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The Insider’s Guide to BPM: 7 Steps to Process Mastery Special eBook Edition with Instructional Guide and Templates

Improve Personal Productivity

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2 STEP | The Insiders’ Guide to BPM: 7 Steps Instructional Guide and Templates

Process Mastery Step 3: Improve Personal Productivity

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Foreword Unfortunately user experience design doesn’t make it into the majority of process project plans. That must change and it starts with initial process improvement planning. Building a perspective on the current user experience empowers the design activity to improve personal productivity and employee satisfaction. It helps ensure the process project is successful and it lowers barriers to change. It can even facilitate a fast, smooth transition – reducing much of the work and stress of change. Understanding the process experience of the people who do the work will often provide new insights into how the process really works and what should be done to make it better. When we improve personal productivity, especially for knowledge workers, the changes we make are far more likely to be welcomed and appreciated than not. Step 3 of process mastery provides a simple and immediately actionable way to set the groundwork for taking ownership of personal productivity. Kamran Kheirolomoom OpenText General Manager, Business Process Solutions



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About the eBook Series BPM big wins have been limited to a small cadre of process masters…but not anymore. Now everyone is just 7 steps away from process mastery. We’ve all heard those stories of BPM success that influenced the bottom line, driving increases in revenue or EBITDA. We’ve all heard those compelling cases of 50%, 60% even 70+% reductions in process cost and labor with hard ROI payback in 12 months (or less). We have heard them and they are very compelling… Yet it seems that for many of us, those kinds of results remain elusive, a mystery. Why is that so? Perhaps it is because no one has taken the time to distill the essence, in simple terms, of just how to achieve such results. That is what this book is intended to do. We’ve put our heads together to draw out the 7 steps that can best help you master your processes, regardless of what mastering means to you. This book is your guide – the insiders’ guide – to making BPM work for you. We know BPM can make a big difference for almost any process goal. We know BPM can make a difference with almost any process. We know that everyone can be successful with BPM. But we also know that process mastery has, to date, remained an unfilled promise for far too many people. Whether you’re seeking the insights to achieve goals with BPM consistently, looking to move yourself from moderate success to big wins, or wanting to be certain you can keep hitting those process home runs, this eBook is for you. From the book The Insiders’ Guide to BPM: 7 Steps to Process Mastery this eBook series presents each of the 7 steps from the book as its own eBook along with a How-To Guide including Templates to make each step actionable. The how-to guide and template come directly from the accompanying Master Class that has already been proven to be one of the simplest and most successful ways to drive process improvement and produce exceptional results. The approach is simple and it is successful—and it is designed to be used by anyone that desires to achieve meaningful process improvement. All you need to start taking control of your own process mastery is here for you in this special eBook series. All you have to do is put it to work for you. Get your copy of The Insiders’ Guide to BPM: 7 Steps to Process Mastery at http://www.opentextbpm.com/GuidetoBPM



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7 Steps to Process Mastery

STEP 1 Understand and Embrace your Goal

Process goals are defined and discussed including how to setup process goals that accurately reflect your real goals, drive the process improvement activity, establish a clear “current state” baseline and validate improvements completed.

STEP 2: Build an Elegant Design

Building an elegant design requires that the work and complexity of a process be reduced by process improvements. In this step, we craft the perspective (model) of a process that creates the correct observational perspective and then assess the real value of proposed process improvements.

STEP 3: Improve Personal Productivity

Process participants often perform detective work, switch between software systems, repeat data entry, chase missing artifacts, and work with complex forms or documents - additional work that ferments dissatisfaction. In this step we identify and eliminate the biggest culprits of these productivity “robbers.”

STEP 4: Orchestrate for Real Time Demand

Most processes do not empower process participants and managers to adapt their work practices to context. Yet these contextual demands exist in almost every process. In this step we identify the majority of the orchestration capabilities participants and managers need to further improve our process design.

STEP 5: Keep Your Process in Tune

The moment a new process design comes into existence it starts becoming obsolete. Process designs are static - they don’t change until we change them. Yet the context around us is constantly changing, slowly and rapidly. In this step we identify the measures that will tell us when our process design is degrading (change has occurred) so that we can protect process success.

STEP 6: Create Transparency

Process transparency is driven by presenting metrics to each person working with a process that are a) meaningful to that person and b) provide insights against a common goal. In this step we use the goals we defined in Step 1 to describe meaningful process metrics for the managers and participants in the process.

STEP 7: Design, Manage and Deliver the Customer Experience

Delivering a desirable customer experience is the key to customer retention and brand excellence. In this step we review our process improvements to determine how they affect the customer and to gain a better understanding of what the real customer experience is that our processes create.



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Contents

Foreword by Kamran Kheirolomoom, OpenText, General Manager, Business Process Solutions…2 About the eBook Series…3 7 Steps to Process Mastery…4 SECTION 1: Improve Personal Productivity…6

Band-Aids – Not a Cure for Corporate Ills…7 Balancing People and Process…10 Process Quality (No Sigmas Allowed)…11 Personal Productivity and the iPhone?…14 NMAC – Productivity Improvements Impact Revenue…16 Missing the Target – Life in the Real World…17

SECTION 2: How-to Guide with templates and instructions that help you put this step into action…19

SECTION 3: Additional BPM resources to help you create business processes that produce exceptional results… 33

About the Author…34



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SECTION 1 – Improve Personal Productivity “Being busy does not always mean real work. The object of all work is production or accomplishment and to either of these ends there must be forethought, system, planning, intelligence, and honest purpose, as well as perspiration. Seeming to do is not doing.” - Thomas Alva Edison

Personal productivity is the secret sauce that drives some organizations to excel, even in difficult times, while others always seem one step shy of getting their act together. More often than not, personal productivity is a rollercoaster ride responding to improvements that do positively impact productivity but that are not sustainable. That is (of course) when the rollercoaster comes roaring down from the peak that it ground its way up to with so much effort. In reviewing business sector productivity over the last 50 years the data collected and collated by the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics paints an interesting picture for us. What we see from this point of view is that productivity is indeed a cyclical event rather than a gain once, keep forever asset. It’s highly likely that there are a number of factors behind this cyclical pattern in productivity but it is at least driven in part by bad process, or perhaps it would be better to say band-aid process.

U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics Business Sector Productivity –

Last 50 Years



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Band-Aids – Not a Cure for Corporate Ills

A band-aid process starts out as an under-performing process that needs to be improved. Band-aid processes are commonly placed under software control, often have complex process models, frequently embed many business rules in the process software and almost also are built from a command and control perspective. Sounds like a pretty heavy-duty band-aid, doesn’t it? The reason why we call these band-aid processes is that they focus on the affects of a problem while the cause remains festering underneath, waiting for the opportunity to raise its ugly head once again. When it does (and it will) our process is likely to head rapidly back into the poor performance category. There are two influences that almost guarantee that will happen with such processes. First, there is this matter of context that we began talking about in the previous chapter (and is an ongoing theme throughout this book). Context includes all of the environmental, societal, and behavioral influences that affect how work gets done. There is no place that this is more obvious than in the trenches, with the people doing the work of our processes. The people who perform the work in our processes are exposed to significant contextual influences from both internal and external sources. Internal management and infrastructure changes are biggies, but sometimes even small changes in human resource policies can have a profound effect on the people in our processes. Changing shift times, overtime policies and documentation for things like sick-time approval (did you bring your Doctor’s note Johnny?) can have devastating effects on process performance. Meanwhile the world outside is changing at a rate like never before, imposing pressure on our processes that, for brittle over-engineered processes, causes them to strain and break. If you want to be a real engineer, then go build bridges or rocket ships—not process. Processes that people interact with are a highly subjective engineering exercise that requires a unique blend of both art and science as we’ve already stated. That all sounds good, but what should we use to help us place the dividing line between what will enable people to maintain productivity gains versus over-engineered processes that are likely to crack under pressure? As one example, we can look at the perspective taken by Netflix.



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Netflix is in the movie business, or perhaps it is better to say they are in the personal movie and TV viewing business. However you prefer to define what they do, Netflix has rapidly become a dominant market player in rental and on demand consumption of movies and TV shows. With over 10 million customers and revenue on track in 2009 to hit over $1.5 billion (with gross margins of 30+% and rising) the company is delivering on its promise. What is Netflix’s promise to their customers? Netflix promises to deliver customer satisfaction. Customers agree that Netflix delivers on their promise with over 90% of surveyed customers saying that they would recommend Netflix service to a friend. They promise to keep making the best service even better. They promise the best content selection, personalized choices and 24/7 free customer support. They appear to be delivering on their promises quite well they use process to help in a very interesting way. Consider that the movie and TV show rental business (DVD’s or on demand) is a low margin business. There isn’t much room for making mistakes and there certainly is no room for premium pricing. That means Netflix is selling a commodity product in a highly competitive market. Do you think process is important in a business like that? Process is essential to companies like Netflix, so much so that we might jump to the conclusion that highly engineered and refined processes are critical to their success. While this may be true in cases like the actual processing and shipping of physical DVDs, in reality it is the initial innovative design of that process that makes the real difference. That design has most material moving out of distribution centers the same day it moves in – keeping the majority of inventory afloat in the US Postal system. The biggest challenge is managing all of those other processes that a company with roughly 1300 employees simply cannot do without. However, in a presentation by Netflix CEO Reed Hastings some very interesting observations on process emerge. Mr. Hastings observes that as most companies grow in size they use process to control their environment, an act that reduces personal freedom. The mindset (and it is a mindset) we commonly find is that by developing highly structured processes we can increase consistency while reducing the number of errors produced. Mr. Hastings continues in the presentation to describe a phenomenon where growth increases complexity to a degree that injects chaos into the mix when balanced against the behaviors of high performance employees. Highly structured processes are used to drive out chaos by most companies but in doing so they also drive out high performance employees.



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What a minute! That seems to be a bit challenging, doesn’t it? It seems that we have a choice. We can either exist in a permanent state of chaos with lots of high performance people OR we can operate in a state of unity knowing we will lose most (or all) of our top talent. Talk about the lesser of two evils… Further complicating the situation is the fact that keeping those top talents is an essential ingredient in adapting to rapid market change. Conversely, implementing highly structured process is a great way to maximize short-term financial success. If we don’t put this into perspective we our process direction can really jump the track. Remember the productivity graph from the US Bureau of Labor Statistics? The cyclical nature of business productivity is at least partially the result of over-structured processes that quickly lose their relevance to our context as the world around us keeps changing. The most profound observation that we can make about process is that what we want from our processes is a moving target. It just never stands still! As you can imagine, if change is a given (and it is) then the more complicated, structured and controlled our processes become the more likely they are to inhibit our ability to adapt to changes around us. In fact, every process that is designed, optimized, or improved and then deployed is out of date before we even turn it on. How can that be? It’s simple really. We can only improve and implement changes to process on a fixed target. There’s just no way to do that on a moving target. Now if our time span is weeks or months there is probably so little movement (change) that we are effectively working on the current context of the process. But for those who still believe in the four year master plan, can you imagine how much change is likely to occur in four years? Just look back at what has changed in the last four years and you’ll have a good idea of what we mean. Command and control processes, which are still very much a part of what many companies actually do, go out of date even faster and are much harder to bring back up to date. These band-aid processes do move us into closer alignment with our context becoming less and less aligned to our needs with every passing day. That’s why we often see immediate improvements but when we go back a year or two later and reassess the process we find we aren’t in any better shape than we were before the last improvement cycle. The benefits don’t stick because we designed the process for a specific context that doesn’t exist anymore.



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The lesson to be learned is that tightly aligning a process to the current context, including embedding everything we can up to and sometimes including the kitchen sink in it, is a recipe for productivity disaster. Any gains are short lived, forcing us to continually reengineer the process. The approach we must take needs to strike a balance; a balance between people and process. Balancing People and Process

Improving personal productivity on an ongoing and adaptive basis requires that we seek an optimal balance with our processes between structure and personal freedom. Simplicity once again enters the discussion here, because simplifying process models and user interactions (or user experiences) reduces complexity. Being as complexity is the only reason those brittle and rigid processes formed in the first place, this makes a lot of sense. So what needs to be in our processes? We need in our processes structure that helps us avoid really big mistakes, what Mr. Hastings notes as processes that protect us from irrevocable disaster, such as hackers stealing customer’s credit card info or producing inaccurate financials. He also goes on to observe that we need in our processes the structure to ensure that we police our corporate character. Whether by external mandate (harassment, discrimination) or organizational mandate (dishonesty, thievery), there are characteristics of our organization that we must properly safeguard. We also need to include structure in our processes that is specifically geared to helping people get work done, not to control them but to empower them. That is perhaps one of the biggest challenges, as in traditional process development we just don’t get that on our radar screen most of the time. More from Netflix: Mr. Hastings further points out that there are good processes and there are bad processes. From his perspective, good processes might include something like web site push every two weeks instead of random and a bad process might be get pre-approval for $5K spending. The point is that the first process is promoting an important behavior in the organization that is likely to make the company more successful. By establishing a two-week web site push schedule, team members can plan, refine and deliver those pushes in a collaborative and highly productive manner—while producing a more predictable benefit for the company. The rule to get $5k spending pre-approved suggests over-sight is required because, well, employees just are not responsible enough to make those kinds of decisions. Ouch, if you’re an employee on the receiving end of that process it’s a bit painful, isn’t it?



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Interestingly enough, the spending rule misses on another critical level of process, the difference between working within context as compared to controlling through command. For example, if we need to trim discretionary spending to help meet our quarterly profitability goals then why wouldn’t we say that? The context is clear, and gets even clearer when stated as: we need to trim discretionary spending where possible so we can hit our quarterly profitability goals and get our bonuses. This contextual rule does not dictate specific actions out of context like the rule: you must get pre-approval for $5k spending though both could easily be intended to achieve the same outcome. When we do work within context, what we find is the creation of a simplified process that also simplifies the work that people need to do. A very significant part of mastering process comes from the fitness of use we deliver to the participants in the process. This is the true measure of process quality. Process Quality (No Sigmas Allowed)

We noted the influence of Dr. Deming on process in a previous chapter but now we need to talk about another quality expert that was influencing global perceptions at the same time as Deming, but from a different angle. That person was Dr. Joseph M. Juran (December 24, 1904 – February 28, 2008) who was concerned with quality as it applied to business and to people. Dr. Juran was also a central figure in the transformation of Japan from a military power to an economic one. Working independently of Deming, Juran focused more on management philosophies from an early stage while Deming was focusing primarily on statistical quality control. One of the most galvanizing statements from Juran was his definition of quality – where he defined quality by its fitness of use for items produced and work being done in respect to the recipient of the product or work. Dr. Juran went on to explain that quality is always judged by the receiving party regardless of what is produced. It doesn’t matter if it is a tangible good, a conversation, an email, a document or anything else. The point that Dr. Juran was making when he defined quality in this way is the observation that for anything that is produced, regardless of its defect rate or adherence to a set of quality metrics, if the receiver can’t easily use or consume it, then it is not a quality output.



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Perhaps one of the most obvious cases-in-point to this comes from manufacturing where over time large manufacturers adopted MRP, MRP II and finally ERP software to help manage the sourcing, planning, scheduling, storing and shipping of materials in, and finished goods out. These software programs offered a way for organizations to gain consistent oversight on the critical, interlinked operations that manufacturing requires. Makes sense, right? Sure it does, unless you’re the production floor manager. As it turns out, these software systems (SAP, MAPICS, BPICS, JD Edwards and so on) had all the information the shop floor managers needed, but that information could not be output in a form directly useful to their work. In fact, for many years (and it’s still going on in some places today) these ERP systems would output stacks of paper that the shop scheduler would then retype into a software program appropriate for actually scheduling and managing work (can you say Excel?). Sometimes this was done on a daily basis. Over time a number of the ERP products ended up supporting the export of data in file formats that products like Lotus123 and Excel could use, although it still required adjusting the information in the spreadsheet program before it could be used to produce daily shop plans.

Now consider this. The data the shop floor needed was in the ERP system. Often times there was more data available than previously. The data was accurate, far more accurate than manual means of tracking could be. The ERP system was able to output all of the information desired every time, without errors or waiting (in most cases). So if you are creating what the next person needs with the right information at the right time without mistakes that’s quality, right? Well, no. While it may be better than before, if the shop scheduler has to spend hours every day to make the output usable then the output is of very low quality. As Dr. Juran said, the user is who determines the quality of a given output! From independent research surveying

attendees at a Gartner BPM event in 2009 (781 respondents)



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So a big part of process design is the fitness of use as judged by managers and process participants. If their interaction with the process is not aligned to their needs, and their context, then the resulting process will leave them with no choice but to move outside of the process with non value-added activities to make up for the real lack of quality in the process. In an independent research study of Gartner BPM conference attendees, survey participants were asked how often workers in their own companies designed workarounds to their business processes or systems. The 781 respondents indicated that 48.1% believed workarounds occurred often and 37% indicated workarounds occurred occasionally. From this we must understand that 4 out of every 5 process participants are finding our business process interfaces inappropriate to their needs, enough so that they at least occasionally design their own process to get their work done. The magnitude of the implications of this one survey question and its responses should send chills down the spine of every business manager that sees it. Can you imagine how much opportunity we are leaving on the table in our process practices? Far more important though, is the need for us to understand what we can do to mitigate these kinds of results. So what can we do?

• Can we identify who the process participants and managers are that will be expected to live with the process once it goes live? Yes.

• Can we spend time with some of them to get a sense for what would make their lives easier? Yes.

• Can we simply take the time to picture ourselves in their role, and to challenge the process as to what we would want if we had to do that work? Yes.

• Can we ask these people what their biggest headaches are, what is getting in the way of them successfully doing their job? Yes.

• And can we simplify the process wherever possible so there just isn’t as much for them to do? You bet. Taking the time to understand the perspectives of people who must live with the process once it goes live is a mandatory part of mastering our processes!



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Personal Productivity and the iPhone?

Apple’s iPhone is a hot product. Apple shipped 13.7 million iPhones in the 2008 calendar year with total units shipped over the 20 million mark as of August 2009. Sales volumes continue to grow with Apple selling 5.2 million iPhones in the last quarter (Q2 2009) and predictions as high as 80 million by 20121. So what’s so special about the iPhone and how does it relate to personal productivity in BPM? While for many people the connection may not be obvious for us it shouts out one of the most challenging issues in BPM. Whether you have an iPhone or not, or you think the iPhone is really slick (or not) doesn’t matter. The fact is that Apple’s iPhone is dramatically easier to use than the mobile devices that preceded it (and that are trying to compete with it now). The thing is, the iPhone really is unique; not by what it can do but in how it does it.

Talk to an iPhone user. See how many love their iPhone. Then ask them about the instructions included with the iPhone. If you are like us, you will find that the vast majority of iPhone users can’t even tell you what instructions came with the device because they didn’t use them. The product is that easy to use. This is the essence of what makes the iPhone so powerful, so unique and so attractive to buyers. You just use it. Apple is not competing on features and functions; they are competing on ease of use and true simplicity. The iPhone is a shining example of what happens when we strive for sophistication as defined by Leonardo da Vinci (e.g. simplicity is the ultimate sophistication). Far more than just good user interface design, the iPhone provides an almost phenomenal shift in user experience. With the iPhone, you focus on doing what you want to do, not how to use the device. In fact, for many iPhone owners the user experience is so intuitive and simple that they are using the iPhone for far more mobile activities than ever before.

1 Mike Abramsky, analyst with RBC Capital Markets, predicts that the iPhone will have 5.7 percent total addressable market share by 2012 equating to a volume of over 80 million units.

Apple iPhone



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This is an order of magnitude shift in user experience and as you can probably guess, that translates directly to increased productivity. With the iPhone, many users are finding they can do more, faster than ever before. So what would happen if our process interfaces—the process worker experience—was improved in this way? The answer is obvious, an order of magnitude shift in worker productivity. Of course most of us who are working with process don’t have the resources available to do this kind of inspirational development work for process that Apple had in developing the iPhone. Also, business processes have far more variation and contextual nuance than a common use device like the iPhone. That makes the challenge even greater, yet the one thing we do have is context. We can take the context of our organization (our processes and our people) into account to aide us in developing process interfaces that are indeed intuitive, simplified and appropriate for those who do work in process. We can replicate the essential different Apple used with the iPhone in the process interfaces for our process participants and process managers. This then is indeed a critical part of increasing personal productivity. Further, if we are truly developing simplified processes—as well as simplified and intuitive process interactions—the resulting process design is far more likely to serve its intended purpose for a longer time. We are effectively minimizing the probability of process obsolescence; where with traditional band-aid process design we are maximizing the probability of process obsolescence. Given a choice, which would you choose? With so many process implementers struggling with issues like this (and the other points we bring out in this book) it helps to see what happens when we get it right. What kind of results can (should) we expect to derive from BPM? Let’s look at what happened on a core process of a major automobile manufacturer when applying BPM to a subsidiary’s core process.



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NMAC – Productivity Improvements Impact Revenue

Nissan Motor Acceptance Corporation (NMAC) is the loan processing arm of Nissan Motors. Their core value creation process, loan processing, has a direct impact on both Nissan revenue and Nissan customer satisfaction. Prior to using BPMS software to improve their processing performance, NMAC documented a high volume period of 40,000 applications in a one month period that required in excess of 30,000 man-hours to process. The same work volume, once the process was optimized and automated where possible within their BPMS software required just over 15,000 man-hours to complete.

Here again we see cost reduction exceeding the 50% mark for NMAC’s peak volume period but the benefits go well beyond that. Using BPM, NMAC reduced the cost of processing loans, the processing time per loan and the elapsed time per loan. Besides cost savings, customer satisfaction was increased, which leads to a higher percentage of completed loans. That produces more car sales, and the overall positive experience increases word of mouth marketing. Isn’t that the kind of bang for our BPM buck that we are all trying to achieve? Going further, NMAC isn’t stopping there. They have already identified the next level to improve; automating the front end to eliminate low-skill/value prep work. From these improvements, NMAC expects to reap another 20% performance improvement driving the total performance improvement of their core business process to over 70%. This case study highlights several important aspects essential to improving personal productivity. NMAC automated functions that people did not need to do and found ways to automate low-skill, low value process activities. By doing this, they freed up their employees to do higher value work that only people can do.

Nissan (NMAC) – Cost Reduction with BPM Exceeding 50%



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But under the covers of the case study is a concerted effort to make sure user interfaces where well designed in respect to the people actually doing the work. It’s often hard to improve core processes and it is almost impossible to produce improvement results of 50% or more unless the participant interfaces are designed with participants needs in mind. That is part of the really big challenge that the vast majority of process projects just plain miss. Missing the Target – Life in the Real World

The last piece of the personal productivity puzzle is the issue of getting “in sync” with the real world of process. Some of the actions we suggest, and certainly imply, to achieve personal productivity already cover process reality. But it is so important, and so overlooked, that it needs to be brought out on its own. The issue (opportunity) comes from the high degree of variation that occurs in the work within all processes that have significant human interaction. Out in the trenches of process operations, many situations demand that ad-hoc actions be taken as work gets done. It’s the proverbial 80/20 rule that states that 80% of the work requires handling the 20% of exceptions that arise in normal operations. Exceptions range from:

• things that have gone missing • to customers that introduce unexpected variables of almost every kind • then on to work loads and resource constraints • emergencies and mistakes

They all happen. If you add in pretty much anything that you can imagine that might go wrong—plus the things you can’t imagine—well, that’s what it’s actually like in the real world of operations. Don’t forget, Murphy’s Law2 remains alive and well, continuing to deliver on its promise that anything that can go wrong, will go wrong! This represents a real challenge for many of us who are designing or developing process models because models cannot ever encode or embed all the variations that will occur in the real world.

2 Murphy’s Law is most commonly attributed to Edward Murphy, an American aerospace engineer who worked on safety-critical systems in the mid 1900s.



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We repeat, process models CANNOT encode or embed all the variations that occur in the real world. Instead what we must do is provide as much freedom as possible to process participants in the process experience. We have to recognize, right from the beginning, that it is impossible for us to identify all of the possible variations that can occur in human-centric processes…and we must develop user experiences that give process participants the freedom to deal with these variations. This may seem obvious to some of us but what we already know is that the majority of process participants in our organizations are currently finding it necessary to go outside of the process experience we provide; finding their own ad-hoc ways to get things done. Now for those who love shortcuts we will also tell you that giving process participants the means to escalate problems is not at all a viable means to addressing this challenge. Sure, that can be part of our process and help in specific cases where we know something needs to be escalated. But escalation does nothing to help with work participants can do that the user experience gets in the way of doing. The challenge is to include in the user experience ways for process participants to address ad-hoc requirements, engage with other team members when solving new challenges. The combination of simplified user experience, flexibility to meet ad-hoc demands (freedom) and contextually relevant team collaboration can be brought together to be the holy grail of personal productivity. More importantly, just knowing what it takes to improve personal productivity is the first step. Once we know that, we can take that knowledge into consideration for every business process we seek to improve. By including this step in our BPM approach we are another step closer to reaching our goal of true process mastery.



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SECTION 2 - How-To Guide and Templates Improving Personal Productivity

To improve personal productivity, we must first understand what the productivity challenges are in the current process design. Those productivity challenges are tasks in the process that for one reason or another, force Participants to:

• work harder than necessary • engage in unnecessary interactions • perform work outside of the process design • juggle multiple competing tasks • have specialized knowledge to complete a task that is NOT a specialized task



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One Perspective – The Task Analysis

The Task Analysis provides some perspective on the challenges faced by process Participants. From it we can see: 1. The Tasks each person is expected to perform 2. How many different objects they must interact with 3. What kind of actions we are expecting them to perform

From this perspective, we can get a sense for some of the challenges Participants face in achieving new levels of personal productivity. However, more is needed. In this step we seek to identify those challenges that are not obvious just from the Task Analysis.



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Challenges to Personal Productivity – Examples

CHALLENGE DESCRIPTION

Document legibility Difficulty in accurately reading information on one or more documents

Exception-handling Extra work based on exceptions to the "normal," or planned work

Duplicate data entry Entering the same data more than once (including across Tasks)

Searching (detective work) Spending time finding ANYTHING needed to complete a Task (physical or digital)

Complex forms/documents Dealing with complex forms or documents that are non-intuitive

Complex business rules Business rules that are difficult to understand or apply to real world scenarios

Missing document A required document that is missing

Inaccurate data Data, physical or electronic, that is needed but is not accurate

Incomplete data Data, physical or electronic, that is needed but is not available

Swivel-chair movement Movement of a Participant between objects (systems, documents, et. al.)

Complex user interface A system interface that is difficult to successfully navigate to a desired conclusion

Technical system issues System or equipment issues that result in work outage or additional work

Pulled away for other work Competing priorities that shift focus in a random or unplanned manner

Frequent changes Changes to systems, rules, procedures or work instructions that occur frequently



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Identifying Challenges to Personal Productivity

Whether you use the examples provided on the previous slide, others you define yourself, or any combination thereof the important thing is that Challenges are identified…And they must be assessed for each Task. The Rule of 3

There’s something magically about the number 3. Where one or two is not enough, three is just right. Where four or more is too much, three is just right. Therefore, in Step 3 we look to identify a maximum of 3 challenges to each Task in the Task Analysis. Caution – Know How To Do This Properly

This is not complicated, but it is easy perform incorrectly. We are not looking to find 3 challenges for each Task, we are looking for up to a maximum of 3 very real challenges that stand out to process Participants. Therefore: 1. Some (perhaps many) Tasks will have no challenges 2. Few (perhaps no) Tasks will have 3 Challenges 3. If we don’t know what the real challenges are – do not make them up or speculate! So how do we know what productivity challenges really exist in a process?



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Know, Observe, Ask, Research 1. Think about what you know, you may already have much of the information that you need.

2. Observe Participants performing their Tasks. Observation will often bring obvious challenges to the forefront.

3. Ask the Participants about their challenges. Be a good interviewer and lead them to uncover their biggest pain-points.

4. Research process to uncover patterns behind rework, inconsistencies, or quality issues – all clear signs of challenges.

Regardless of how you identify productivity challenges, the next step is to build those into our process picture.



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From Step 2 – The Agile Style Task Analysis…

Participant Action (the task being performed)

Primary Object (the object of the action)

Work Object Type

1 As an underwriter I review The application Document

…we add Challenges (Step 3)

Participant Action (the task being performed)

Primary Object (the object of the action) Work Object Type

1 As an underwriter I review The application Document

Challenge 1 Challenge 2 Challenge 3

Legibility Inaccuracy



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From Step 2 – Assessing Process Improvement

# Tasks # Hand-offs (each time work changes hands)

# Participants # Objects (unique) # Challenges

Baseline B

Improvement 1 1

Improvement 2 2

Improvement 3 3

Improvement n n

Baseline – Total for each category before improvement

# Tasks – Total number of tasks eliminated

# Hand-offs – Total number of hand-offs eliminated

# Participants – Total number of participant (roles) eliminated

# Objects – Total number of different objects eliminated

# Challenges – Total number of challenges eliminated (defined in Step 3)

Challenges from Step 3 go here in

the Step 2 Assessment



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From Step 2 – Calculating Net Gain

Tasks Hand-offs (each time work changes hands)

Participants Objects (unique) Challenges

Baseline B 100% 100% 100% 100% 100%

Improvement 1 1

Improvement 2 2

Improvement 3 3

Improvement n n

Tasks – Percent Improvement (Tasks Eliminated/Baseline Tasks)*100

Hand-offs – Percent Improvement (Hand-offs Eliminated/Baseline Hand-offs)*100

Participants – Percent Improvement (Participants Eliminated/Baseline Participants)*100

Objects – Percent Improvement (Objects Eliminated/Baseline Objects)*100

Challenges – Percent Improvement (Challenges Eliminated/Baseline Challenges)*100

Step 3 Challenges Go Here



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Improving Personal Productivity – Summary In Step 3 we have: 1. Identified any real personal productivity challenges by Task 2. Included Challenges in our Process Assessment 3. Calculated the Net Gain 4. Resulting in a clear understanding of how well we have addressed productivity challenges

in our improvements Note – as before, the improvement approach outlined in The Insiders’ Guide will eliminate Tasks, Participants, Interactions, object and Challenges. Step 3 adds Challenges into the practice. *If we feel we have not met the challenges of personality productivity, what do we do? This can be an important motivator to go back to improvements and innovate on new ways that additional challenges can be eliminated.



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Templates and Instructions Template Instruction for Step 3 – Improve Personal Productivity

In step 3 we identify the challenges faced by Process Participants for each Task in the process. We are not looking to find 3 challenges for each Task, we are looking for up to a maximum of 3 very real challenges that stand out to Process Participants. Therefore: 1. Some (perhaps many) Tasks will have no challenges

2. Few (perhaps no) Tasks will have 3 Challenges

3. If we don’t know what the real challenges are – do not make them up or speculate!



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Challenges to Personal Productivity – Examples CHALLENGE DESCRIPTION

Document legibility Difficulty in accurately reading information on one or more documents

Exception-handling Extra work based on exceptions to the "normal," or planned work

Duplicate data entry Entering the same data more than once (including across Tasks)

Searching (detective work) Spending time finding ANYTHING needed to complete a Task (physical or digital)

Complex forms/documents Dealing with complex forms or documents that are non-intuitive

Complex business rules Business rules that are difficult to understand or apply to real world scenarios

Missing document A required document that is missing

Inaccurate data Data, physical or electronic, that is needed but is not accurate

Incomplete data Data, physical or electronic, that is needed but is not available

Swivel-chair movement Movement of a Participant between objects (systems, documents, et. al.)

Complex user interface A system interface that is difficult to successfully navigate to a desired conclusion

Technical system issues System or equipment issues that result in work outage or additional work

Pulled away for other work Competing priorities that shift focus in a random or unplanned manner

Frequent changes Changes to systems, rules, procedures or work instructions that occur frequently



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The Insiders’ Guide to BPM: 7 Steps to Process Mastery

Template for Step 3 – Improve Personal Productivity

Task ID Challenge 1 Challenge 2 Challenge 3



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Additional Instructions for Step 3 – Improve Personal Productivity In addition to completing the challenges identification in the template provided, return to the templates from Step 2 and enter the results from the challenges activity as follows:

The Insiders’ Guide to BPM: 7 Steps to Process Mastery Template 3 for Step 2 – Accessing Process Improvement

# Tasks # Hand-offs (each time work changes hands)

# Participants # Objects (unique) # Challenges

Baseline B

Improvement 1 1

Improvement 2 2

Improvement 3 3

Improvement n n

Baseline – Total for each category before improvement # Tasks – Total number of tasks eliminated # Hand-offs – Total number of hand-offs eliminated # Participants – Total number of participant (roles) eliminated # Objects – Total number of different objects eliminated # Challenges – Total number of challenges eliminated (defined in Step 3)



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The Insiders’ Guide to BPM: 7 Steps to Process Mastery Template 4 for Step 2 – Calculating Net Gain

Tasks Hand-offs (each time work changes hands)

Participants Objects (unique) Challenges

Baseline B 100% 100% 100% 100% 100%

Improvement 1 1

Improvement 2 2

Improvement 3 3

Improvement n n

Tasks – Percent Improvement (Tasks Eliminated/Baseline Tasks)*100

Hand-offs – Percent Improvement (Hand-offs Eliminated/Baseline Hand-offs)*100

Participants – Percent Improvement (Participants Eliminated/Baseline Participants)*100

Objects – Percent Improvement (Objects Eliminated/Baseline Objects)*100

Challenges – Percent Improvement (Challenges Eliminated/Baseline Challenges)*100



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SECTION 3 – Additional BPM Resources to Help You Create Business Processes that Produce Exceptional Results These free resources created by renowned BPM industry experts provide additional assistance in consistently achieving and exceeding your organizations’ goals through process improvement. Filling in the Missing Links in Business Process Management BPM can be transformational, but far too often it is not because there are ‘missing links’ in the common approach to process that limit results for the majority of process initiatives. Only by addressing all of the influencing factors that determine process success can BPM initiatives consistently and reliably deliver organizational value. Process management that fills in the ‘missing links’ by addressing the personal perspectives of the people involved in the process—that maximizes individual ability to achieve success—is the problem; or perhaps it is better stated as the opportunity. Download the whitepaper. Persona-based BPM Puts People at the Center of Process Discover how Persona-based BPM improves the user experience and the interaction and collaboration of all the participants in your process, empowering them to be more productive and maximize business performance. Extensive field research shows that by including users earlier in the process can reduce costs by as much as 40% and increase productivity by 50%+. Global 360’s Persona-based BPM approach is the first to address the tough challenges that live in the heart of process where the real work gets done. Learn more about Persona-based BPM at www.opentextbpm.com/solutions/persona. How the User Experience Impacts Personal Productivity Watch this video series featuring Donna Tellam, Usability Specialist at Global 360, discussing the importance of focusing on process participants when designing and implementing process improvements, and the growing expectation for application functionality coming from a new generation of workers. Watch the video. BPM Resource Center We’ve created a resource center with all the information you need in one place. Whether you are just learning about BPM, getting started or determining what the right solution is, you’ll find industry research, expert advice and materials to help. Check out the available resources at www.opentextbpm.com/BPMresources.



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Get your copy of each of the eBooks (or share this link with a friend) in The Insiders’ Guide to Process Mastery Practical Guide eBook Series at: http://www.opentextbpm.com/GuidetoBPM

About the Series and the Author: The Insiders’ Guide to BPM: 7 Steps to Process Mastery is available at: http://www.amazon.com/Insiders-Guide-BPM-Process-

Mastery/dp/0929652096

For more on the author of the print book and eBook series you can visit: http://www.tschurter.com http://www.slideshare.net/tschurter http://www.youtube.com/user/tschurter http://twitter.com/tschurter

The eBook Series (sponsored by OpenText): http://www.opentextbpm.com/GuidetoBPM

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