month called on senior executives to recognize the dark side of the communications revolution - information overload, and its close cousin, attention fragmentation:

'Always-on multitasking environments are killing productivity, dampening creativity, and making us unhappy.'

The indictment set out by McKinsey is serious and extensive. The way we work right now is not just unproductive, it also makes us anxious - and it's addictive so it can be bad news for the work-life balance too.   

Tom Davenport continued the McKinsey narrative last week in ReThinking Knowledge Work, calling for a radical new approach to meeting the needs of knowledge workers.  At the heart of his argument is a contrast he draws between a 'free access' approach and a 'structured model':

'Executives who aren’t conscious of the trade-offs they are making between them and thus don’t look for opportunities to harness the power of structure probably won’t get the most from knowledge workers.'

Hats off to McKinsey for tackling this.  These issues are absolutely central to the thinking behind our vision at Nimbus to 'Make work easier, faster and more valuable for millions of people'.

What's missing in the debate so far is an appreciation of the potential of process as the language of the enterprise.  It's not a panacea but it's a significant part of the solution. 

Modern organizations can be immensely complex.  Delivering operational excellence, innovation and continuous improvement across an increasingly virtual extended enterprise is like learning how to maintain an aircraft while in flight (while also reconfiguring it to develop the next generation model as well).

So effective collaboration is becoming the crucial capability for any enterprise.  We've all seen the consequences where collaboration is indequate - in project failures, cancellations and overruns - and not just across the IT:Business divide. 

I believe that any framework or application or platform - call it what you will - that is to underpin effective collaboration has to fulfil four criteria. It must

• use the language of end-to-end process
• be holistic and integrated
• be real, not an artificial construct
• be within a governance wrapper, because otherwise it's not sustainable. 

It may sound weird - it's a word from which most people would happily run a mile - but the truth is that process is one of the keys to the productivity and wellbeing of knowledge workers.   

Related Posts

21 Jan 2011    Think Simplicity, Think Process

8 Dec 2010    Fostering High-Value Collaboration

1 Nov 2010    Making Work Easier, Faster and More Valuable

16 Sep 2010    Boosting The Productivity of Knowledge Workers

In Memoriam - Metastorm

A Friday Column

A guest blog inspired by E J Thribb, poet-in-residence at the London-based satirical magazine Private Eye. Lines penned on hearing of the demise this week of Metastorm.

In Memoriam

So. Farewell then Metastorm.

For most of us, from leafy Wimbledon to Waterloo is just two stops on the train

In your case, it was via a lengthy stop-over in Baltimore

In a quest for higher ethics inspired by The Wire, joshed your critics.

Staffware got away but you feasted on CommerceQuest, then swallowed ProVision

But the predator became prey.

It's been a roller-coaster ride. You fended off two patent lawsuits and pulled an IPO

To arrive at Waterloo. 

The wags are asking: But who's Napoleon and who's the Duke of Wellington?

Keith's Mum says Bob Farrell is an acquisition genius and anyway $182m doesn't go that far these days, so his exile to St Helena won't last long.

She always said it was a shame about the software because Metastorm was a brilliant name.

And an anagram of 'Smart Tome' so an easy fit with Open Text.  

H J Blouse (aged 17 1/2)

LOL Metastorm

Brilliant. The day after the announcement that - subject to due diligence etc -Metastorm is to be acquired by Open Text...

Metastorm's PR folks just released:

 Three Reasons to Start Thinking About A Business Transformation Strategy

Arguably it's a bit late for that ;-)

But let's be charitable and assume that it's a neatly orchestrated joke. So hat tip to Metastorm PR for brightening my afternoon...

Understanding Process: More on Orchestral Scores

Let's not go overboard on swimlanes [groan] but please allow me one brief follow-up to my colleague's insights on how the orchestral score illustrates the genius of the Nimbus Storyboard and the limitations of swimlanes.  

The orchestral score solves a problem that is similar to the problem of how to represent business process.  

The score provides a common language that enables a wide range of instruments working together in real time to create the musical effect that reflects the intentions of the composer and delights the audience. 

Process provides a common language that enables people working together in real time to create products that reflect the intentions of the corporate strategy and delight the customer.

But it's a even richer metaphor than that [and I'd be delighted to publish here your own inspirations on this theme].  I've used the example of the orchestral score as a way of making a different point: about the importance of version control and the value of having a single source of truth, in this article published last summer, which you might find amusing:

The lights dimmed, the audience quieted in response — and you step towards the rostrum. It was an extraordinary honor for you, an amateur conductor and a 'mere' business CEO, to be invited to do a cameo with the Vienna Philharmonic.

It was a simple piece, of course, an early Mozart piano concerto, featuring a young Chinese pianist. But snow at O’Hare had cancelled two days of flights, so there had been no time for any rehearsals at all. Gulp — you lift the white baton to gather the orchestra. It was now or never. Hell, this was more nerve-wracking than any investor presentation.

But really, what could go wrong? You knew the piece intimately. You had even conducted it before. And the Vienna Philharmonic musicians were among the world’s finest. So relax and enjoy.

It was in the second bar when you realized something was awry. The orchestra was going faster than you’d ever imagined.

It came crashing into your head that they were using the revised October 1782 score, while you had the original September 1781 score in front of you. Never mind — maybe you could still get through this.

The orchestra built raggedly toward the entry of the soloist, their eyes looking at you in increasing bewilderment, wondering why your arms were off-beat.

You turned to introduce the pianist. She played from memory, of course. It was half a bar later that you realized that she was performing Mozart’s later revision of this work — his January 1783 score, which was much the same, except for the revised timpani line.

The music careered along, jumping and spluttering like a car with water in the tank. Maybe it was OK for an amateur — you might just make it to the end.

But not much can survive when the timpanist is confused. The cacophony grew. Only true grit could save the day. You waved and pummeled the air, and pulled them through into the final bar — and silence.

First one clap, then another, then spreading around the hall — until, finally, tumultuous applause. You bowed, amazed, and left the podium.

In the wings, you overheard a radio presenter gushing into his microphone: “A stunning new interpretation of Mozart in the style of Philip Glass, the radical American minimalist composer…”

A miraculous survival — again. Yet as you headed back for a final bow — and definitely no encore — your thoughts turned inexplicably to work.

How well were your own teams performing? Weren't similarly talented heroics required far too often, because everyone had a slightly different view of the playbook? How much better could your company be if your people’s skills were better orchestrated?

But you had just put a process improvement project on the back burner. It hadn't seemed that important to get globally consistent processes and documents delivered real-time to all staff.

As you bowed before the tumultuous applause, you vowed to give it the attention it deserved. Hey, you might even get the Europeans onto the same page, at last.

~ reprinted with permission, the IT Cutter Journal, May 2010

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1 Feb 2011    Swimlanes and Storyboards

 

Swimlanes and Storyboards

My colleague Paul Barrett, Nimbus Product Manager, is a serious musician.  So when I wrote recently that

'...swimlanes can have value in certain circumstances, especially in IT systems configuration.  Ultimately, the orchestra does need a score showing the notes that each instrument is playing, even if most people are only interested in the complete musical effect (or just tapping a foot to the melody).' 

Paul came back with a response that takes this idea further, and links it neatly to the value of the Storyboards used in Nimbus Control to deliver process to end-users.

Insights which, with Paul's permission, I'm pleased to be able to share here...

If you liken the conductor’s score to the swim-lane view of the process you get a good analogy, as long as the components are laid down in a strict timeline.  The conductor needs this overall detailed view so he knows when to expect each player to come in, what they will do and when they will exit.  Prior to rehearsal this score is pored over by the conductor so is he completely familiar with it and can point out nuances that he wants.  In rehearsal the conductor will make constant reference to it, calling out bar numbers to players.  In performance the need for the detailed score falls away, and the conductor may not even take it on to the podium.

The orchestral players do NOT have a full score.  They play to a single stave that shows only their part.  If they play no part for 48 bars they will have a single bar that says ‘48’ with a ‘bar rest’ symbol. This tells them how many intervening bars to count before  they play again.  Sometimes, to give them an assist the orchestral part will show a few bars of another part – to give them a crucial lead in.  The part player’s individual score can be likened to a storyboard – a view for each players that almost ignores everything else going on around them.  As long as they play their part at the right time, they don’t need to care about what other people are doing. 

So why can’t we provide every orchestra member with a full score and be done with the orchestral parts?  It’s not efficient.  No orchestral player will know a part so well that they can perform without a score but if they all had a full score then the performance would be one massive rustle of page turns as, in my example above, a 48 bar rest could span a dozen pages in the score.  Also since many instruments are scored on the same clef and in the same transposition key, it’d be all too easy for a player to do something that belonged to another (similar sounding resource in an adjacent lane).  It’s just the same as using swim-lanes to illustrate process for end users – why on earth would they want to keep paging past all that white space to get to the bits they need? And run the risk of doing something that was actually not their responsibility?

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14 Jan 2011    Adios Swimlanes, Hola Process Adoption

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8 Mar 2010    Swimlanes: The Tide is Turning