Below you can read answers from 10+ BPM experts. You can either read everything or use the navigation below. Enjoy!
Wil van der Aalst
Tony Benedict
Lloyd Dugan
Marlon Dumas
Scott Francis
Ian Gotts
Paul Holmes-Higgin
Adeel Javed
Mathias Kirchmer
Mirko Kloppenburg
Holly Lyke-Ho-Gland
Brian Reale
Adrian Reed
Pedro Robledo
Tomislav Rozman
Serge Schiltz
Jim Sinur
James Taylor
Roger Tregear
Miguel Valdés-Faura

Which BPM skills will be hot in 2022

Now, let’s dive into the answers.

Prof. Wil van der Aalst

Prof.dr.ir. Wil van der Aalst is a full professor at RWTH Aachen University, leading the Process and Data Science (PADS) group. He is also the Chief Scientist at Celonis, part-time affiliated with the Fraunhofer FIT, and a member of the Board of Governors of Tilburg University. He also has unpaid professorship positions at Queensland University of Technology (since 2003) and the Technische Universiteit Eindhoven (TU/e). Currently, he is also a distinguished fellow of Fondazione Bruno Kessler (FBK) in Trento, deputy CEO of the Internet of Production (IoP) Cluster of Excellence, co-director of the RWTH Center for Artificial Intelligence. His research interests include process mining, Petri nets, business process management, workflow automation, simulation, process modeling, and model-based analysis. Many of his papers are highly cited (he is one of the most-cited computer scientists in the world and has an H-index of 161 according to Google Scholar with over 121,000 citations), and his ideas have influenced researchers, software developers, and standardization committees working on process support. He previously served on the advisory boards of several organizations, including Fluxicon, Celonis, ProcessGold/UiPath, and aiConomix. Van der Aalst received honorary degrees from the Moscow Higher School of Economics (Prof. h.c.), Tsinghua University, and Hasselt University (Dr. h.c.). He is also an IFIP Fellow, IEEE Fellow, ACM Fellow, and an elected member of the Royal Netherlands Academy of Arts and Sciences, the Royal Holland Society of Sciences and Humanities, the Academy of Europe, and the North Rhine-Westphalian Academy of Sciences, Humanities and the Arts. In 2018, he was awarded an Alexander-von-Humboldt Professorship.

WWW: http://www.vdaalst.com
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Twitter: @wvdaalst

What are the skills, techniques, behaviors, and attitudes that can help BPM practitioners create value for their organizations in 2022?

Data-science skills remain very important. However, it becomes increasingly clear that being an expert in machine learning is not enough to solve real-world challenges. These techniques are always applied in a particular context and need to be combined with domain knowledge. Process mining can facilitate the generation of machine learning problems to address real-world challenges. When being confronted with thousands of tables in an ERP system like SAP and additional data scattered over other home-grown information systems, one cannot start by creating a neural network. This can only be applied to very specific problems. However, with process mining you can regain control over the data and put this in a business context. Then you can generate your neural networks or other machine learning models to answer business questions. Process mining provided the missing link between model-based process analysis and data-oriented analysis techniques. Skills related to the combination of data science and process science have become more critical over time, and 2022 will be no exception.
The COVID-19 pandemic showed that accurate data are vital to managing operational processes. Global supply chains were taken by surprise, and vulnerabilities were exposed. Process mining can be used to create full transparency on what is happening in a supply chain and recommend actions.

What are the best resources to learn those skills? (e.g. books, articles, courses)

What is new in 2022 and very suitable for people starting in BPM and process mining is the course “Process Mining: From Theory to Execution” released in December 2021. The course is for free and can be found here: https://www.celonis.com/wils-process-mining-class/. This new process mining course aims to bridge the gap between the theory of process mining and the practical application using a commercial tool and real-life data sets. This 10-hour course “Process Mining: From Theory to Execution” can be taken at any time and provides software and data sets. After taking this compact course, participants will have learned about current trends in process mining and automation, know the key process discovery and conformance checking algorithms, and also study comparative and predictive process mining techniques allowing organizations to perform root cause analysis of performance and compliance problems.
Next to this course, my process mining book “Process Mining: Data Science in Action. Springer-Verlag, Berlin, 2016.” still seems the most obvious place to start to prepare for the convergence of data science and process science. The book is supported by the Coursera course with the same name, see https://www.coursera.org/learn/process-mining.

Which skills are no longer relevant or not practically applicable yet (hype)?

My answer is the same as last year; not much changed actually. I sense that most of the traditional skills are still relevant, but the emphasis has shifted from modeling and gathering requirements to more data-driven skills. Many people are obsessed with BPMN, DMN, and CMMN, living in an imaginary world very disconnected from reality. People stressing such standards without looking at the actual processes’ traces will not contribute to actual process improvements. Also, Artificial Intelligence (AI) and Deep Learning (DL) have been promising things that are simply unrealistic. The fact that neural networks work surprisingly well for some tasks does not imply that they can be applied to any problem, e.g., process management.

What is the role of process-related skills in the “new normal”?

Due to COVID-19, digitalization and new ways of working moved up in the list of priorities. Poor processes and outdated IT-infrastructures have been exposed, and people realize that it is time to rethink things and that changes are possible if there is a sense of urgency. Organizations built on spreadsheets and politics are unable to tackle the challenges related to COVID-19, e.g., tracking whether people get a third or fourth dose, ensuring that the right people get the vaccines, and detecting counterfeited or incorrectly handled vaccines. Due to my complex official first names (my full name is “Willibrordus Martinus Pancratius van der Aalst”), Covid-apps storing my COVID certificates cannot match my first two vaccinations with the third one, even not after reissuing the certificates three times.

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Tony Benedict

Tony Benedict is a Partner with Omicron Partners, LLC, a strategy advisory firm. He is a senior level operations executive best known for transforming organizations, improving operational excellence and profitability. Most recently, he served as Interim Vice President of Operations for Rising Pharma, managing all phases of complex $200M post-merger integration of 2 acquired companies (36 CMOs, 2 3PLs) within expedited timeframe, while concurrently launching a state-of-the-art pharma distribution center. Consolidated 3 ERP systems into a single SAP instance within 6 months. Benedict previously worked at HonorHealth as Vice President, Procurement and Supply Chain where he was responsible for over $600M in spend management. One of his accomplishments was in the restructuring of the procurement and supply chain organizations post-merger within 12 months and consolidating two ERP systems within 18 months while implementing $60M in cost reduction initiatives. Previously, he was Chief Information Officer, Vice President of Supply Chain for Tenet, and Vice President, Supply Chain, Vanguard Health Systems at Abrazo Community Health Network in Arizona.
He is currently serving as President and Director, Board of Directors for the Association of Business Process Management Professionals International and is a co-author of the Business Process Management Common Body of Knowledge versions 2, 3 and the recently released version 4.
WWW: http://www.abpmp.org
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What are the skills, techniques, behaviors, and attitudes that can help BPM practitioners create value for their organizations in 2022?

I would add additional skills for systems thinking from an integration standpoint. What is meant by that? There are 10 core capability elements in every Enterprise. The term capability is used/misused way too often and tends to point to or focus on technology to much. While technology is one of the core capability elements, it is by no means the most important. At the center (of graphic) is customer experience, and surrounding that is business performance, then process and data. What guides the focus of those elements are Strategy, Organizational Structure and Human Capital. These 3 are the primary capability elements that you can control, where the most change will happen and represent what you can “mold” into whatever is needed to support achieving an optimal customer experience with high business performance. Process and Data are what PEOPLE WILL DO (AND USE) to achieve those outcomes/goals. Technology and Infrastructure are investments that are made as part of the overall plan, however, integrating the first 7 on the list is what creates the premium value. If you focus too much on one (technology) or two of the elements without integrating the others, then the risk of failure increases. 70% of transformation still fail even after 20 years of efforts.

Bottom line: Integrating the 10 core capability elements will be a critical skillset for BPM now and in the future in order to truly transform enterprises.

They are noted below:
1. Customer Experience,
2. Strategy,
3. Business Performance,
4. Business Process,
5. Information,
6. Organizational Structure,
7. Human Capital,
8. Supporting infrastructure,
9. Enabling Technology,
10. Policy & Rules

Here’s the graphic:

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Lloyd Dugan

Lloyd Dugan is a widely recognized thought leader in the development and use of leading modeling languages, methodologies, and tools, covering from the level of EA and BA down through BPM, Case Management, and SOA. He specializes in the use of standard languages for describing business processes, systems, and services, particularly BPMN, CMMN, and DMN from the OMG. He has developed and delivered BPMN 2.0 training to the U.S. Department of Defense and large consultancies. He has nearly 30 years of experience with public and private sector clients, and has an MBA from the Fuqua School of Business at Duke University. He is an OMG-Certified Expert in BPM (OCEB) – Fundamental, a member of the Workflow Management Coalition and its BPSim Working Group, a member of the OMG’s BPMN Model Interchange Working Group (MIWG), and a Contributing Member (author), Meta Modeling and BPM-BA Alignment Collaboration Teams Member, and Advisory Board Member of the Business Architecture Guild. He is a frequent speaker at national and international conferences on BPM, BPMN, Case Management, SOA, and BA. He is a published author or co-author on BPM, BPMN, and BA. He serves as the Chief Architect for Business Process Management, Inc. (see www.bpm.com), for whom he delivers BPM-related training and client advisory services on BPM-related matters and technologies.

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What are the skills, techniques, behaviors, and attitudes that can help BPM practitioners create value for their organizations in 2022?

BPM practitioners should expand their understanding of related disciplines (including core concepts, modeling techniques, and methodologies), strive to do deeper and more meaningful (while still relatable) process modeling and BPM-related analyses, and continue to keep current with the impacts of emerging and evolving technologies. Regarding the first point, process modelers need to improve how they define scopes for processes and activities, which increasingly will require a technology-agnostic grounding in what are the outcomes that are produced or required by associated business capabilities. This is normally the purview of Business Architecture, but better alignment of BPM work with what the business does or needs requires an interdisciplinary approach to provide business or technology solutions of meaningful and enduring value. A Business Architecture standard from the OMG should start to emerge this year that will help make this happen, and BPM practitioners should engage with any outreach along these lines. Regarding the second point, integrated use of the languages available for modeling operational behaviors (DMN/CMMN/BPMN) is slowly but inevitably marching towards a critical mass of interest and practice. BPM work can (and should) be as demanding and rewarding as any engineering discipline, but this will only happen if BPM practitioners see their work as essential (and can prove it). Regarding the last point, RPA continues to evolve, but the 1st gen technologies of automating via emulation routine and repetitive work is already maxing out in impact, so the incorporation of machine learning and AI is up next as 2nd gen technologies to extend the value proposition of RPA.

What are the best resources to learn those skills? (e.g. books, articles, courses)

Really good BPM practitioners have – by training, experience, or both – the equivalent of advanced education (akin to an MBA here in the US). This requires a serious of purpose and a commitment to learn and to do, and to learn by doing. There are several websites that provide training (including bpmtips.com), some of which cost money while others are essentially free. Too many to list here, but I’ll mention (in completely self-serving way) BPM.com and BusinessProcessIncubator.com. Books and literature are also widely available and too numerous to mention. What I suggest is that one seeks out training and reference material, try to get a sense of (if not a listing of) the source material used in the training so that the curriculum is clear as well as what certification of having learned really means. Ultimately, this is more about what matters to the practitioner than to the market.

Which skills are no longer relevant or not practically applicable yet (hype)?

Facilitation skills are not, IMO, as much in demand anymore, as BPM practitioners have become an essential expertise that is hired from without or developed within or a bit of both. In other words, BPM practitioners are increasingly expected to be THE experts to solve problems, and to do so largely on the largess of their own skills, experience, and training. This means that BPM practitioners need to be able to go the extra mile in divining the root causes of problems and to craft impactful solutions to those problems, as the client will largely see this as outsourced endeavor. This becomes high-risk, high-reward for those brave enough to keep doing it. Grounding in applied operational management theory or industrial engineering remain, IMO, essential, but they continue to be hard and/or expensive to come by. Hopefully this can change with greater access to resources.

How did covid-related changes in the business environment impact the work of BPM people?

IMO, COVID has broken the back of the old employment model that has governed how staff engage to delivery value to or on behalf of the business. We know all CLEARLY know that remote work is not only doable but can be effective. We also CLEARLY know that only knowledge workers can be the beneficiaries of this realization, as front-line service workers, first responders, and other workers who HAVE to be somewhere physically cannot. What this means for the BPM practitioner is that knowing how to outfit an effective remote workforce is now a critically needed solution for high-knowledge situations, but solutions for other workers are still needed that better enable high-touch situations. Otherwise, class divisions that are already bad will get worse. BPM should not add to this inequality but should work to bridge it, realizing that solutions have consequences. It is hard to imagine how any of these realizations would have happened without COVID exposing these things. As a society, as a species, we cannot go back to the past. We do not have that luxury in a post-pandemic world.

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Prof. Marlon Dumas

Marlon Dumas is Professor of Information Systems at University of Tartu, Estonia, and co-founder of Apromore Pty Ltd, a company dedicated to developing and delivering open-source process mining solutions. He is currently recipient of an Advanced Grant from the European Research Council with the mission of developing algorithms for automated identification and assessment of business process improvement opportunities from event data. His research in the field of business process management and process mining has led to numerous research publications, several US/EU patents, and a textbook (Fundamentals of Business Process Management) used in over 250 universities worldwide.

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What are the skills, techniques, behaviors, and attitudes that can help BPM practitioners create value for their organizations in 2022?

The need for agility and adaptability has clearly increased during pandemic times. Organizations are pushed hard to continuously monitor their processes, and to detect, preempt, and react to changes.

Not surprisingly, we see an increased attention to process mining and data-driven process management. Managers need full transparency into their process to understand how to surgically intervene in order to continuously adapt to changes in customer demand and expectations, to workforce behavior, and to other changes in the business environment. They also need to predict what will be the impact of internal and external changes, such as the impact of reduced workforce availability, supply chain disruptions, or increasing or decreasing demand for different types of products. Because of this, managers are seeing value in deploying digital twins of the organization, and particularly digital process twins.

Against this backdrop, we are seeing increased adoption of predictive and prescriptive analytics technology, which allow operational managers and process workers to foresee and to preempt issues in their processes (e.g. out of stock situations, customer churn). As we move forward inside the 2020s, predictive and prescriptive analytics, and other AI technology, will mature and drive increased business value.

What are the best resources to learn those skills? (e.g. books, articles, courses)

A data-driven company by Richard Benjamins gives a lightweight overview of what it means to run a data-driven company.

To learn from what other successful companies are doing, I recommend the book of “Business Process Management Cases” by Jan vom Brocke, Jan Mendling and Michael Rosemann, which is now available in two volumes.

To keep up with ongoing technology developments and news on process automation (but also BPM more generally), I recommend following the Linkedin account of Tolani Jaiye-Tikolo.

For Spanish-speakers, I recommend Coursera’s data-driven process optimization course in Spanish “Analítica de Procesos: Optimización desde los Datos”: https://www.coursera.org/learn/analitica-procesos-optimizacion-desde-datos

Which skills are no longer relevant or not practically applicable yet (hype)?

In an era of continuous change, there is a less pressing need to solidify and standardize processes. As a result, process standardization skills are less in vogue than they were a few years ago. This does not mean, however, that the need for these skills is gone forever. Not at all. I bet we will see them back on the table soon enough.

How did covid-related changes in the business environment impact the work of BPM people?

Covid has had two major effects. First it has made flexible and remote work a norm. Second, it has created a continuous need for adaptability. Both of these trends have heighten the need for business transparency methods and technology, including process mining and digital process twins.

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Scott Francis

Scott Francis is CEO and Co­-Founder of BP3, a BPM specialist firm focused on accelerating process innovation for customers. Scott and his team have grown BP3 into a Leader in Forrester’s Wave for BPM Services Providers, a top 10 Company in Fortune’s Great Places to Work, a top 10 company in Austin’s Fast 50, and to 120 employees worldwide. Scott is a speaker at conferences such as: bpmNEXT, BPMPortugal, and BPMCAMP, and is the primary author of BP3’s blog.

WWW: http://www.bp-3.com
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Twitter: @sfrancisatx

What are the skills, techniques, behaviors, and attitudes that can help BPM practitioners create value for their organizations in 2022?

Let’s assume this person *already* knows BPMN, knows a value stream map from a failure mode effects analysis, and they at least know when to ask for help from someone who is a six sigma guru. I think in 2022, if you’re doing process work, you need to look at adding some skills to your repertoire. First off, if you don’t know RPA yet you should learn how to do RPA with one of the top tools in the space. Each vendor has good free educational resources. Second, learn about Design with a capital D. Not “process design” – but Design. It will help change your perspective on how to build great process solutions. Third, if you aren’t facile with a programming language, take time to get passably familiar with one – javascript or python for example. Both of these are general utility-like languages with lots of use cases. Fourth, if you have the above down already, time to look at expanding your knowledge of data and analysis with R, or AI by going deep on AWS or Google or Azure services… That should be a good start for the new year! While you’re at it, read 20+ books to keep sharp! fiction, nonfiction, business – I don’t think it matters, they all help you improve your self, develop empathy and perspective. In a time when we can’t travel (much), reading is the next best thing.

What are the best resources to learn those skills? (e.g. books, articles, courses)

Most of the software vendors provide great educational content online for the self-directed learner. We’ll be offering educational options for clients this year for our own take on what matters most! This kind of offering will be helpful to clients who want to make sure their teams are all on the same page – getting the same background and educational framing to support working together on process and automation projects.

How did covid-related changes in the business environment impact the work of BPM people?

The main change is that our clients and BP3 are doing our work from anywhere now. This was true before – but with many clients wanting a certain amount of time in the office together. Now those requirements have lapsed and we do our work from quite literally anywhere, and do our connecting on Zoom and Slack and other collaboration tools.

We’ve had to learn new ways to collaborate on process designs and software design – but equally, it was needed – because even pre-pandemic our clients have national and global teams that need to be included in the process. So we see it as progress. Now the question for 2022 and 2023 – is how do we add back the more personal human connection, while retaining the benefits of working together from anywhere in the world?

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Ian Gotts

Ian is a founder of Elements.cloud, tech advisor, investor, speaker and author.

Elements.cloud helps customers clean-up, document and build their app implementations, focused on Salesforce. But valid for any low code app platform.
WWW: https://medium.com/@Q9ELEMENTS
WWW: elements.cloud
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Twitter: @iangotts

What are the skills, techniques, behaviors, and attitudes that can help BPM practitioners create value for their organizations in 2022?

1. COVID accelerated digital transformation in every organization. In the early days of COVID, a cobbled-together on-line offering was good enough, but now having an online offering is table stakes. The differentiator is execution. Can your back office deliver the promise your website is making? That requires end to end process thinking, definition and delivery through a combination of technology and people. And that means process is at the heart.

2. Low-code apps showed how you could hack together an app really quickly. That was fine when it was tactical, small or self contained. If it wasn’t right, then throw it away or tweak it. But now low-code is being used for strategic systems. Therefore we need to reinforce (or reinstate) the value of business analysis before you start building. That will be a challenge as it feels like it is slowing down innovation. But what it is doing is removing rework. It is delaying app development, but it ultimately accelerates time to value because you are building what the business needs – first time.

What are the best resources to learn those skills? (e.g. books, articles, courses)

Spending time doing the upfront analysis is called “Shift Left”. Shift Left means find the problems earlier, when they are cheaper to fix.

There is no shortage of information on how to capture requirements, map processes and write user stories. We’ve developed courses based on 20+ years experience in our Academy.elements.cloud

Also Salesforce has launched a business process mapping course as part of its certified architects program, but it is relevant to any process practitioner https://elements.cloud/2020/12/18/salesforce-training-course-endorses-upn/

Which skills are no longer relevant or not practically applicable yet (hype)?

We need on-line actionable diagrams embedded inside apps. So flowcharts are finally dead. And this is why https://elements.cloud/2020/06/08/the-evolution-of-process-diagramming-i-e-why-flowcharts-are-so-1980s/

How did covid-related changes in the business environment impact the work of BPM people?

See ans to Q1

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Paul Holmes-Higgin

Dr Paul Holmes-Higgin, Chief Product Officer and co-founder of Flowable. Previously, as co-founder and CPO of Alfresco he brought Activiti to the fore of the company’s innovation. A long-time Open Source advocate, he believes it still has an important role to play in making innovation more widely available. His PhD and background in AI gives him a deep understanding of the opportunities and realities of Machine Learning. He sees innovation around the standard models of BPM as the best way to bring together his passions for user-centred software and intelligent automation in today’s highly dynamic business and social environment.

WWW: https://flowable.com
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Twitter: @paulrhh

What are the skills, techniques, behaviors, and attitudes that can help BPM practitioners create value for their organizations in 2022?

With our customers, we’re seeing a move towards resolving end-to-end (E2E) automation problems, rather than point solutions – though point solutions may make up part of that E2E result. There’s a lot of focus on low-code, but not in a compartmentalized way it might be expressed by the market, which often separates no-code, low-code and pro-code. What businesses are asking for is the optimal approach for the problem at hand, and that changes as a project or solution evolves. We’re seeing no-code being heavily used for prototyping and departmental solutions, but then low-code when there’s more complexity (through scale, user experience, or integration), with pro-code being needed at the extremes of this (where time and money are more often acceptable). So, platforms or combinations of tools that facilitate the spectrum of no-low-pro-code solutions are attractive (by the way, we call it flow-code for short, but we would, wouldn’t we!).

One of the key capabilities that this end-to-end focus has highlighted is the easy assimilation and distribution of data. For me, business automation is all about the flow of data from and to systems and humans. Generally, in the process market we’ve been focused on process, case and decisions/rules – the “triple crown”. Data really belongs at the same level of importance. The ability to connect with databases and web services in no-code and low-code approaches is critical to delivering on the E2E no-low-pro-code opportunity. In my mind, data is the raw material extracted from systems or people to create business value. Data needs to flow through a number of stages of refinement, enrichment and evaluation to create an effective end-to-end solution. Ideally, you want the best of breed systems involved in the automation and life-cycle of the solution. That might be for process mining, machine learning, IoT and so on, or devices connecting people through chat, voice, video or augmented reality.

What are the best resources to learn those skills? (e.g. books, articles, courses)

Doing it! There’s only so much you can learn on specific technologies or techniques when it comes to applying them together in an E2E automation solution. I still believe CMMN as an open standard offers a great way to model automation end-to-end, and there’s books, articles and open source tools that can support learning of that.

Which skills are no longer relevant or not practically applicable yet (hype)?

End-to-end business automation has a couple of areas where practical reality is still behind expectations. First, Robotic Process Automation: the RPA vendors don’t seem to have grasped that their current technologies don’t meet the needs of E2E. I expected acquisitions to happen in the last year to address this, but nothing significant happened.
Second, AI/ML is still something people are hyping without telling the full story and implications. We’re starting to see this in some of the no-code, AI-driven process automation tools that are being promoted. At the end-to-end business level (and many other places), AI needs to be explainable, otherwise there’s a real risk of bias of some form or other. At a macro-level, AI that generates BPMN, CMMN or DMN is good, as a human can inspect and adjust the machine learnt logic. At a micro-level, black box machine learning is very useful, but can’t be taken as magic – its implications need to be understood in the context they’re used.

How did covid-related changes in the business environment impact the work of BPM people?

These BPM people suddenly had many more projects they were asked to deliver on – and in shorter timescales! This really accentuated the no-code and low-code buzz that was already starting to happen. For some companies, they’d already started adopting and adapting their approach to process-rich automation, so it just accelerated that. For others, the covid situation drove them to introduce formal processes to adjust to remote and auditable working; also to consider process agility for more frequent absence of staff; and automation adaptability to even more rapidly changing markets and regulations.

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Adeel Javed

Adeel Javed is an intelligent automation architect, an author, and a speaker. He helps organizations automate work using low-code, business process management (BPM), robotic process automation (RPA), analytics, integrations, and ML. He loves exploring new technologies and writing about them. He has published two books with Apress, “Building Arduino Projects for the Internet of Things: Experiments with Real-World Applications” and “Robotic Process Automation using UiPath StudioX: A Citizen Developer’s Guide to Hyperautomation”. He shares his thoughts on various technology trends on his blog (adeeljaved.com).

WWW: https://adeeljaved.com
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Twitter: @processrambling

What are the skills, techniques, behaviors, and attitudes that can help BPM practitioners create value for their organizations in 2022?

In my opinion, understanding of what I refer to as the Automation Stack will be very important. While orchestration is still the central component of this stack, we need to think beyond the traditional human-input tasks, and API-based system integrations. I would recommend exploring these areas.
• Robotic Automation: The hype might no longer be there, but RPA is still a necessity. The ability to integrate with legacy systems that do not support APIs, or systems that are hard to integrate with (due to numerous constraints) is extremely important to digitalize processes.
• Intelligent Document Processing: Still a bit clunky, but the ability to process documents intelligently can reduce a lot of manual work.
• Next Best Action: Most platforms now connect with some sort of AI services that can be used to augment human tasks with next best action recommendations.
• Process Mining: Not there yet, but it is definitely coming up, and is a good skill to get into now.
• Agile: Nothing new, but the ability to better breakdown process automation projects into user stories is still a challenge, so mastering this skill will be very beneficial.

Which skills are no longer relevant or not practically applicable yet (hype)?

I do believe that most of the standards (such as BPMN, CMMN, DMN) have not really been adopted really well, and I do not see them being very relevant at this point.

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Dr. Mathias Kirchmer

Dr. Kirchmer is an experienced practitioner and thought leader in the field of Business Process Management (BPM) and Digital Transformation. He co-founded BPM-D, a consulting company focusing on delivering performance improvements and appropriate digitalization by establishing and applying the discipline of BPM. Before he was Managing Director and Global Lead of BPM at Accenture, and CEO of the Americas and Japan of IDS Scheer, known for its ARIS Software.

Dr. Kirchmer has led numerous transformation and process improvement initiatives in various industries at clients around the world. He has published 11 books and over 150 articles. At the University of Pennsylvania and at Widener University he has served as affiliated faculty for over 15 years. He received a research and teaching fellowship from the Japan Society for the Promotion of Science.
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WWW: http://bpm-d.com
Twitter: @mtki2006

Business Process Management – Predictions for 2022

Business Process Management (BPM) continues to drive value from digital transformation and becomes the management discipline to keep the transformation journey going – while getting digitalized itself. Here are four key trends and predictions I see for 2022:

• Process-led Digital Transformation: Digital technologies delivers value through new and enhanced business processes. Therefore, digital transformation is best organized through a process lens. The discipline of business process management (BPM) enables process-led digital transformation using an appropriate “process of process management”. Organizations will keep on increasing their focus on establishing and applying the required BPM-Discipline as “value-switch” for the digital world.

• Digitalization of the Process of Process Management: To achieve the agility and effectivity required in a digital world, business process management (BPM) goes through a digital transformation itself. The Process of process management is implemented through an integrated set of digital tools, such as process prioritization tools, process modelling and repository applications, or process mining environments. These tools are increasingly integrated with underlying process automation platforms and software applications. Organizations select their “ERP for BPM” and implement it in an outcome-driven way in the context of specific improvement and transformation initiatives. This value-driven digitalization of BPM leads to rapid business benefits while building a sustainable process management capability; the BPM-Discipline.

• Innovation through Business Process Management: Business Process Management (BPM) is not just applied to deliver efficiency to drive innovation. It is used to achieve process innovation, leveraging techniques like customer journey mapping or software-based reference models and the definition of related process scenarios. This serves to identify, design, and realize new and significantly enhanced processes, fast and reliably. BPM allows to apply design thinking pragmatically and action oriented. In addition, the BPM-Discipline is used to establish and manage a suitable innovation process, realizing goals like an increased number of high-quality innovation projects, reduced time-to-market, reliable cycle time estimations, or an early identification of potential roadblocks.

• Governance for the Digitalization and Transformation Journey: Digital transformation is not just a project or program. It is an ongoing journey. The right business process management (BPM) discipline helps to organize this journey. It defines strategy-based priorities, manages the resulting project portfolio, runs the process transformation initiatives, and realizes the value of those projects. BPM organizes the required process governance to align people and digital technologies to achieve best value for the organization. Organizations establish the BPM-Discipline to master the digitalization and transformation journey.

Highly specialized consulting organizations, such as BPM-D and Scheer Management, industry organizations, for example, ABPMP and the BPM Institute, or academic institutions, e.g. Widener University and the University of Pennsylvania, provide focused education regarding those trends. They also offer readings and eLearning opportunities though their web pages. Software vendors, such as SAP/Signavio, Software AG/ARIS or Celonis, provide tool-specific training.

Traditional, manually applied process excellence tools and approaches continue to lose in significance. They increasingly struggle to follow the pace of change in a digital world. However, the basic thinking that approaches like Lean or Six Sigma provide is still true and valid. It just must be incorporated in a modern, digitally enabled process management discipline.

The pandemic has accelerated and shaped the development of this BPM-Discipline. It has pushed process management practitioners to adjust and digitalized their working style quickly. This resulted, for example, in effective remote process capture and design sessions where the related process models are developed live in virtual sessions, leveraging user friendly modelling and collaboration tools. Process mining approaches are used more widely, enabled through the higher degree of process automation. The required remote work of process practitioner encourages the more formal definition of the “process of process management” with its organizational structure. All in all, Covid has helped to transform BPM even faster into a value-driven and digitally enabled process management discipline.

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Mirko Kloppenburg

Hi, I am Mirko Kloppenburg. Together with my wife and our two daughters, I live in Hamburg, Germany.

For more than 20 years, I have been working for Lufthansa Group in various process management positions. Currently, I am heading the Methods & Tools team for Process Excellence and we are providing process management expertise to the whole Lufthansa Group.

In parallel to my job at Lufthansa, I founded NewProcessLab.com in 2021. NewProcessLab.com is a platform to build a community, to perform experiments, and to share experiences along the New Process approach. New Process is a symbiosis of New Work and BPM and aims to rethink processes. It adds a human-centric mindset to the already proven BPM tools and methods we know from the past.

The year 2022 will bring a big change for me personally, as I will be leaving Lufthansa to concentrate fully on New Process. So, I am looking forward to an exciting year and I would like to invite you to join the New Process community, to build the future of process management, and to rethink processes together!

WWW: NewProcessLab.com
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What are the skills, techniques, behaviors, and attitudes that can help BPM practitioners create value for their organizations in 2022?

For me, the core skill to make a valuable contribution to an organization with BPM is clearly the knowledge on how to implement a structured process management process. By this I mean a procedure for translating the organization’s business strategy into specific processes and bringing them to life. I would go even further here and recommend a holistic transformation approach that considers the purpose of the organization and the individual processes to truly inspire people.

Inspiring people to create excellent processes is one of the New Process principles that are integrated into the New Process Life Cycle. The New Process Life Cycle is an approach to implement exactly the mentioned capabilities in an organization. It is about putting people at the center of process management, trusting them, empowering them, and taking their individual strengths and needs into account.

By the way, New Process can also be combined very well with Process Mining, which is certainly a topic mentioned by many for 2022. Process mining can be used to identify improvement potentials within process strategy and process design phase of the New Process Life Cycle. To interpret the results and derive measures, it is important to also involve the people who work in the process. After all, they are the true experts on the process, and this should be used to further develop the process and implement the changes in a sustainable manner. #NewProcess

And there is another thing that I expect to be an emerging theme in 2022: We will see more and more of the tools and methods used by influencers applied to specific business processes or to BPM in an organization. Process Influencers, so to speak. People who specialize in creating content for the respective process community within an organization: Process related podcasts, videos, events…

I see a great potential to use these influencer tools and methods in BPM and thus to support the transformation process. To push this approach of inspiring people further, I will certainly start some activities.

What are the best resources to learn those skills? (e.g. books, articles, courses)

You will find a lot of information about New Process on NewProcessLab.com. There is a toolbox with methods and tools along the New Process Life Cycle available.
But of course, I don’t just want to advertise on my own behalf. Beyond New Process, I discovered the “Mining Your Business”- Podcast a few months ago and I can highly recommend the interviews of Patrick Bogner and Jakub Dvořák. – By the way, episode 22 of their podcast series is dealing with New Process, too.

Which skills are no longer relevant or not practically applicable yet (hype)?

For me, everything that has to do with “higher, faster, further” is obsolete. In my view, it is time to push human-centric BPM instead. I am so bored of budget discussions and counting FTEs. I wish we can make a positive impact with BPM that really touches and inspires people.

How did covid-related changes in the business environment impact the work of BPM people?

Business topics can be discussed remotely without any problems, but interpersonal topics often get missed out. That’s why I’m really hoping to be able to hold workshops in person again soon.

As long as this is not the case, I would especially recommend following the New Process Principles and to focus on the people working in and on the process. #NewProcess

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Holly Lyke-Ho-Gland

Building on more than 10 years of business research and consulting experience, Holly Lyke-Ho-Gland is a principal research lead who conducts and publishes APQC research on process management and improvement, quality, project management, measurement, and benchmarking for APQC’s Process and Performance Management research team. Her research supports APQC members and clients across disciplines and centers on helping professionals and project managers solve business problems with strategy, process and measurement.

Holly regularly partners with other APQC research leads to look at improving the end-to-end business processes in areas such as procure-to-pay or order-to-cash where true improvement rests in the entire process versus one functional department. On a biannual basis, she conducts APQC’s extensive research survey and report on The Value of Benchmarking as well as annual surveys and reports on how organizations adopt and use the Process Classification Framework®.

WWW: https://www.apqc.org
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What are the skills, techniques, behaviors, and attitudes that can help BPM practitioners create value for their organizations in 2022?

Knowledge management is rapidly moving beyond a nice to have skill for BPM practitioners. Processes by themselves—even augmented through technology—will only take organizations so far. Instead, they need to be connected to all the relevant process knowledge (e.g., business rules, best practices, and expertise). Over the last couple of years, have seen the divide between process and knowledge disciplines shrink. Knowledge management professionals are partnering with BPM professionals to integrate process into their work. They are also partnering so they can help connect employees to the knowledge they need in the flow of their work. While BPM professionals want to ensure they capture, curate, and ensure accessibility of all relevant process knowledge. Hence, why these days it’s much more common to see BPM teams that will include a knowledge management expert to help them manage their process content. Furthermore in research on productivity, we found that process and knowledge (preferably working together) are vital for virtual work environments.

So much of BPM work relies on people. Hence facilitation and relationship building skills are more important than ever. The virtual nature of BPM work requires professionals to not only re-hone their facilitation skills but become much more purposeful in building relationships with people within the business.

What are the best resources to learn those skills? (e.g. books, articles, courses)

There are a lot of great books and resources out there on knowledge management:
• APQC: Knowledge Management
• KM World
• New Edge in Knowledge: How Knowledge Management is Changing the Way We do Business by Carla O’Dell and Cindy Hubert
• Thinking for a Living: How to Get Better Performances And Results from Knowledge Workers by Tom Davenport

Which skills are no longer relevant or not practically applicable yet (hype)?

Skills don’t ever really lose their applicability; they just evolve and serve as the foundations for new skills.

How did covid-related changes in the business environment impact the work of BPM people?

Covid-related changes had two big impacts on the work of BPM people. First it has helped bring process work to the forefront. Though teams still conduct a lot of work looking at cost and productivity improvements, they are also being tapped for an array of strategic work—supporting the execution of strategic objectives, organizational transformation, and large-scale technology implementations.

The second major impact is the ubiquitous of technologies. Gone are the days of a group of SMEs huddled together in a workshop using post its or whiteboards. Today BPM professionals are deft at leveraging collaboration tools—to substitute the conference rooms—and digital whiteboards to map out processes. Not only has Covid made technologies more necessary, but it has also spurred vendors to make them easier to use. In our recent priorities survey BPM professionals indicate that collaboration platforms, data visualization tools, and automation are the top technologies intrinsic to their process work.

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Brian Reale

Brian Reale is a serial entrepreneur. Brian founded a telecommunications company in 2000 called Unete Telecomunicaciones which provided, voice, data, and satellite services in Latin America. Brian sold Unete to a publicly traded US telecom company in 2000. Brian was also the co-founder of Spotless LLC, an entertainment technology company that developed projection mapping technology for major live entertainment industries.

Brian has been involved in the workflow and BPM industry since he co-founded ProcessMaker in 2000. ProcessMaker is a leading open source BPM suite which has just released its 4th generation product – a modern lightweight BPM designed for both human tasks and microservices orchestration. The ProcessMaker BPMS has been recognized with numerous awards and pushes the bounds of BPM with a fundamental belief that process management can be simple, elegant, and easy to use.

Brian graduated magna cum laude from Duke University in 1993 and was awarded a Fulbright scholarship in linguistics in Ecuador in 1994.

WWW: https://www.processmaker.com
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Twitter: @breale
Twitter: @processmaker

What are the skills, techniques, behaviors, and attitudes that can help BPM practitioners create value for their organizations in 2022?

I tend to like the Gartner concept of the “Composable Business” when thinking about BPM. The idea of monolithic iBPMs suites is basically dead. Sophisticated companies want to use a composable architecture to build around a best in class process orchestration engine. They want to be able to choose their low code front end technologies, their favorite RPA and iPaas vendors, plugin in a best in breed document storage, and use AI/ML in a variety of places. In one word, customers want freedom. I think that BPM practitioners need to embrace this freedom and become well versed in many different plugin technologies.

What are the best resources to learn those skills? (e.g. books, articles, courses)

The best resources are free-trials, online tutorials, and vendor documentation. Practitioners need to test and try before they buy. The absolute best resource for this is Github. Fork some code and implement something yourself. Demand openness from your vendors.

Which skills are no longer relevant or not practically applicable yet (hype)?

Small data. In other words, you really need big data skills to make sense of where all technology trends are leading today. AI and ML will soon be making most decisions for us in most systems. Practitioners need to really understand these trends and where they are heading.

How did covid-related changes in the business environment impact the work of BPM people?

The real change from COVID is the change to the labor force. The fact is that it is now very difficult to find the right people with the right skills for many types of jobs. As a result, the demand for automation has sky-rocketed. We will look back in 5 years and see that the Great Resignation really was the moment of the Great Start for AI/ML. The one is the exact replacement of the others. We have always talked about AI & ML replacing humans. It makes perfect sense that this really started happening in earnest during the year that all the humans decided to stop working. It is sad, but true.

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Adrian Reed

Adrian Reed is a true advocate of the analysis profession. In his day job, he acts as Principal Consultant and Director at Blackmetric Business Solutions where he provides business analysis consultancy and training solutions to a range of clients in varying industries. He is a Past President of the UK chapter of the IIBA® and he speaks internationally on topics relating to business analysis and business change. Adrian wrote the 2016 book ‘Be a Great Problem Solver… Now’ and the 2018 book ‘Business Analyst’

You can read Adrian’s blog at http://www.adrianreed.co.uk and follow him on Twitter at http://twitter.com/UKAdrianReed

WWW: http://www.adrianreed.co.uk
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What are the skills, techniques, behaviors, and attitudes that can help BPM practitioners create value for their organizations in 2022?

My angle on this is probably different to some of the other contributors, in that my background is in business analysis rather than BPM specifically. However one trend that seems to have been accelerating at pace over the past few years is that of product ownership and product management. Now, “what does this have to do with process management” I hear you say! One of the challenges is how the two interact.

For example, imagine an organization has several market-facing business units, each with several products/services. There are several product managers and product owners. They have deep expertise in those markets and know what their customers want, but in order for those products/services to be delivered in a sustainable and efficient manner there will probably be processes that flow across the organization. This is nothing new of course, but the move towards a product-centric paradigm means we need to spend more time than ever thinking about the process and enterprise-wide implications of making a seemingly small change in one area.

So, in terms of skills and attitudes, I think it’s very much about working with stakeholders and helping them to take a step back and zoom out, considering the internal and external factors. Again this is nothing new, but it perhaps highlights the importance of a core set of skills.

What are the best resources to learn those skills? (e.g. books, articles, courses)

There are so many resources out there, generally, about BPM, business analysis and more. Formal learning, such as courses, is one option, and the pandemic has meant that many providers offer online options now.

However, there are also many excellent blogs (including BPMTips of course!) and youtube channels too. So for me, a blend of formal and informal learning is key. But to make this really hit home it’s important to actually use the techniques that are learned. So doing it alongside the day job, to enhance the day job, is key. On a personal level, that’s how I learn best.

Which skills are no longer relevant or not practically applicable yet (hype)?

I’m not really sure, as so much is context dependent. I tend to think that really all of the core skills are pretty important. I sometimes see hype and argument over particular technical tools, but I think that’s largely a distraction to most practitioners!

How did covid-related changes in the business environment impact the work of BPM people?

Well, speaking personally as a business analyst, it meant that I’ve moved very much to a “virtual first” practice. Tools like Mural or Miro are very helpful in running collaborative workshops, and have the advantage that many people can contribute at once (many people can ‘hold the virtual pen’).

I also think Covid showed the importance of BPM. I’m a true believer that if you have a well-formed and well-maintained process architecture then change is easy. Put differently: If you know what you do today and how you do it, then working out how to change and the impact of change is easier.

With a fast-moving business environment, there will always be unexpected events. I believe BPM is a key ingredient in the business agility that many organizations seek.

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Pedro Robledo

President and co-founder of the Spanish chapter of ABPMP International. One of the main referents with the greatest influence in Process Management using the BPM (Business Process Management) management discipline, with +20 years dedicated to promoting knowledge of Business Process Management in Spain and Latin America. Director of the Master’s Degree in BPM for Digital Transformation and Director of the Master’s Degree in Strategic Process Management at the International University of La Rioja (UNIR). And professor of the MBA and executive MBA of UNIR. BPM consultant who helps organizations in their BPM initiatives, Digital Transformation, BPM maturity diagnosis, BPM ROI calculation, BPM supplier selection, training and advice on BPMN process modeling and DMN decisions, and roadmap advice BPM for the advancement of BPM implementation. Director of BPMteca. Computer Engineer from the Polytechnic University of Madrid. He has made his professional career as a manager in multinational software companies such as Borland International, Ask Group, Computer Associates, Progress Software, Teamware and Oracle. Since 2013 he has participated as a jury in the international WfMC Awards for Excellence in BPM and Workflow until the end of WfMC. He writes about BPM and Digital Transformation on his blog: “The White Paper on Process Management”, http://pedrorobledobpm.blogspot.com.es/ and regularly contributes to other blogs and magazines.

WWW: pedrorobledobpm.blogspot.com.es
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Twitter: @pedrorobledoBPM

What are the skills, techniques, behaviors, and attitudes that can help BPM practitioners create value for their organizations in 2022?

In 2022, automation is the main objective of all industries. But automation should not considered as technical project, but rather the consequence of a rigorous study on the improvement of a process in accordance with the company’s annual strategies. But before improving a process, it is necessary to study the efficiency, and efficacy and effectiveness of the process, and the maturity of the process, and if the company has enough maturity of transformation capabilities to make that process change now.

The BPM CoE must have BPM people with sufficient technical, management, transformation and operational skills to execute 12 BPM Maturity analyses around the 7 key pillars of BPM discipline:
1.- Analysis of the level of alignment of the processes to the business strategy, carrying out predictive, proactive and reactive management of the business in real time, seeking operational excellence.
2. Analysis of the level of documentation through modelling, process mining and automation of business processes
3. Process Maturity Analysis (PEMM)
4. Analysis of the application of BPM Technologies for the different roles that participate in Process Management throughout the BPM Life Cycle.
5. Analysis of matrix organization
6. Analysis of the BPM team
7. Analysis of the level of knowledge and skills in BPM of the different roles that participate in BPM initiatives
8. Analysis of BPM team management in reference to the metamodel used, and the application of standards and guides for the proper use of good practices of Process Management.
9. Analysis of the level of use of formal BPM methodologies, well defined and repeatable to carry out BPM and its continuous improvement in the different phases of the Life Cycle of a BPM process
10. Business Culture Analysis towards process orientation
11. Enterprise Transformation Capability Maturity Analysis (PEMM)
12. Innovation Culture Analysis (e.g. J.Rao & J.Weintraub)
If any company performs these 12 analyses every year, they will be able to define their appropriate training roadmap to improve in the BPM discipline and be ready to improve the processes on which the corporate strategy and practice of Enterprise Architecture decide to focus.

On that roadmap, all companies will include the needs to improve on these core skills:
– Business Process Automation Platforms or BPMS
– Robotic Process Automation (RPA)
– Artificial Intelligence/Machine Learning
– Decision Model & Notation (DMN) 1.4 (as OMG will be published in Q1)
– Process Mining and Task Mining
– Optimization and Improvement Methodologies (Lean, SixSigma and Theory of Constraints)
– Business Process Simulation (BPS)
– Enterprise Architecture

What are the best resources to learn those skills? (e.g. books, articles, courses)

The need for BPM professionals worldwide and especially in Spain and Latin America is growing 13% in 2022 (14% estimated in 2024) and more than 66% of the positions demanded in Business Process Management (BPM) are not currently being covered yet.
The need for professionals and employment opportunities are forcing specialization to achieve specific competencies on BPM discipline and throughout the BPM life cycle: a) There will be greater interest in specialized master’s studies in Management BY Processes and Operational Excellence; b) There will be increased interest in international professional certifications such as those awarded by ABPMP International (Association of BPM Professionals) and OMG (Object Management Group); and, c) More and more knowledge and experience are required in BPM discipline, Automation, BPMS, RPA, Process Mininng, BPMN / DMN, ROI and AI. To help on this, I contribute as director of two online University courses in Spanish for postgraduates in UNIR (Universidad Internacional de la Rioja based in Spain and Latam): Master’s Degree in Business Process Management for Digital Transformation, which covers the entire BPM life cycle, focusing not only on the Business part, but with an extensive scope in the BPM Technology part and its key role in the Digital Transformation of an organization; and Master’s Degree in Strategic Process Management which covers the advanced knowledge about the tools, methodologies and techniques necessary to study the changes on the Enterprise Architecture and achieve the excellence of the operations and processes of any organization, contributing both to its growth and its continuous and sustained development.
ABPMP chapters will push the ABPMP’s BPM CBOK to maintain the global standard for BPM practices and certification.
As BPM consultant I will help companies in Spain and Latam by providing ad-hoc BPM Learning-by-doing training to help companies in their growth on their business process maturity.

In my blog (http://pedrorobledobpm.blogspot.com.es), I have some posts with bibliography by BPM topics, videos and articles about BPM discipline. And anyone can consult the calendar of BPM events on my blog http://pedrorobledobpm.blogspot.com/p/eventos-bpm.html since I include all the BPM events that I discover from Associations, Suppliers, Consulting and my own webinars, so it is possible to be updated by BPM industry experts every week.

Which skills are no longer relevant or not practically applicable yet (hype)?

As Business Process Management is a management discipline, all BPM skills are relevant and they are applicable yet, although it is required to improve continuously the BPM skills with the new trends, best practices and learned lessons.
All Business Activity Monitoring (BAM) skills are obsolete and instead of BAM anyone should focus on Process Mining in BPMS.

How did covid-related changes in the business environment impact the work of BPM people?

Changes related to covid are impacting the work of BPM people like any other job. But growing digitization and automation requirements means BPM people need to learn the skills they need to succeed on projects faster, as companies often have to reinvent themselves, needing to respond to unprecedented dynamism, where innovation must be continuous to survive. The BPM skills now are more required if any company wants to be process oriented and implement innovations. Telework will remain in companies, further boosting the need to digitize processes, which will imply an advance in the adoption of digital technologies and driving the next wave of disruption, agility and productivity in the digital company.

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Tomislav Rozman

Dr. Tomislav Rozman is a founder of consultancy company BICERO Ltd. He is also designing online courses related to BPM, CRM, IT and teaching and mentoring Masters’ students at DOBA Faculty of applied business and social studies Maribor, Slovenia.

He enjoys teaching people about BPM and he has performed projects of implementing BPM in Slovenian companies, public administration organizations and SMEs.

In his free time, he is a runner, guitar & ukulele player and psychology counsellor.

WWW: http://www.bicero.com
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Twitter: @tomirozman

What is the relation between covid and BPM?

In the last year, covid uncovered the same old problems which caused many digital transformation (or, society transformation) initiatives failing in the past: you can not automate (change) what you don’t understand.

The public sector, educational institutions and companies in my country (Slovenia) wanted to quickly deploy IT solutions during the pandemics such as remote learning and work, but many efforts failed or had serious flaws. I was observing some examples of IT development from Slovenia: covid-tracker app, call centre for municipalities system, PCR app.. and transition to remote work in general.
Example 1: Covid tracker app. released by the state had initially many technical flaws, later it wasn’t efficient because the encompassing process was missing. Nobody took time and thought about the process around the app.: how to issue TAN codes, how to persuade people to use it, what to do with the results, how to report bugs etc. The result was low trust in the app and low acceptance rate, somehow affecting higher infection rates.

The next example: Call centre reservation system for municipalities (also initiated by the public administration) was retracted a few days ago because of poor information security. Nobody took time to prepare a proper system requirements specification which resulted in the system being publicly available only for a few days.

Next, remote work in companies took more than a year to catch up. We have done a small research about the remote work acceptance (https://www.bicero.com/projects/remoteworkr) and found out the biggest challenges transitioning to remote work during the pandemic were: lack of social contacts, information security, poorly defined processes and responsibilities, poor communication.

Next, our government issued (at the time of writing) already a 10th package of decrets, which are often in conflict with the previous ones and not many people can properly decipher it. The reason? The creators don’t think in terms of long-running processes, business rules, exceptions, process flow.

What have all these examples to do with BPM? Everything! Without the systematic and structured thinking and setting the solid foundations, systems (IT or people) tend to become chaotic.

Did we learn anything from it? Probably not. Could a more structured and systematic thinking help? Probably, but only rare people have the skills, the capacity and the mental bandwidth to deal with it.
Therefore I still persist in advocating and teaching people how to deal with the complexity of the world.

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Serge Schiltz

Serge Schiltz is CEO and founder of processCentric GmbH, a European consulting and training firm focused on business process management. With his extensive practical experience as a senior consultant working with clients on their BPM challenges in different industries, he has been able to build a solid reputation over the past decades. Author, trainer, university lecturer and conference speaker in English, German and French. Member of OMG’s DMN Task Force and contributor to the OMG Certified Expert in BPM (OCEB) examination. He is also a ABPMP DACH Chapter event management volunteer and Swiss eGovernment (eCH) BPM Task Force Member.

WWW: https://www.processcentric.ch/en
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What are the skills, techniques, behaviors, and attitudes that can help BPM practitioners create value for their organizations in 2022?

I see business process management with its wide range of perspectives as the focal point of all management disciplines. As it touches every little facet of an organization, BPM practitioners can make a substantial contribution to an organization’s success at the strategic as well as the operational levels. But it is important for them to understand business needs and management’s concerns. It is not sufficient any more to just create models and deploy these to business process and rules engines. We need to position ourselves as value-enabling consultants helping management create transparency, shape strategy, design and implement operations. This requires not only targeted BPM training, but also management, leadership and communication skills.

What are the best resources to learn those skills? (e.g. books, articles, courses)

I very much appreciate the wide and practice-oriented curriculum of OMG’s Expert in BPM (OCEB) certifications. They cover important literature with an extremely wide range of topics, specifically for BPM, but also business and technology. And practice, practice, practice … have a lot of profound discussions with diverse colleagues, not only in the BPM area.

Which skills are no longer relevant or not practically applicable yet (hype)?

All BPM skills that we have acquired in the past remain important and can be combined with new approaches to create even more value. However, obsession with any of these is counterproductive. Remember those Six Sigma Black Belts who threw statistics at every unsignificant data sample? And there some more recent additions to the BPM toolset like CMMN. Great many do not yet understand its potential, but I am pretty convinced that in the long run, it will gain in importance … but I will not be religious about it.

What is the role of process-related skills in the “new normal”?

Business processes are everywhere, whatever we do is a business process … almost! More and more, regulators insist on transparency in what we do (process documentation), customers require satisfaction (voice of the customer), shareholders expect profits (efficiency), the IT development cycle speed is ever increasing (model-based development), etc. Every role in an organization needs process-related skills. In particular, as working at home and/or outside the office is becoming the “new normal”, we don’t systematically have office mates who we can ask how to do things, so we need well designed and clearly defined business processes that we can rely on.

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Jim Sinur

Jim Sinur is an independent thought leader in applying Digital Business Platforms (DBP), Customer Experience/Journeys (CJM), Business Process Management (BPM), Automation (RPA), Low-code and Decision Management at the edge for enhanced business outcomes. His research and areas of personal experience focus on intelligent business processes, business modeling, results oriented communications (ROC), real tine data feedback with heterogeneous data types, business process management technologies, smart process collaboration for knowledge workers, process intelligence/optimization, AI applied to business policy/rule management, IoT and leveraging business applications in processes. Jim was a contributor to Forbes in the area of AI. Jim is also one of the authors of BPM: The Next Wave. His latest book is Digital Transformation. Innovate or Die Slowly. Jim’s personal blog is approaching one million hits to date. Jim is also a well know digital and traditional artist.

WWW: https://www.forbes.com/sites/cognitiveworld/people/jimsinur/
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Twitter: @JimSinur

What are the skills, techniques, behaviors, and attitudes that can help BPM practitioners create value for their organizations in 2022?

There are a number of skills that BPM folks could pick up as there are many coming out of the digital evolution, but my top seven would be the following:
1) Journey Mapping for Customers, Employees and Partners including touchpoint analysis and persona creation.
2) Embedded Advanced Analytic and Visualization Capabilities. Process plus big, fast and dark process/data mining is growing to be more important. Decision Models will become more important as the integrate with process models
3) Adaptive and Goal Driven Processes (often in Case Management and also Explicit Rule enabled) driven by process/data mining with real time feedback.
4) AI looking for opportunities to add automation or more smarts like Robotic Program Automation (RPA). Machine learning is hot and Deep Learning is starting to gain momentum.
5) Cognitive Collaboration for Knowledge Intense Processes or Cases. AI Assistance is starting
6) Signal and Pattern Detection at the edge (often needed for agility, IoT and business strategy). IoT integration is a new emerging theme. This can be taken to the level of digital twins and by merging control on a the edge with central control.
7) Business Professional Process creation, adaptation and optimization by leveraging lite BPM/workflow, Process/Data Mining utilizing Low code and AI.

Which skills are no longer relevant or not practically applicable yet (hype)?

While there are no skills that one should drop, there are several that are considered common and receding. My top three would be the following:
1) Central Control only approaches with siloed skill sets. More lateral thinking is and collaborative control is needed today.
2) Water Fall project methods are taking a second seat to incremental development, RPA and rapid experimentation,
3) Large blocks of dumb frozen code are giving way to smart components, micro services and late binding rules guided by constraints.

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James Taylor

James is founder and CEO of Decision Management Solutions and a leading expert in decision management and digital decisioning. Experienced working with machine learning, business rules, predictive analytics and AI to improve operational systems. Published author – Digital Decisioning: Using Decision Management to Deliver Business Impact from AI, Real-World Decision Modeling with DMN and others – strategy consultant, writer and speaker.

WWW: http://jtonedm.com
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Twitter: @jamet123

What are the skills, techniques, behaviors, and attitudes that can help BPM practitioners create value for their organizations in 2022?

The best thing I think BPM practitioners could do would be to embrace digital decisioning. We have been digitizing our businesses for a long time now and have succeeded in digitizing our channels, our data and our processes. But too often we are failing to digitize the decisions that use our digital data, support our digital channels and drive our digital processes straight through most efficiently.
Digital decisioning is a way to deliver smarter, simpler and more dynamic processes while effectively applying predictive analytics, machine learning and AI – not to the process itself, but to the critical decisions on which the process relies. Digital decisioning involves identifying and modeling decisions, automating them in decision services that combine machine learning with business rules, and creating a continuous improvement infrastructure for them. It delivers consistent, easy to manage, precise and data-driven decisioning throughout your business.

What are the best resources to learn those skills? (e.g. books, articles, courses)

Obviously I think my new book Digital Decisioning: Using Decision Management to Deliver Business Impact from AI is the best resource for Digital Decisioning but there are also some great papers from Forrester and some good resources from Gartner too (under their Decision Management topic). My blog and company blog have plenty on this topic too.

Which skills are no longer relevant or not practically applicable yet (hype)?

Attempting to apply business rules, predictive analytics or machine learning/AI directly to business processes should count as irrelevant these days. While you can apply these technologies to processes directly, the evidence that they work so much better when applied to automate and manage decision-making explicitly is overwhelming. Applying a decision management approach with the Decision Model and Notation (DMN) standard and delivering digital decisioning is the future.

It’s also time to retire process capability maps and assessments that don’t consider decisions as first class components of your business architecture. It’s no longer viable to inventory processes – even at Level 0 – without explicitly also inventorying decisions. AI, machine learning and a renewed focus on decision-making (digital decisioning, decision management, decision intelligence) all require that an organization understand its decisions as well as its processes. Decisions are not just part of operational processes, they are a key element of business architecture.

How did covid-related changes in the business environment impact the work of BPM people?

We saw many companies realize how many of their systems and processes relied implicitly on people being collocated or at least all in an office of some kind. Unpicking that and building processes that worked for remote and hybrid workforces generated some interesting projects for BPM folks. We’re now seeing those companies realize that they don’t understand the decision-making of the people left in the loop well enough to optimize it. These forward-looking companies are asking us to review their processes for critical decisions so they can prioritize decision automation projects and identify processes that need a decision-centric re-design.

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Roger Tregear

Roger Tregear spends his working life talking, consulting, thinking, presenting, recording, and writing about the analysis, innovation, improvement, and management of business processes. He helps organizations improve performance.
As Principal Advisor at TregearBPM Roger provides business process management consulting, training, and coaching services. 36 years’ experience as a business, management, and IT consultant means that he has well-developed insights into business improvement and problem resolution.
Roger’s practice and client base are global with assignments completed in Australia, Bahrain, Belgium, Jordan, Namibia, Nigeria, Netherlands, Saudi Arabia, South Africa, South Korea, Switzerland, New Zealand, United Arab Emirates, UK, and USA.
Roger writes, presents, and records on many topics related to process-based management. That material can be accessed via https://bit.ly/TregearBPM_Resources.

WWW: https://www.tregearbpm.com
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Twitter: @rogertregear

What are the skills, techniques, behaviors, and attitudes that can help BPM practitioners create value for their organizations in 2022?

I always struggle with questions like this because it invites a perception of a level of similarity and uniformity in the ‘BPM space’ that’s just not there. Even “BPM practitioners” will mean many different things in different organizations—it could (and should) apply to some or all the work of everyone in the organization, and that work is going to be very different if you are the CEO or the RPA expert.

I’ll answer just from my ‘place in the space’ which is defined by the idea that the M is BPM is for management. I prefer the term process-based management which I define as:
Continuous management of the hierarchy of processes by which value is created, accumulated, and delivered, with the active intention of optimizing process performance through mindful, continuous improvement.

So, what capabilities and mindsets are needed to give that a good chance of working well and sustainably:
• Primary need is to be able to see that every organization creates, accumulates, and delivers value across the organization via cross-functional business processes. For some, that is obvious, and they get it immediately. Others, not so much. If this idea doesn’t resonate with you then you aren’t doing process-based management. You might be doing process improvement (aka fixing stuff), but that’s only half the story (see my definition).
• Facilitating conversations about cross-functional collaborative management might require advanced interpersonal skills. Everyone is happy to sign up for continuous improvement but not so much for its prerequisite, continuous problem finding.
I can see that the rest of you have lots of problems, but my area is working just find thank you very much.
• To optimize process performance, you need to love process measurement. It may not be your absolute favorite activity but defining, tracking, and responding to PKPIs must be at least in your top 10, maybe your top 5.
• You need a burning desire to really understand what makes high-impact processes tick—why are they important, to whom, what does good look like, how can they be improved, what would exceptional look like, what is the current performance, what should it be, what will it be, what could it be, etc. And all that long before changes are made to the process.
• We need the ability to choose wisely which processes to analyze, manage, and improve. It’s simply not possible to get optimum organizational performance by improving the wrong processes, and it’s not possible to improve them all.
There does need to be a central team (BPM team, Center of Excellence etc.) with advanced skills and experience, but they can’t (and should not) do it all, so these skills need to exist to varying degrees across the organization.

What are the best resources to learn those skills? (e.g. books, articles, courses)

All the above and everything else.

Only a small fraction of the needed whole-of-organization development will happen naturally or organically. We need a BPM Capability Development Plan (capability = experience and expertise) that lays out how process-based management capabilities will be developed and maintained at a useful level for all cohorts in the organization. This doesn’t need to be complicated, but it does need to exist. I would structure it using the 7Enablers of BPM (obvs) and define the capability gaps and then make plans to close those gaps.

How did covid-related changes in the business environment impact the work of BPM people?

It would be nice to think that COVID has been a massive catalyst for enhanced process-based management and that organizations now understand their processes much better and can optimize performance in existing and new processes. It would be a rare benefit from COVID if organizations realized that poorly performing processes could no longer be tolerated — the failing engine is OK on the flat but is totally inadequate when, inevitably, put under load in the hills.

Did that happen? It will have done for some. And it’s not too late for the others!

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Miguel Valdés-Faura

As Chief Executive Officer and co-founder, Miguel leads the charge in Bonitasoft’s mission: to democratize Business Process Management (BPM), bringing powerful and affordable BPM to organizations and projects of all sizes. Prior to Bonitasoft, Miguel led R&D, pre-sales and support for the BPM division of Bull Information Systems, a major European systems provider. Miguel is a recognized thought-leader in business process management and passionate about open source community building.

WWW: http://www.bonitasoft.com
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Twitter: @miguelvaldes

What are the skills, techniques, behaviors, and attitudes that can help BPM practitioners create value for their organizations in 2022?

The most valuable attitude in 2022 for BPM practitioners is to identify/prioritize broken processes and coordinate the internal effort to redesign and automate them. In particular, broken processes that involve multiple teams and that create internal inefficiencies in organizations. How are you supposed to deliver great customer service if internally teams are not working in an efficient manner?

Broken and manual processes are causing serious operational problems and burdening business activities with hidden costs and resources. Those issues are accentuated with the work-from-home experience and the hybrid workplace.

In addition to the previous point, BPM practitioners with technical development skills will make the difference in complex process automation implementations. In a world in which IMO we are putting a bit too much emphasis on how citizen developers are involved in BPM projects, practitioners that understand the complexity of internal systems, changing business logic and that have the ability to code will shine!

What are the best resources to learn those skills? (e.g. books, articles, courses)

– Fundamentals of Business Process Management
– Covid-19 remote work just broke your processes, this is what to do about it!
– Bonita Camp, free hands on exercises and training on the Bonita open source platform

Which skills are no longer relevant or not practically applicable yet (hype)?

Number one is, once again, traditional waterfall development approaches. Customers in all industries are moving away from detailed, long-term project plans with single timelines to embrace a more iterative (agile) development approach.

How did covid-related changes in the business environment impact the work of BPM people?

The great pandemic work-from-home experience has brought the “hybrid workplace” to the fore: one that combines remote and on-site work. Competitive business is always focused on the best possible customer experience, and what’s newly emerging from the hybrid workplace is a “hybrid employee-customer journey” that integrates both through business process applications. Employees and customers both need smooth, painless and supported experiences, and business applications built on digital process automation platforms are going to focus more and more on how everyone involved in critical end-to-end processes has that best possible experience

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This year, BBC is taking place live in Florida. There are 12 conference tracks:

• Business Analysis Essentials
• Realizing Business Strategy
• Leadership & Collaboration
• Business Agility
• Data & Business Analytics
• Owning the Product
• High-Impact Techniques
• Digital Transformation
• Practitioner’s Chat
• Making Change Happen
• Cybersecurity
• Women in Tech (WiT)

There are dozens of great sessions and over 70 awesome speakers (including Roger Burlton, Jacob Feldman, Gladys Lam, Adrian Reed, Ron Ross, Dave Saboe, James Taylor, Roger Tregear, Jan Vanthienen, Hanna Wesołowska, and Angela Wick – to name just people I had a chance to read/listen to)

Learn more about BBC 2021 and register. If you plan to attend the conference use the promo code “BPMTIPSBBC” for 15% discount.

PS. You can also watch selected recordings of sessions from BBC 2019 to see how much you can learn there!

Which BPM skills will be hot in 2021

Below you can read answers from 20+ BPM experts. You can either read everything or use the navigation below. Enjoy!
Tony Benedict
Lloyd Dugan
Marlon Dumas
Scott Francis
Ian Gotts
Barbara Hodge
Paul Holmes-Higgin
Cristian Ivănuș
Mathias Kirchmer
Holly Lyke-Ho-Gland
Jan Mendling
Juergen Pitschke
Brian Reale
Adrian Reed
Pedro Robledo
Michal Rosik
Tomislav Rozman
Alec Sharp
Phil Simpson
Jim Sinur
James Taylor
Steve Towers
Miguel Valdés-Faura

Now, let’s dive into the answers.

Tony Benedict

Tony Benedict is a Partner with Omicron Partners, LLC, a strategy advisory firm. He is a senior level operations executive best known for transforming organizations, improving operational excellence and profitability. Most recently, he served as Interim Vice President of Operations for Rising Pharma, managing all phases of complex $200M post-merger integration of 2 acquired companies (36 CMOs, 2 3PLs) within expedited timeframe, while concurrently launching a state-of-the-art pharma distribution center. Consolidated 3 ERP systems into a single SAP instance within 6 months. Benedict previously worked at HonorHealth as Vice President, Procurement and Supply Chain where he was responsible for over $600M in spend management. One of his accomplishments was in the restructuring of the procurement and supply chain organizations post-merger within 12 months and consolidating two ERP systems within 18 months while implementing $60M in cost reduction initiatives. Previously, he was Chief Information Officer, Vice President of Supply Chain for Tenet, and Vice President, Supply Chain, Vanguard Health Systems at Abrazo Community Health Network in Arizona. He is currently serving as President and Director, Board of Directors for the Association of Business Process Management Professionals International and is a co-author of the Business Process Management Common Body of Knowledge versions 2, 3 and the recently released version 4.

WWW: http://www.abpmp.org
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What are the skills, techniques, behaviors, and attitudes that can help BPM practitioners create value for their organizations in 2021?

We just published in December what we believe are the BPM Trends moving into the future:

1. BPM as a management discipline is experiencing a resurgence beyond the “Hype Cycle” because it’s an approach to manage organizations holistically at the enterprise level by establishing:

* An enterprise process architecture

* An enterprise level performance measurement system

* An approach to strategically align and prioritize business change and transformation efforts

2. The BPM knowledge areas (ABPMP BPM CBOK 4.0), skills and competencies (ABPMP BPM Competency Model) have evolved into a multi-disciplinary leadership role and practice encompassing:

* Strategy alignment

* Business process architecture

* Organizational Design

* Leadership/People Management

* Business Impact and performance measurement

* Project & Change Management

* Technology enablers (BPMS, RPA, iDBMS, Process Mining, Case Management, Blockchain, AI, Machine/Deep Learning, IoT)

3. BPM Leading practices include:

* A BPM Center of Excellence (CoE) that resides in the business operations

* Process fundamentals paired with advanced technology enablers for business and digital transformation

* Enterprise level governance that links to the C-Suites and governing boards

4. BPM technologies (RPA, Process Mining) are fueling this resurgence as a means to achieve three main objectives:

* Improve the customer experience to remain competitive

* Increase productivity and reduce cost (mostly labor)

* Address risk/compliance/regulatory concerns

What are the best resources to learn those skills? (e.g. books, articles, courses)

Organizational Competencies (shown above) are what every organization should have to do transformation (Business or Digital). Associations are noted for each if people want to know where to go to get training or books.

* BPM CBOK 4.0 (free to our members here: https://www.abpmp.org/page/guide_BPM_CBOK). Also available on Amazon.

* BPM Competency Model (free to public here: https://www.abpmp.org/page/CompetencyModel)

Which skills are no longer relevant or not practically applicable yet (hype)?

These are the skills that are hyped now, but will become adopted in the near future.

* Robotic Process Automation is a hammer looking for a nail, but will find its place within the next 3 years. It’s not for automating cut/paste type tasks (like between Outlook and Excel), which is where it is getting a lot of focus from the software providers.

* Process Mining will work wonders for process discovery if you have siloed legacy systems that generate event logs. It’s not a replacement for process discovery.

* Artificial Intelligence (includes Machine/Deep Learning) is still in its infancy and will take another 3-5 years to really become a standard for decision-based processes and for business decision making.

* Blockchain would follow similar trajectory as AI. Both Blockchain and AI will show up in Supply Chain based applications first before hitting other industries like healthcare, etc.

What is the role of process-related skills in the “new normal”?

* We believe that the virus lockdowns have forced people into virtual facilitation which will become more commonplace compared to a face-to-face facilitation workshops. Virtual facilitation of process (or any) workshops has its own challenges, requiring more preparation to keep sessions within reasonable time limits and to keep people’s attention focused.

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Lloyd Dugan

Lloyd Dugan is a widely recognized thought leader in the development and use of leading modeling languages, methodologies, and tools, covering from the level of EA and BA down through BPM, Case Management, and SOA. He specializes in the use of standard languages for describing business processes, systems, and services, particularly BPMN, CMMN, and DMN from the OMG. He has developed and delivered BPMN 2.0 training to the U.S. Department of Defense and large consultancies. He has nearly 30 years of experience with public and private sector clients, and has an MBA from the Fuqua School of Business at Duke University. He is an OMG-Certified Expert in BPM (OCEB) – Fundamental, a member of the Workflow Management Coalition and its BPSim Working Group, a member of the OMG’s BPMN Model Interchange Working Group (MIWG), and a Contributing Member (author), Meta Modeling and BPM-BA Alignment Collaboration Teams Member, and Advisory Board Member of the Business Architecture Guild. He is a frequent speaker at national and international conferences on BPM, BPMN, Case Management, SOA, and BA. He is a published author or co-author on BPM, BPMN, and BA. He serves as the Chief Architect for Business Process Management, Inc. (see www.bpm.com), for whom he delivers BPM-related training and client advisory services on BPM-related matters and technologies.

WWW: BPM.com
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What are the skills, techniques, behaviors, and attitudes that can help BPM practitioners create value for their organizations in 2021?

First, modeling robotic process automation (RPA) remains a bit of a challenge outside of the RPA designer tool itself, particularly if it involves unattended end-to-end (E2E) usage where RPA enables a virtual and full instance of an automated process. The most often used modeling languages (e.g., BPMN) were not really developed with this kind of thing in mind, so creating useful design patterns and modeling approaches has turned on the experience levels, training, and creativity of the modelers. In addition, including reporting on RPA work as part of operations management will present new challenges as well for modeling processes and creating system designs, especially in cases of hybrid workforces. Furthermore, current (largely) first generation RPA is likely mostly played out (though not yet ubiquitous), so the inevitable introduction of machine learning (ML) for pattern recognition and artificial intelligence (AI) for less deterministic decision-making raises the complexities of modeling so-enabled processes and systems.

Second, coming out of the Object Manage Group (OMG) and related efforts is a growing movement – born out of a comprehensive effort to model healthcare practices and known as BMP+ – to tighten up the integration among BPMN, DMN, and CMMN. This movement requires a whole new threshold of competency for modelers to meet.

Third, event-based processing (EBP) and microservices are fully matured as technologies, and demand that modelers know how to model events and such services. This maturation means declarative modeling is overtaking procedural modeling as a key modeling skill.

Fourth, the continued rise of Business Architecture (BA), and the maturation of the artifacts created for it are forcing modelers to extend their analytical reach into other perspectives, branching from seeing Value Streams as “super processes” where value is generated and accreted, to Customer Journeys where value is experienced and evaluated. BPM practitioners need to become conversant in BA artifacts, and the associated connections to BPM artifacts.

What are the best resources to learn those skills? (e.g. books, articles, courses)

There continues to be good literature on this that is publicly available as books, publications, presentations, and websites (and I’ll plug my own home over at BPM.com), but there is a lot of boot-strapping that comes with the territory for both the noobies and those seeking to refine their skills. Training can help, and should be pursued as an investment opportunity and not a cost center, but mentoring or apprenticing is likely also necessary and maybe more effective. Internal BPM Centers of Excellence (COEs) can be key to internalizing and extending skill sets, but are nowhere near as extant as should be the case, and are too often seen as a luxury item. Social media outlets, such as LinkedIn, are opening subscription-based access to the broader masses, so it is out there to find.

Which skills are no longer relevant or not practically applicable yet (hype)?

It used to be that creating even simple models required some level of competence in modeling, but the modeling tool vendors have worked diligently to make such work easy for the less-experienced and less-skilled. This has lowered the bar for needing to know some things, so quality has dropped a bit since the tooling can only prevent so much error. On the other hand, it has driven a wedge between the normal run-of-the-mill process modeling, that the “citizen modelers” can presumably do without the overhead that burdens the rest of us, and the more complicated modeling along the lines discussed above. I fear that modeling will collapse into pockets of competency, and passing on deep modeling insights will go only to the select few who take it up. Well, so be it.

What is the role of process-related skills in the “new normal”?

Process modeling is something that has now proven it can be done with or without a physical presence involved. Modeling tools and online meeting tools have become so good that such work really can be done effectively on a remote-basis. There is still much to be gained from face-to-face interactions, but modelers nowadays have had to adapt to working without it. This has meant that they have had to become better at the softer skills of collaboration and – most import of all – learning how to ask the “right questions” of folks.

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Prof. Marlon Dumas

Marlon Dumas is Professor of Information Systems at University of Tartu, Estonia, and co-founder of Apromore Pty Ltd, a company dedicated to developing and delivering open-source process mining solutions. He is currently recipient of an Advanced Grant from the European Research Council with the mission of developing algorithms for automated identification and assessment of business process improvement opportunities from event data. His research in the field of business process management and process mining has led to numerous research publications, several US/EU patents, and a textbook (Fundamentals of Business Process Management) used in over 250 universities worldwide.

WWW: WWW
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What are the skills, techniques, behaviors, and attitudes that can help BPM practitioners create value for their organizations in 2021?

The ability to sense change and to rapidly react to change will make all the difference in 2021. In other words, there are two main capabilities that BPM practitioners need to cultivate this year: transparency and agility. BPM practitioners need to be able to see how their processes are performing at any level of details: all the way from KPIs, down to individual process and activity performance measures. They need to understand the bottlenecks and the constraints in their processes. Next to that, BPM practitioners need to cultivate the ability to change the process on short notice in order to scale up as customer demand recovers and to be ready for ups and downs as the year unfolds.

What are the best resources to learn those skills? (e.g. books, articles, courses)

For many years, I have recommended various books and reading lists. But I believe that 2021 is the time to act. So I’ll skip reading recommendations for once. I would keep all eyes open for case studies where companies share their experience on how they have achieved the transparency and agility required to adapt to rapid changes.

Which skills are no longer relevant or not practically applicable yet (hype)?

I see less and less emphasis on techniques that require long lead times between “problem or opportunity” and “change”. Traditional approaches where several months are spent mapping processes, analyzing processes, and automating processes on the basis of models are less and less used. On the other hand, there is more and more emphasis on techniques for data-driven process discovery and analysis, because they allow the BPM teams to reduce the lead times between the moment when a change is needed and the moment when the change is implemented and deployed.

What is the role of process-related skills in the “new normal”?

It is interesting to see how process management has gained importance after the Covid shock. The need to monitor and to adapt the business processes in an organization has never been higher. The move to digital channels forced by Covid has led to increased amounts of business operations data. Organizations that exploit these data in order to drive process change will be in a better position to profit from the recovery.

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Scott Francis

Scott Francis is CEO and Co­-Founder of BP3, a BPM specialist firm focused on accelerating process innovation for customers. Scott and his team have grown BP3 into a Leader in Forrester’s Wave for BPM Services Providers, a top 10 Company in Fortune’s Great Places to Work, a top 10 company in Austin’s Fast 50, and to 120 employees worldwide. Scott is a speaker at conferences such as: bpmNEXT, BPMPortugal, and BPMCAMP, and is the primary author of BP3’s blog.

WWW: http://www.bp-3.com
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Twitter: @sfrancisatx

What are the skills, techniques, behaviors, and attitudes that can help BPM practitioners create value for their organizations in 2021?

Let’s assume this person *already* knows BPMN, knows a value stream map from a failure mode effects analysis, and they at least know when to ask for help from someone who is a six sigma guru. I think in 2021, if you’re doing process work, you need to look at adding some skills to your repertoire. First off, if you don’t know RPA yet you should learn how to do RPA with one of the top tools in the space. Each vendor has good free educational resources. Second, learn about Design with a capital D. Not “process design” – but Design. It will help change your perspective on how to build great process solutions. Third, if you aren’t facile with a programming language, take time to get passably familiar with one – javascript or python for example. Both of these are general utility-like languages with lots of use cases. Fourth, if you have the above down already, time to look at expanding your knowledge of data and analysis with R, or AI by going deep on AWS or Google or Azure services… That should be a good start for the new year! While you’re at it, read 20+ books to keep sharp! fiction, nonfiction, business – I don’t think it matters, they all help you improve your self, develop empathy and perspective. In a time when we can’t travel (much), reading is the next best thing.

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Ian Gotts

Ian is a founder of Elements.cloud, tech advisor, investor, speaker and author.

Elements.cloud helps customers clean-up, document and build their app implementations, focused on Salesforce. But valid for any low code app platform.
WWW: https://medium.com/@Q9ELEMENTS
WWW: elements.cloud
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Twitter: @iangotts

What are the skills, techniques, behaviors, and attitudes that can help BPM practitioners create value for their organizations in 2021?

Accelerating digital transformation is a priority and process mapping is core to reengineering business models. As every company is now run on core applications, then processes need to be tightly integrated into systems development lifecycle. That means understanding the relationships between business processes, ERD, requirements, user stories and system metadata.

Recent article in ZDNet (https://www.zdnet.com/article/most-important-currencies-in-digital-economy-trust-speed-relevance/)

What are the best resources to learn those skills? (e.g. books, articles, courses)

We have released some training videos that talk about BPM and its vital role in the implementation lifecycle. train.elements.cloud/live

Also Salesforce has launched a business process mapping course as part of its certified architects program, but it is relevant to any process practitioner https://elements.cloud/2020/12/18/salesforce-training-course-endorses-upn/

Which skills are no longer relevant or not practically applicable yet (hype)?

We need on-line actionable diagrams embedded inside apps. So flowcharts are finally dead. And this is why https://elements.cloud/2020/06/08/the-evolution-of-process-diagramming-i-e-why-flowcharts-are-so-1980s/

Low-code apps are now mainstream, so a business process map is required to define the requirements and then built using the low-code app. So BPMN and other highly technical modelling notations are irrelevant. Finally, Process Mining powered by AI is starting to prove its value in uncovering process patterns, but it needs to be combined with business analysts mapping processes to build the new optimized processes that can then be baked into the underlying business apps.

What is the role of process-related skills in the “new normal”?

See ans to Q1

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Barbara Hodge

Barbara Hodge is SSON’s Global Editor, and has been with the organization since 2000, having joined to launch Shared Services News. She is now responsible for SSON’s online portal content, including industry reports, case studies, surveys, interviews, etc. – as well as everything else that makes SSON the most trusted space for practitioners from around the world.
Barbara uses her extensive industry knowledge and connections to provide a unique perspective on the latest trends and developments across the SS&O landscape. She is the voice of ssonetwork.com, SSON’s online content portal, and she regularly conducts interviews with key industry figures to ensure SSON is a one-stop shop for shared services and outsourcing resources.
Prior to joining SSON, Barbara was Editorial Director at Armstrong Information, a London-based specialist publishing firm, with responsibility for launch and editorial content management for a number of management journals, including corporate communication, change management and business process reengineering. She started her career with Deutsche Bank Capital Markets in London.

WWW: http://www.ssonetwork.com
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Twitter: @ssonetwork
Twitter: @abrakabarbara

What are the skills, techniques, behaviors, and attitudes that can help BPM practitioners create value for their organizations in 2021?

This year it’s going to be predominantly about recognizing the benefits of an end-to-end approach. The challenge is “ownership,” as many shared services or GBS don’t own the entire end-to-end process. So, collaborating with the business to drive improvements will be key.

What are the best resources to learn those skills? (e.g. books, articles, courses)

Well you can hire in expensive talent that has hound these skills in other operations, I believe training is paramount. In particular, learning from those that have amassed critical experience in running successful shared services is key. SSON has collaborated with a team of experts to offer a tremendously valuable GBS training and certification program that includes BPM. Details here (https://www.ssonetwork.com/events-gbscertification/).

Which skills are no longer relevant or not practically applicable yet (hype)?

I think although artificial intelligence is all the rage, it’s perhaps a matter of running before we can walk. The important thing is to verse all employees in automation language and capability, and expanding this awareness to data. Data drives automation. And artificial intelligence will depend on quality data.

What is the role of process-related skills in the “new normal”?

As so many GBS and shared services have recognized “end-to-end” process transformation as a performance lever, these skills cannot be underestimated. In addition, automation technology leverages process so process understanding and awareness, for example through process discovery or process mining, is key.

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Paul Holmes-Higgin

Dr Paul Holmes-Higgin, Chief product Office and co-founder of Flowable. Previously, as co-founder of Alfresco, one of his achievements was to bring Activiti to the fore of the company’s innovation. He has always been focused on software execution with a strong conceptual underpinning, and on closing the gap between the users and builders of software. A long-time Open Source advocate, he believes it still has an important role to play in making innovation more widely available. His PhD and background in AI gives him a deep understanding of the opportunities and pitfalls of Machine Learning. He sees innovation around the standard models of BPM as the best way to bring together his passions for user-centred software and intelligent automation in today’s highly dynamic business and social environment.

WWW: https://flowable.com
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Twitter: @paulrhh

What are the skills, techniques, behaviors, and attitudes that can help BPM practitioners create value for their organizations in 2021?

Distributed and remote operation seems to be a key theme that’s come out of the pandemic times we’ve been living through, as well as concerted programs to introduce more digital automation. In the Flowable customer base and new business, we’ve seen this in terms of allowing people to participate in processes on any device and with variable bandwidth. Also, a trend that we started seeing a couple of years ago has become almost ubiquitous in infrastructure architectures – event-driven processes and cases.

Both these technical and human shifts require a fresher way of thinking about how process automation should operate. Fewer assumptions about a knowledge worker being at a desk with a decent screen. Designing process and case models that swim in an event stream, consuming and emitting events. And those event streams aren’t just different backend systems communicating, they’re human interactions from a user surface, chat channel or whatever. Understanding the difference an event-driven paradigm brings to how processes are modeled and what a BPM tool needs to support to avoid implications such as race conditions and transaction boundaries. This is where our customers have found CMMN a natural way to express event-driven behavior. Important in real-world models are tools with visual debugging that is event aware and allows a process modeler to see exactly what’s going on in these difficult to troubleshoot or refine rich process applications.

What are the best resources to learn those skills? (e.g. books, articles, courses)

There’s a number of books on event-driven approaches, such as Designing Event-Driven Systems by Ben Stopford, and Making Sense of Stream Processing by Martin Kleppmann. With Apache Kafka being open source, there’s easy access to experimentation and examples.

Which skills are no longer relevant or not practically applicable yet (hype)?

There just seems to be more to learn and apply at the moment. Old skills always help inform new ones.

What is the role of process-related skills in the “new normal”?

With the push to automate more, the ability to translate a manual or office-focused business activity onto BPM tools, through BPMN, CMMN and DMN, is one of the highest value skills. Getting new processes running quickly and adapting them as circumstances change have brought a whole new reality to business agility and survival.

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Cristian Ivănuș

Cristian Ivanus works at Vodafone Shared Services International VOIS as Automation and Innovation Lead

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What are the skills, techniques, behaviors, and attitudes that can help BPM practitioners create value for their organizations in 2021?

One important value that BPM practitioners can bring into the organization is the capability to foresee the digitalization opportunity that any BPM initiative is taken into consideration. Taking into consideration that the business was dramatically changed during the last year due to the COVID impact, it is important to understand and adopt measures for the business continuity in a restricted environment. People should not expect to have the same pre-pandemic business environment in less than two years. Consequently, the digitalization of the business is a: “must” for business survival. This means that company processes (regardless the types these are falling into (core, support, management)) must contribute to a strong adaption to a new business model. One of the ways to achieve continuous change and adaptability of business models should be the digitalization.

What are the best resources to learn those skills? (e.g. books, articles, courses)

I strongly recommend to follow online courses for digitalization from Coursera organized by prestigious Universities along with a deep studies on BPM and RPA platforms. These are providing a huge amount of valuable information and resources that will help practitioners to go deeply toward digitalization.

Which skills are no longer relevant or not practically applicable yet (hype)?

I cannot say that some skills are no longer needed. I would rather say that it is important for each practitioner to reinvent himself and to be ready for new challenges and opportunities. Always learn and achieve new skills to be prepared for unexpected situations. Be proactive, try to see beyond the current environment, be flexible and prepared to cross new knowledge borders.

What is the role of process-related skills in the “new normal”?

“New normality” has shown that it is mandatory to be permanently prepared to face unexpected challenges. The process-related skills should provide the strategic thinkers with the tactical and operational tools and skills for a rapid change in a restrictive environment. The people acting in this role must be the “enablers” of change and no longer drivers of the change. Process people should be aware that they should provide solutions and answers to the stakeholders and shareholders. In my opinion process-role skills and people, can successfully provide solutions to the “new normality” taking into consideration the huge impact of digitalization of any business.

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Dr. Mathias Kirchmer

Dr. Kirchmer is an experienced practitioner and thought leader in the field of Digital Transformation and Business Process Management (BPM). He co-founded BPM-D, a consulting company focusing on digital process transformation, operational excellence and customer experience by leveraging the discipline of BPM. Before he was Managing Director and Global Lead of BPM at Accenture, and CEO of the Americas and Japan of IDS Scheer, known for its ARIS Process Software.

Dr. Kirchmer has led numerous transformation and process improvement initiatives and has worked with hundreds of clients in technology, financial, health, consumer goods and manufacturing industries. He has published 11 books and over 150 articles. He is affiliated faculty at the University of Pennsylvania and received a research and teaching fellowship from the Japan Society for the Promotion of Science.
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WWW: http://bpm-d.com
Twitter: @mtki2006

Business Process Management – Skill Predictions for 2021

Digital transformation continues to shape the discipline of business process management (BPM). Here are four key trends and predictions shaping required skills in 2021:

• Reducing Time-to-Value of Digital Transformation though a BPM-Discipline: Digital transformation initiatives deliver their value through new and improved business processes. Appropriate process management accelerates the time-to-value and realizes the targeted process performance. This is achieved through a BPM-Discipline, which must go through a digitalization itself. It leverages the right combination of digital enablers, such as process mining, modelling, and simulation, or process-led prioritization tools. An increasing number of BPM-related services is delivered remotely, benefiting from cloud-based tools and aligned work processes. Establishing and continuously improving this digital business process management discipline is required to enable an accelerated value-realization of digital transformations. Skills to establish and apply such a digital BPM-Discipline have become key for an organization.

• Performance through Process-led Automation Platforms: In our fast and frequently changing business environment, many processes must be adjusted continuously and require specific software support. No-code or low-code automation platforms enable this agility, and support the required integration of applications and services, such as robotic process automation (RPA), as well as the development of additional software components. They become a key interface between the BPM-Discipline and operational processes. Appropriate process governance organizes the ongoing adjustments and aligns people with technologies. Digital technology-based process reference models help to understand and plan the business impact of the automation platform and enable a rapid and standardized roll-out of digital processes. Skills supporting a process-driven use of automation platforms become increasingly important.

• Process Innovation through Integrated Stakeholder Journey Planning: Process innovation has become a key driver for new and enhanced business models. Identifying impactful innovation opportunities requires an outside-in view on business processes. This can be achieved though integrated stakeholder journey planning, showing how processes impact customer, supplier, or employee experience with the organization. The management of stakeholder journey maps and their links to underlying processes becomes an effective enabler of transformations. It allows organizations to improve the experience of key stakeholders through appropriate management of the underlying processes. Integrated stakeholder journey planning becomes a core BPM skill.

• Agility and Compliance through Digital Process Governance: Sustaining the results of transformation initiatives requires appropriate process governance to keep process performance on track and ensure success. Just as process management in general goes through a digital transformation, process governance needs to be digitalized as well to meet the necessary service levels. Process governance uses digital BPM tools, such as process mining, on an ongoing basis to enable faster and more effective performance and conformance management. The result is digital process governance, enhancing the way process owners and their teams govern operational processes. Digital process governance is value-driven, tool-enabled and people-centric. The governance support that a BPM center of excellence provides must be adjusted accordingly to enable a reliable enterprise-wide use of the required tools. Organizational and technical skills to build digital process governance need to be developed.

The pandemic has accelerated digital transformations and with that the importance of process management as value-switch. Time-to-value is key to master frequent unpredictable changes. Remote work, already increasing for years, has now become a topic in basically every organizations. Business process management plays a key role to master the resulting processes by creating the necessary transparency. This also accelerated the digitalization of BPM itself. The remote delivery of process management services supported through cloud-based prioritization, modelling and mining tools has become mainstream. The trends I described highlight some of the key developments.

Traditional process management approaches, relying on face-to-face activities or pencil and paper have even more rapidly lost their importance. Lengthy manual capturing and analysis of data is not possible anymore. Process improvement approaches that don’t include systematic automation and digitalization opportunities lose their relevance. Traditional process experts need to move their skill set into the digital age.

Specialized consulting and education organizations offer remote training and eLearning modules regarding those new trends, such as BPM-D with its academy and publications (www.bpm-d.com). Industry organizations, like APQC (www.apqc.org), ABPMP (www.abpmp.org) or the BPM Institute (www.bpminstitute.org), provide related resources. Forward thinking universities also offer more and more leading edge BPM-related classes, for example Widener University with its master program for Business Process Innovation or the University of Pennsylvania with its Organizational Dynamics program that offers a class about process-led digital transformation. All those organization provide reference to related readings and other resources.

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Holly Lyke-Ho-Gland

Building on more than 10 years of business research and consulting experience, Holly Lyke-Ho-Gland is a principal research lead who conducts and publishes APQC research on process management and improvement, quality, project management, measurement, and benchmarking for APQC’s Process and Performance Management research team. Her research supports APQC members and clients across disciplines and centers on helping professionals and project managers solve business problems with strategy, process and measurement.

Holly regularly partners with other APQC research leads to look at improving the end-to-end business processes in areas such as procure-to-pay or order-to-cash where true improvement rests in the entire process versus one functional department. On a biannual basis, she conducts APQC’s extensive research survey and report on The Value of Benchmarking as well as annual surveys and reports on how organizations adopt and use the Process Classification Framework®.

WWW: https://www.apqc.org
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Twitter: @hlykehogland

What are the skills, techniques, behaviors, and attitudes that can help BPM practitioners create value for their organizations in 2021?

As organizations continue to face challenges and are embroiled in organizational transformation; there is a focus on developing key skills for long-term resiliency. We found that there are 6 key capabilities that organizations and their teams (including BPM practitioners) need to stay resilient in the face of disruption.

1. Flexibility—the ability to shift strategy or execution to meet evolving circumstances and opportunities. Which was exemplified with how BPM teams shifted their project load to meet their organizations need for re-engineering digital processes.
2. Innovation—the creation and application of ideas that add value to internal and external customers alike.
3. Change management—how to take employees along for the journey and empower them to contribute or own the change.
4. Communications—art of balancing when, where, and what messaging needs to occur to drive knowledge adoption and behavior shifts.
5. Risk management—the process of monitoring and reporting on risks as well as prioritizing, developing, and implementing mitigation plans. But just as importantly taking the right risks at the right time.
6. Technology fluency—the ability to assess a situation and determine when, where, and how technology can be applied to fix it or make it better.

What are the best resources to learn those skills? (e.g. books, articles, courses)

There are a myriad of books, articles, and courses for these key capabilities. Some of my favorite include:

• Kotter’s Change Model
• Innovator’s Dilemma by Clay Christensen
• The Black Swan by Nassim Nicholas Taleb
• DAMA-DMBOK

When it comes to technology skills, I still stand by the statement from last year. There are a wide variety of free courses available (like Coursera), which I personally prefer because they include hands on labs and experience that helps you immediately apply what you learn.

Which skills are no longer relevant or not practically applicable yet (hype)?

I have never been a big fan of pushing things in the no longer relevant category. Prefer to think of them as evolving skills. Things that are expansions on existing skills necessary due to changes in technology or how the skill is applied (e.g., operating process mining software, which is an expansion of enduring process analysis skills).

What is the role of process-related skills in the “new normal”?

In the early days of the pandemic process teams were poised to help their organizations adapt and ensure business continuity. In fact, over 61% of process teams stated they were actively supporting their organizations’ business continuity. Teams were tapped to:

• triage the organization’s processes,
• re-engineer broken processes, and
• leverage technology to execute work in a digital environment.

As we move towards the “new normal” process teams will continue to support business continuity through their expertise in people engagement, process analysis, re-engineering, and digital tools. In our recent research on BPM teams we discovered that BPM teams purpose is to support the strategic goals of the organization (since most initiatives have a process core) and explore opportunities to collaborate with our partners in other functions like data and knowledge to optimize their efforts.

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Prof. Jan Mendling

Prof. Dr. Jan Mendling is a Full Professor with the Institute for Data, Process and Knowledge Management at Wirtschaftsuniversität Wien (WU Vienna), Austria. His research interests include various topics in the area of business process management and information systems. He is co-author of the textbooks Fundamentals of Business Process Management (http://fundamentals-of-bpm.org/) and Wirtschaftsinformatik (https://lehrbuch-wirtschaftsinformatik.org/). He has published more than 400 research papers and articles, among others in ACM Transactions on Software Engineering and Methodology, IEEE Transaction on Software Engineering, Information Systems, Data & Knowledge Engineering, and Decision Support Systems. He is member of several international journals, member of the board of the Austrian Society for Process Management (http://prozesse.at), a co-founder of the Berlin BPM Community of Practice (http://www.bpmb.de), organizer of several academic events on process management, and member of the IEEE Task Force on Process Mining. His Ph.D. thesis has won the Heinz-Zemanek-Award of the Austrian Computer Society and the German Targion-Award for dissertations in the area of strategic information management.

WWW: https://www.wu.ac.at/dpkm/team/mendling
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Twitter: @janmendling

What are the skills, techniques, behaviors, and attitudes that can help BPM practitioners create value for their organizations in 2021?

Most important is the understanding and the communication of the bigger picture of and beyond BPM. With Jan vom Brocke and Michael Rosemann, we have created the BPM Billboard (https://bpm-billboard.com/ see also: https://www.researchgate.net/publication/345661487_Planning_and_Scoping_Business_Process_Management_with_the_BPM_Billboard) as a tool to support this.

What are the best resources to learn those skills? (e.g. books, articles, courses)

Currently, we are designing a BPM Billboard poster together with Signavio. More info soon.

Which skills are no longer relevant or not practically applicable yet (hype)?

The fact that Camunda has discontinued CMMN is the last nail on its coffin.

What is the role of process-related skills in the “new normal”?

The last year has made us all much more process-oriented than what we have been in the past. Process is the new normal, and process frictions are much more painfully experienced than in the past.

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Juergen Pitschke

Juergen Pitschke is Partner and Managing Director at Process Renewal Group Deutschland.

Juergen has more than 25 years industrial experience about enterprise modelling and the realization of Business and IT Architectures. He is recognized for his deep knowledge and the systematic use of visual standard notations and of different frameworks für the design of an Enterprise Architecture. His knowledge is often sought in the field of Business Process Management and Decision Management.

His focus are model-based approaches for enterprise design and their practical use. Clients value his abilities to explain concepts, to help teams to adopt and successfully apply such methods, and to guide projects successfully.

He is author of the book “Unternehmensmodellierung für die Praxis”. He translated the Business Process Manifesto, the Decision Management Manifesto, and the RuleSpeak® – approach into German.

His customers include companies as Kuehne+Nagel (AG & Co.) KG, Boehler Edelstahl or organizations like the Federal Office of Police in Switzerland.

WWW: http://processrenewal.de
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Twitter: @jpitschke

What are the skills, techniques, behaviors, and attitudes that can help BPM practitioners create value for their organizations in 2021?

Be clear about your project charter. Be Process Centric. Be Business Decision Centric. We see a shift away from notations to methods and collaboration in the last two years. Unfortunately, the OMG avoids methods as the devils avoid the plague. But this is what customers ask most. How to collect information about Business Processes? How to improve and optimize Business Processes and Business Logic? How to measure results. Looking for tools, we see more support for methods and collaboration, and integration.

What are the best resources to learn those skills? (e.g. books, articles, courses)

You will find many books about methods for different purposes. Which method works well for you depends on your project and project charter, your team, and for sure also depends on your preferences. You have to find your “way of working”. Therefore the first suggestion for a book is “Choose your WoW: A Disciplined Agile Delivery Handbook for Optimizing Your Way of Working” by Scott Ambler and Mark Lines. I’m still an enthusiast of “Reimagining Management” by Roger Tregear (for Business Process Management). I’m a fan of “Six Thinking Hats: An Essential Approach to Business Management” by Edward de Bono (I apply this in workshops). The list can be extended. Suppose you are interested in Business Decision Management and the application in Machine Learning, I suggest the new edition of “Digital Decisioning: Using Decision Management to Deliver Business Impact from AI” by James Taylor. I recommend his website http://www.decisionmanagementsolutions.com too for more resources.

Which skills are no longer relevant or not practically applicable yet (hype)?

The “old” skills are still relevant also if they don’t dominate the headlines. I’m always surprised seeing people apply notations with no knowledge about the notation, concepts, and methods. An example are Dataflow Diagrams. An old concept, still popular and often applied intuitively. If you are interested, have a look at “Structured Analysis and System Specification” by Tom Demarco. A current hype topic is “Low Code” realizing process models and business logic models into executable solutions without extensive programming knowledge. An interesting solution in this regard is USoft (www.usoft.com). Look for their website for more information and resources.

What is the role of process-related skills in the “new normal”?

As I pointed already, “old” concepts and methods are a prerequisite for the “new normal”. Business Process and Business Logic related skills and tools are essential!

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Brian Reale

Brian Reale is a serial entrepreneur. Brian founded a telecommunications company in 2000 called Unete Telecomunicaciones which provided, voice, data, and satellite services in Latin America. Brian sold Unete to a publicly traded US telecom company in 2000. Brian was also the co-founder of Spotless LLC, an entertainment technology company that developed projection mapping technology for major live entertainment industries.

Brian has been involved in the workflow and BPM industry since he co-founded ProcessMaker in 2000. ProcessMaker is a leading open source BPM suite which has just released its 4th generation product – a modern lightweight BPM designed for both human tasks and microservices orchestration. The ProcessMaker BPMS has been recognized with numerous awards and pushes the bounds of BPM with a fundamental belief that process management can be simple, elegant, and easy to use.

Brian graduated magna cum laude from Duke University in 1993 and was awarded a Fulbright scholarship in linguistics in Ecuador in 1994.

WWW: https://www.processmaker.com
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Twitter: @breale
Twitter: @processmaker

What are the skills, techniques, behaviors, and attitudes that can help BPM practitioners create value for their organizations in 2021?

The world is “appifying” at an incredibly fast pace. Having a low-code automation tool is no longer much of an advantage. It has become very easy to produce a low code toolset and there are now literally hundreds of tools with new ones entering the market everyday. The future belongs to those with a deep understanding of real-world problems and the ability to develop applied solutions to those problems. Industrial design thinking in many ways is now becoming more important than systems skills.

What are the best resources to learn those skills? (e.g. books, articles, courses)

The best resource is real-life work. Developing specific solutions is all about scratching a real and specific itch. To feel the itch you really have to have experienced the problem. Deep domain knowledge acquired through industry specific work experience is the most useful way to develop these skills.

Which skills are no longer relevant or not practically applicable yet (hype)?

Generalist skills are becoming less and less valuable. System and developer skills are becoming less valuable as well because so many of the low code tools in the market are becoming very easy to use. Ironically, more and more companies are being started as “workflow software” companies. Most of these general toolset companies will fail.

What is the role of process-related skills in the “new normal”?

It is an understatement to say that in the new normal digital processes have become more important. Digital processes are eating the world. People with the skills and tools to automate processes will thrive. However, as I mentioned above, those skills need to be process and industry specific. It seems everyday I see people who are new to BPM trying to recreate the wheel. It is tempting. There is a sense of power, control, and efficiency associated with being able to build software without actually having to do any coding. These people often lack the experience to see that what they are doing is most likely a worthless exercise. It only becomes valuable when the process addresses very specific and deep real world processes. These processes become even more valuable when they are combined with other solutions that help connect the extended value chain for a given industry’s particular problem.

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Adrian Reed

Adrian Reed is a true advocate of the analysis profession. In his day job, he acts as Principal Consultant and Director at Blackmetric Business Solutions where he provides business analysis consultancy and training solutions to a range of clients in varying industries. He is a Past President of the UK chapter of the IIBA® and he speaks internationally on topics relating to business analysis and business change. Adrian wrote the 2016 book ‘Be a Great Problem Solver… Now’ and the 2018 book ‘Business Analyst’

You can read Adrian’s blog at http://www.adrianreed.co.uk and follow him on Twitter at http://twitter.com/UKAdrianReed

WWW: http://www.adrianreed.co.uk
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Twitter: @UKAdrianReed

What are the skills, techniques, behaviors, and attitudes that can help BPM practitioners create value for their organizations in 2021?

My perspective on these questions will probably be different from some of the other contributors, as my background is as a business analyst as opposed to specialising specifically in BPM.

However, in my experience there’s still a huge gap in organisations saying they want well-managed processes, and actually investing the time to do it. Too often, process management is ad-hoc and on-demand… often in a time of crisis. We’ve probably all worked on projects where the first set of activities involve working out what on earth the business currently does because nobody seems to know the end-to-end picture. Or if there is documentation, it’s out of date and stored as unorganized diagrams on a plethora of shared drives.

2020 has been a year where organisations with well-managed processes could move and adapt more quickly. Like a building’s architect who knows how the electricity, gas and water flows, it’s much easier to make a change when there’s clarity on how the work and information flows. So one skill, which some might see as a ‘soft’ skill, is that of influence, ‘selling the benefits’ and creating the space to amplify our practice. Linking BPM with business agility, and convincing people that, yes, it is worth investing time in is crucial.

So perhaps we need to become better business storytellers?

What are the best resources to learn those skills? (e.g. books, articles, courses)

Of course books, articles, and courses are all excellent ways—I’d add that conferences and events are, in my view, essential melting-pots of ideas. Although virtual events are different, it’s still possible to have a great exchange of ideas with other practitioners, and to use others as informal ‘sounding boards’. I’m really enjoying some of the informal, ‘unconference’ style virtual events, where everyone is a contributor.

I suppose 2020 has also challenged many of our views on what ‘learning’ should look like. I’ve become an advocate of online live training and e-learning too.

Which skills are no longer relevant or not practically applicable yet (hype)?

In my view, the core skills remain. I see a lot of hype about specific technologies or tooling—all of these things are important, but in my view as practitioners we should think hard about the tools we use and when. Context matters a lot, and understanding the level of complexity, changeability and appetite for risk is crucial.

What is the role of process-related skills in the “new normal”?

Agility becomes even more front-and-centre, and note that I’ve deliberately written agility rather than Agile; by this I mean the broader ability of a business or organisation to sense, assess and respond to its environment. For me, processes are central to this: as practitioners we need to continually think about building ‘sensing’ into processes and we also need to accept that there are some situations that are so complex that a rigid process will never work. Understanding the variety and complexity of the business environment helps us to design effectively.

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Pedro Robledo

President and co-founder of the Spanish chapter of ABPMP International. One of the main referents with the greatest influence in Process Management using the BPM (Business Process Management) management discipline, with +18 years dedicated to promoting knowledge of Business Process Management in Spain and Latin America. Director of the Master’s Degree in BPM for Digital Transformation and Director of the Master’s Degree in Strategic Process Management at the International University of La Rioja (UNIR). And professor of the MBA and executive MBA of UNIR. BPM consultant who helps organizations in their BPM initiatives, Digital Transformation, BPM maturity diagnosis, BPM ROI calculation, BPM supplier selection, training and advice on BPMN process modeling and DMN decisions, and roadmap advice BPM for the advancement of BPM implementation. Director of BPMteca. Computer Engineer from the Polytechnic University of Madrid. He has made his professional career as a manager in multinational software companies such as Borland International, Ask Group, Computer Associates, Progress Software, Teamware and Oracle. He collaborates with the Spanish chapter itSMF Spain as First Vice President and Head of the Digital Transformation Committee and Team leader of the ITSM4BPM interest group for the application of BPM in Service Management. Since 2013 he has participated as a jury in the international WfMC Awards for Excellence in BPM and Workflow. He writes about BPM and Digital Transformation on his blog: “The White Paper on Process Management”, http://pedrorobledobpm.blogspot.com.es/ and regularly contributes to other blogs and magazines.

WWW: pedrorobledobpm.blogspot.com.es
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Twitter: @pedrorobledoBPM

What are the skills, techniques, behaviors, and attitudes that can help BPM practitioners create value for their organizations in 2021?

In 2021, automation is an obsession. All analysts are indicating an interest in automation: Gartner with Hyperautomation, Forrester with Digital Process Automation, and IDC with Intelligent Process Automation. So BPM practitioners will need skills to be able to bring together BPMS, RPA and Artificial Intelligence, to automate everything that it be possible, by improving processes previously.

Process mining has become the necessary technology not only to discover processes, but also for process analytics to seek continuous improvement and thus achieve operational excellence. 80% of companies will focus on Process Mining in 2021. In the coming years, Process Mining technologies will respond to the needs that organizations require. With new mining focus on tasks (Task Mining) to analyze what can be robotized. And largest application of artificial intelligence, offering machine learning to discover, monitor and improve real processes. BPMS, BPA and RPA manufacturers will focus more on Process Mining in 2021.

The BPM Market will grow in 2021 by 17%. It is estimated that the size of the BPM software market will see significant growth until 2025 due to the interest in Digitalization and Process Automation. Four concrete evidences will stimulate this growth: a) Interest in the BPM (Process Management) discipline has grown for 80% of organizations in 2020; b) Sales of BPMS software will increase 12% in 2021; c) Sales of RPA (Robotic Process Automation) software will increase by 20% in 2021., and, d) Sales of Process Mining software will increase 25% in 2021.

So BPM practitioners will need to get skills on BPMS, RPA, Process Mining and AI. And to be able to madurate to Process Oriented Enterprise, it should be required to have skills on BPM Maturirty Model, Process Maturity and BPM Roadmap Planning.

What are the best resources to learn those skills? (e.g. books, articles, courses)

The need for BPM professionals worldwide and especially in Spain and Latin America is growing 12% in 2021 (14% estimated in 2024) and more than 66% of the positions demanded in Business Process Management (BPM) are not currently being covered yet. More than 85% of companies request consulting services in the different roles of the BPM Life Cycle. The need for professionals and employment opportunities are forcing specialization to achieve specific competencies throughout the BPM life cycle: a) There will be greater interest in specialized master’s studies in Management BY Processes; b) There will be increased interest in international professional certifications such as those awarded by ABPMP International (Association of BPM Professionals) and OMG (Object Management Group); and, c) More and more knowledge and experience are required in BPM discipline, Automation, BPMS, RPA, Process Mininng, BPMN / DMN, ROI and AI. To help on this, I contribute as director of two online University courses in Spanish for postgraduates in UNIR (Universidad Internacional de la Riojabased in Spain, Mexico, Colombia, Peru, Ecuador): Master’s Degree in Business Process Management for Digital Transformation, which covers the entire BPM life cycle, focusing not only on the Business part, but with an extensive scope in the BPM Technology part and its key role in the Digital Transformation of an organization; and Master’s Degree in Strategic Process Management which covers the advanced knowledge about the tools and techniques necessary to achieve the excellence of the operations and processes of any organization, contributing both to its growth and its continuous and sustained development. And I have founded ABPMP chapter in Spain in 2019, in order to push the ABPMP’s BPM CBOK to maintain the global standard for BPM practices and certification. And via ABPMP Spain and as BPM freelance Consultant we are providing ad-hoc BPM training by example to help companies in their growth on their business process maturity.

In my blog (http://pedrorobledobpm.blogspot.com.es), I have some posts with bibliography by BPM topics, videos and articles about BPM discipline.

Which skills are no longer relevant or not practically applicable yet (hype)?

As Business Process Management is a management discipline, all BPM skills are relevant and they are applicable yet, although it is requiered to improve continuosly the BPM skills with the new trends, best practices and learned lessons.

What is the role of process-related skills in the “new normal”?

Defining 2020 with one word surely leads us all to think about it, but at the business level, it is surely “uncertainty”. And it forces us to think that in 2021, companies will have to reinvent themselves often, needing to respond to an unprecedented dynamism, where innovation must be continuous to survive.

The needs of teleworking have driven the needs to digitize processes, which has implied an advance in the adoption of digital technologies and driving the next wave of disruption, agility and productivity in the digital company. And the key role of the discipline of Business Process Management (BPM) is undoubtedly taking hold fast.

The process-related skills in the “new normal” are not different skills in other situtation, but the BPM skills now are more required if any company wants to be process oriented and implement innovations.

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Michal Rosik

Product Visionary & CPO, Minit

As Product Visionary for Minit, Michal defines the Research & Development direction for this process mining solution, develops close ties to the academic community in this area and evangelizes process mining benefits to enterprises worldwide. Michal previously lead Microsoft Consulting department in Siemens and was involved in several large enterprise projects as a consultant and project manager. In his free time, he is a passionate trail runner.

WWW: http://www.minit.io
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Twitter: @rosik
Twitter: @minit_io

What are the skills, techniques, behaviors, and attitudes that can help BPM practitioners create value for their organizations in 2021?

When the first wave of COVID-19 hit the world, many enterprises suddenly paused or even stopped any process mining or process related initiatives.
We at Minit have been eagerly waiting what happens next.

To our surprise, with the second wave approaching, companies understood that waiting for the “old normal” to return does not make sense. We are living in a different/changed/”new normal” world from now.

In 2019, old processes were not optimized and even a small change brought some benefit. In 2020, old processes became obsolete, not working at all, sometimes leading businesses to an end.

For me, 2021, more than ever, is about coming “back to the roots” – roots of proper and fundamental business process management, process re-engineering, process analysis, and process automation (including RPA, but to a much smaller extent). Most value a BPM practitioner can bring to an organization is based on rerouting from hype adoption support to proper BPM in every sense of B, P, and M.

There is, however, one more thing to be added, and that is focus on flexibility. Rigid processes, as we’ve seen in 2020, might become a path to death of a business. Having your business processes prepared for a continuous (and fast) change is the only way to survive in this new, ever-changing world.

What are the best resources to learn those skills? (e.g. books, articles, courses)

I’m convinced that community insights exchange, lectures from experienced professionals and practitioners, as well as meet-ups and discussions with them are still the best way to learn.

Much appreciated is also work of people that find time in their busy schedules to become bloggers, write articles and advocate BPM to the world (shout-out to Zbigniew and people like you). This combination of practical experience and academic research in a dense form is one of the best ways to learn .

Last but not least, I was surprised about the return of books and e-books. They’d become quite obsolete, not being able to keep up with the tempo of development of new skills, but having added interactivity and having sped up the writing and publishing process is putting them back on my radar.

Which skills are no longer relevant or not practically applicable yet (hype)?

Skills communicate, they “talk” to each other, and even though some skills might seem no longer relevant at the moment, other might recall them to action in the near future.

Investment in learning new skills is never wasted.

What is no longer relevant is not about the skills as such. What is no longer relevant is decided by evaluating the right use for the right skill at the right time and about extracting the essence of any skill for the purpose I need at the moment.

What is the role of process-related skills in the “new normal”?

The most important is to admit that “new normal” is not a postponed old normal.

Depending on the industry we are looking at, the “new normal” is changing the processes to a smaller or larger extent or even introducing brand new processes to businesses all around the world.

Many enterprises have a unique opportunity to launch their new processes with much more knowledge and much more experience gained from the market, BPM practitioners or even from competition benchmarks. It is much more difficult to change a large running process than starting a new one from scratch, no matter how complex process it is.

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Tomislav Rozman

Dr. Tomislav Rozman is a founder of consultancy company BICERO Ltd. He is also designing online courses related to BPM, CRM, IT and teaching and mentoring Masters’ students at DOBA Faculty of applied business and social studies Maribor, Slovenia.

He enjoys teaching people about BPM and he has performed projects of implementing BPM in Slovenian companies, public administration organizations and SMEs.

In his free time, he is a runner, guitar & ukulele player and psychology counsellor.

WWW: http://www.bicero.com
WWW: LI profile
WWW: Company LI profile
WWW: Company FB page
WWW: ResearchGate profile
Twitter: @tomirozman

‘The Last mile BPM’.

In the last several years, I moved away from BPM evangelism, I don’t even use this abbreviation anymore. I use BPM in my consulting services only if I find it fit for the problem, but I don’t force it anymore.

I asked myself: “What if we teach BPM to people, who never intended to learn it? What would happen?”

For the last 2 months I have been working with a group of Msc. students (adults, avg. 37yrs old, employed at various middle-lower management positions).
They were working on various assignments – real life projects – which have a similar goal: to design smart-city IT solutions, such as: Flood warning system, Better waste management system for citizens, Local air pollution alarming etc.
Business analysis is the first part of their projects. Expected outcome of this phase is a process model of a customer(citizen)-journey with at least 3 roles: Citizen, Municipality, Application.
This year I skipped teaching them about BPMN, it’s syntax and usage. I’ve just provided some pre-recorded lessons and resources. Instead of focusing on modelling, we focused on the problems in the city and a vision (what/how would an ideal ‘smart’ solution solve a problem).
I expected their results would be a disaster from a syntax and semantic point of view and you know what happened?
All customer-journey maps were excellent. System requirements including functional and non-functional requirements based on these models were thoughtful. Weighted multicriteria decision models for the best IT solution provider also. Project plans for IT solution implementation too.
I’ve learned that if you want to successfully manage and implement innovative ideas, you need to acquire / integrate complementary skills: project management, decision making, requirements management and a bit of BPM. From my perspective, BPM is only a small puzzle in the big picture, not vice-versa.
And teaching people (who probably never thought of it) BPM without explicitly mentioning it, is what I call ‘the last mile BPM’.

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Alec Sharp

Alec Sharp has managed his consulting and education business, Clariteq Systems Consulting Ltd., for over 35 years. Serving clients from Ireland to India, and Washington to Wellington, Alec’s expertise includes facilitation, strategy development, business analysis, data management, and, of course, business process change. In addition to an active consulting practice that keeps him up-to-date on real world issues, he conducts top-rated workshops and conference presentations on these topics globally – on five continents last year alone! Alec is the author of “Workflow Modeling, second edition” (Artech House, 2009) which is widely used as a consulting guide and MBA text, and is a best-seller in the Business Process Management field with a “5 star” Amazon.com rating. He was also the sole recipient of DAMA’s 2010 Professional Achievement Award, a global award for contributions to the Data Management field.

WWW: LI profile
WWW: www.clariteq.com

BPM skills in 2021

BPM is a broad field, because “Business Process” encompasses the total work of any enterprise. I can’t presume to offer advice for practitioners across the field, so I’ll just describe what’s worked for me. And what has worked for me is based on having a very active consulting practice in addition to my teaching and speaking schedule. Frankly, I think some of the commentators or pundits in the BPM field have not actually done hands-on Business Process Change work in many years. What worked 10 or 15 years ago is unlikely to work in 2021. That’s why I have so much respect for people who stay active “hands-on,” like my friend and colleague (and fellow Tottenham Spurs supporter) Roger Burlton. He is very active in helping organisations improve their performance, and he continually updates his techniques and methods based on what he learns in “on the ground” consulting gigs. Fundamental principles are critical, and I rely on them, but we have to adapt and apply them differently.

So, some of the aspects of our current world are:

• everyone is under a lot of pressure, and many have the attention span of a gnat
• there is an expectation (or glum acceptance) of constant change
• nobody on the business side has the bandwidth for complex, opaque methods

Luckily for me, I’ve devoted 30 years to making methods simple and accessible. Business was absolutely booming (pre-COVID) and there was more demand than I could keep up with. (I’m working virtually now, but it is nowhere near as effective except for very simple brainwriting activities.)

So, finally, here’s what’s worked for me, and what is my advice for others. Mostly it has to do with simplicity and accessibility:

• a very simple and “common-sense” methodology that “just makes sense.”
• “what first, who and how next, only then why?” – developing a problem statement before understanding what the end-to-end process really is, is an incredibly common source of failure.
• “just enough” time spent in as-is modelling. Too often teams descend into the “Pit of Useless Detail” while modelling the as-is.
• no “barrier to entry” – techniques should be immediately clear to our partners. An obvious example – when I develop swimlane diagrams, I essentially use only “boxes and lines.” Even Gateways are totally unnecessary if you understand certain conventions.
• instead of a “big bang” implementation I use a “feature-based” approach that treats each key feature or characteristic of the to-be process as a change that can be implemented independently. This has been very popular as an Agile approach to Business Process Change.

In summary, I think simplicity and accessibility are very important. People don’t have the bandwidth for anything else.

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Phil Simpson

Phil Simpson is product marketing manager at Red Hat where he’s responsible for market positioning and messaging activities for Red Hat’s business automation products. Phil has extensive experience with business rules and BPM solutions. He led the product management function at an early business-rules pioneer and has held senior marketing roles at several leading technology companies. Prior to joining Red Hat, he was product manager for the data analytics firm Renesys and was a director at SeaChange International, Ironhead Analytics, and Rulespower. Phil holds a bachelor’s degree from Southampton University in the UK.

WWW: https://www.redhat.com
WWW: LI profile
Twitter: @RedHatNews

What are the skills, techniques, behaviors, and attitudes that can help BPM practitioners create value for their organizations in 2021?

This last year has been very challenging, for us as individuals and for organizations around the world. As the pandemic crisis continues, many of us have transitioned to working from home, and our employers, customers, partners and suppliers are learning how to operate in this new world of remote business. My personal opinion is that this is not just a temporary change; that we are learning new ways of doing business that will persist long after COVID-19 has disappeared from the headlines. Technologies like BPM, AI/ML, and RPA are currently seeing an uptick in usage as the crisis pushes businesses to automate more of their operations, and I believe that this trend will continue. As we come out of crisis mode, skills in process modeling, decision modeling, AIOps, etc. will be more important than ever. AI technologies are now mainstream, and data scientists are in high demand. My advice to practitioners today would be to try to expand your knowledge of business automation beyond traditional BPM, to include at least RPA and AI/ML so that you can contribute in multiple ways to automation initiatives.

What are the best resources to learn those skills? (e.g. books, articles, courses)

I’m going to repeat some suggestions I made last year, which I think are still very useful. There are plenty of online resources. Try the RPA groups on LinkedIn (here & here), and the Institute for RPA & AI here. The IIBA is an excellent organization providing professional development resources for business analysts. Their website at iiba.org is a must visit. Also Google’s ML crash course is a great place to learn about AI/ML.

Which skills are no longer relevant or not practically applicable yet (hype)?

It takes a long time to transition from ‘old’ ways of doing things to ‘new’, so I wouldn’t classify traditional skills (think Waterfall development methods) as not relevant just yet. We have however moved towards more agile approaches, and the corresponding skills are no longer hype. On the technology side, Blockchain is still hype-ish in my opinion. Worth keeping an eye on, but not going to generate a massive demand for skills this year.

What is the role of process-related skills in the “new normal”?

As I mentioned, businesses today have a greater need for automation and I believe that process-related skills will continue to receive more attention. There are many many business processes in dire need of redesign and reimplementation, and far too few skilled workers who know how to do it. If anything, the crisis has brought our skills gap more into focus and will likely drive more investment in the coming years. I expect that process and decision skills will have a more central role to play as businesses ramp up automation efforts.

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Jim Sinur

Jim Sinur is an independent thought leader in applying Digital Business Platforms (DBP), Customer Experience/Journeys (CJM), Business Process Management (BPM), Automation (RPA), Low-code and Decision Management at the edge to business outcomes. His research and areas of personal experience focus on intelligent business processes, business modeling, business process management technologies, process collaboration for knowledge workers, process intelligence/optimization, AI applied to business policy/rule management, IoT and leveraging business applications in processes. Jim is also a contributor to Forbes in the area of AI. Jim is also one of the authors of BPM: The Next Wave. His latest book is Digital Transformation. Innovate or Die Slowly. Jim is also a well know digital and traditional artist.

WWW: https://www.forbes.com/sites/cognitiveworld/people/jimsinur/
WWW: http://www.james-sinur.com/
WWW: http://jimsinur.blogspot.com
WWW: LI profile
Twitter: @JimSinur

What are the skills, techniques, behaviors, and attitudes that can help BPM practitioners create value for their organizations in 2021?

There are a number of skills that BPM folks need to pick up. My top ten would be the following:
1) Journey Mapping/Mining for Customers, Employees and Partners including touchpoint analysis and persona creation. Creating a 360 View of interactions for better processes
2) Innovation Democratization by leveraging Collaboration for Process improvement methods, tools and techniques
3) Integration of Business Direction with Process Implementations and adaptation to create a world of real time response combined with prediction
4) Leverage of the Advanced the Emerging Data Mesh that includes monster data volumes and complex data types including voice, images and video along with traditional data and events
5) Culture of Insights by leveraging embedded Advanced Analytics and Visualization Capabilities. Process plus big, fast and dark process/data mining is growing to be essential. Decision Models will become more important as the integrate with process models
6) Adaptive and Goal Driven Processes (often in Case Management and also Explicit Rule enabled).
7) Hyper Automation leveraging AI looking for opportunities to add automation or more smarts like Robotic Program Automation (RPA). Machine learning is hot and Deep Learning is starting to gain momentum.
8) Cognitive Collaboration for Knowledge Intense Processes or Cases. AI Assistance is starting
9) Signal and Pattern Detection at the edge (often needed for agility, IoT and business strategy). IoT integration is a new emerging theme. This can be taken to the level of digital twins
10) Merging Control on the Edge with Central Visibility. Decisions and actions at the edge is starting to emerge. This includes process, AI and RPA at the edge

Which skills are no longer relevant or not practically applicable yet (hype)?

While there are no skills that one should drop, there are several that are considered common and receding. My top three would be the following:
1) Central Control Only approaches with siloed skill sets. More lateral thinking is and collaborative control is needed today.
2) Water Fall Only project methods are taking a second seat to incremental development, Low-code, RPA and rapid experimentation.
3) Large blocks of Dumb Frozen Code are giving way to smart components, micro services and late binding rules guided by constraints.

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James Taylor

James is founder and CEO of Decision Management Solutions and a leading expert in decision management and digital decisioning. Experienced working with machine learning, business rules, predictive analytics and AI to improve operational systems. Published author – Digital Decisioning: Using Decision Management to Deliver Business Impact from AI, Real-World Decision Modeling with DMN and others – strategy consultant, writer and speaker.

WWW: http://jtonedm.com
WWW: LI profile
Twitter: @jamet123

What are the skills, techniques, behaviors, and attitudes that can help BPM practitioners create value for their organizations in 2021? (first three answers are the same as in 2020)

The best thing I think BPM practitioners could do would be to embrace digital decisioning. We have been digitizing our businesses for a long time now and have succeeded in digitizing our channels, our data and our processes. But too often we are failing to digitize the decisions that use our digital data, support our digital channels and drive our digital processes straight through most efficiently.
Digital decisioning is a way to deliver smarter, simpler and more dynamic processes while effectively applying predictive analytics, machine learning and AI – not to the process itself, but to the critical decisions on which the process relies. Digital decisioning involves identifying and modeling decisions, automating them in decision services that combine machine learning with business rules, and creating a continuous improvement infrastructure for them. It delivers consistent, easy to manage, precise and data-driven decisioning throughout your business.

What are the best resources to learn those skills? (e.g. books, articles, courses)

Obviously I think my new book Digital Decisioning: Using Decision Management to Deliver Business Impact from AI is the best resource for Digital Decisioning but there are also some great papers from John Rymer and Mike Gualtieri at Forrester and some good resources from Gartner too (under their Decision Management topic). My blog and company blog have plenty on this topic too.

Which skills are no longer relevant or not practically applicable yet (hype)?

Attempting to apply business rules, predictive analytics or machine learning/AI directly to business processes should count as irrelevant these days. While you can apply these technologies to processes directly, the evidence that they work so much better when applied to automate and manage decision-making explicitly is overwhelming. Applying a decision management approach with the Decision Model and Notation (DMN) standard and delivering digital decisioning is the future.

What is the role of process-related skills in the “new normal”?

The new normal involves far more remote work and has dramatically accelerated the move to digital channels. Companies need to rethink how they make decisions about customers and transactions as a result. With more customer transactions digital, they need to think how they can enhance those transactions to build customer relationships with intelligent next best action and custom generated content. With staff working remotely, decision-making must be formalized and automated so it can be delivered by the first point of contact – they can’t ask around the office the way they used to. All this, and more, means that formalizing and automating decision-making about customers and transactions is more important than ever. Digital decisioning is going to be a critical skill in the new normal.

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Steve Towers

Steve is passionate about helping people and businesses transform to better ways, with happier lives. Whether that is individuals, teams or companies I apply proven and tested ways from the very best individual and corporate achievers to help you codify your own success, happiness and future.

Named one of the 30 most influential Global Customer Service Experts in 2020. An experienced business transformation leader with over 40 years of success in driving and achieving organizational goals in both the private and public sectors in a variety of key ‘C’ leadership and top-level consulting positions. Recognized across industries including Business Process Management, Enterprise Architecture, Customer Experience and Lean Six Sigma

WWW: https://www.bpgroup.org
WWW: http://www.stevetowers.com/
Latest bestseller: Dare!
WWW: LI profile
Twitter: @stowers

The BPM skillset for 2021 and Beyond!

Customer Obsession is now the hallmark of companies that outperform others everywhere.
These top-performing companies have a passion for connecting the dots and drawing the lines between strategy and execution with innovative structured approaches and immediate proactive collaboration across all stakeholders. This sets the scene for, what I will call, the 2021 and beyond BPM Skillset.
Perhaps in the past, reliance on industrial age thinking was OK. It certainly isn’t now as we help create the new normal. So let’s break out the critical skills to succeed and directly contribute to our companies success.

1. Connecting the Dots and Drawing the lines
We are literally talking about processes and customer experiences here. Organizations that can see how everything and everyone is connected are more efficient, effective, and consistently deliver successful business and customer outcomes. Part of doing this is enabled by taking an ‘Outside-In’ view of business and understanding the real causes of work. The fundamental cause of work is customer interactions. Great BPM happens when we include these in our thinking and practice.

2. Speed of thought and execution
Business leaders value highly increased agility, innovation, and rapid execution. Agility in seeing several solutions to a problem; innovation with radical improvements to old-style linear processes; and fast delivery of new processes with new ways of working. Gone are the days of long drawn out projects with comprehensive change management approaches. It is a time to experiment constantly and change the parts of the running engine as we go. It is time for bravery and delivery of significant results.

3. Collaboration and Communication
Perhaps a BPM skillset of the past encouraged nerdiness? Not so anymore. The ability to communicate effectively at all levels of the organization, combined with team playing skills, is the way of winners. What was once regarded as soft skills are now essential to win hearts and minds and provide the company with trust and confidence that BPM is critical to future business success.

4. Tools and Techniques
Upgrading yesterday’s toolkit may not be good enough. Successful BPM sometimes involves taking our own medicine and adopting different software. That allows us to better align the organization, not just from a myopic department view but an across the enterprise perspective that compliments points 1, 2, and 3 above.

How flexible is the software in helping you? Is it relevant in this dynamic, fast-moving customer-obsessed world? And yes, that requires developing an insight into the newer enabling systems.

Look at how the best performing companies combine these new tools and be prepared to abandon legacy approaches that were not designed with the world of the third decade of the 21st century.

Conclusion – Opportunity Everywhere
This is a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to elevate the BPM skillset into every top team and every corner of our organizations. The Need for Speed, Innovation, and Rapid Execution has never been greater. Seize the day, help yourself, your colleagues, and your stakeholders build a better world.

Recommended Resources
Video – Outside-In 3 minute overview
http://bit.ly/WhyOutsideIn

Best Selling Book – Outside-In Book The Secret. FREE (just pay a small s & h fee).
https://bit.ly/OI2021now

The Certified Outside-In Master® (COIM®) professional qualification.
https://cemnext.com/oi2020

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Miguel Valdés-Faura

As Chief Executive Officer and co-founder, Miguel leads the charge in Bonitasoft’s mission: to democratize Business Process Management (BPM), bringing powerful and affordable BPM to organizations and projects of all sizes. Prior to Bonitasoft, Miguel led R&D, pre-sales and support for the BPM division of Bull Information Systems, a major European systems provider. Miguel is a recognized thought-leader in business process management and passionate about open source community building.

WWW: http://www.bonitasoft.com
WWW: LI profile
Twitter: @miguelvaldes

What are the skills, techniques, behaviors, and attitudes that can help BPM practitioners create value for their organizations in 2021?

Citizen Developers, DevOps, and IT: “coercion” will give way to “collaboration”

IT profiles need to stop thinking that the business folks won’t be involved in emerging business process automation. This new normal may be difficult and even painful for the DevOps team, but it’s a reality for projects now. The “citizen developer” trend shows that people without skills need to be involved, and no-code solutions aren’t the answer for them either. It’s time to start thinking about technologies that allow a wide range of skills to participate: developers who need to code, developers who rely on dependable frameworks, and “citizen developers” who are capable of using visual tools in collaboration with the technical team. Citizen developers are not going away, you guys are gonna need to work together, so let’s find solutions that help them to be a productive part of the DevOps team.

Business profiles need to understand that complex projects can only be done with developers, and you will need them through the whole automation project life cycle. Face it, developers want to keep using the tools that they like to use and that allow them to be good at what they do. Don’t try to force them to use the tool YOU want them to use.

Don’t make each other give up ground. Collaboration is better than coercion, and the trend is towards tools that let all technical skill levels participate in creating, deploying, and managing a successful automation project. I predict that business-IT collaboration is going to go much further than the initial business process mapping and modeling, and that citizen developers are going to be knocking on IT’s door more and more in 2021.

What are the best resources to learn those skills? (e.g. books, articles, courses)

Here are some resources around collaboration and governance in BPM:
– Fundamentals of Business Process Management
– Using BPM governance to align systems and practice
– The BPM way of implementation and governance
– Collaboration between citizen and professional developers in low-code platforms

What is the role of process-related skills in the “new normal”?

The “New Normal” Changes Automation forever
Is remote working temporary? Is it here to stay? How do you make your critical business processes flexible to adapt to whatever comes next?

People are already changing the way they work both physically and through technology. Tweaking and making minor “quick-fix” changes to processes by adding a bit of automation here and there won’t be enough; it’s not sustainable for the long run.

Re-engineering and automating the processes that your employees work with to improve efficiency will become a necessity. Profound re-engineering includes operational changes, as people are changing the way they work. It includes organizational changes, as people are changing where they work and how they work together. And it includes technological changes, as people need the tools to make operations and organizations work well.

How does having some or all of your organization working remotely affect your processes? What do you actually need that common office space for? It is necessary for daily work, or as a place for creative thinking and coming together for innovation? What are your common spaces like, physically and on-line?

When you have two people in a room, you may need less automation in your processes than when you have forty people working remotely. And as we saw in early 2020, that balance can change in a heartbeat, so processes need to be maximally flexible. End-to-end automation of business processes can be agnostic to time and place, and if we learned anything from Covid besides what “social distancing” means and how to do it, we learned what robust processes look like and how they can mean the difference between business survival…or not.

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Do you want to learn more?

If you enjoyed this post, you may also want to take a look at the previous editions:

2020 (part 1, part 2, part 3), 2019, 2018, 2017 (part 1, part 2), and 2016.

Still hungry for more?

Professor Rosemann kindly suggested the following article from BPTrends as relevant for readers of this post: Business Process Management in the Digital Age.

If you enjoy the video lecture format take a look at Virtual Lecture Series on Business Process Management (2020) from University of Würzburg.

This year, for obvious reasons, BBC will be a virtual conference. It will take place on October 19-23, 2020.

You can participate in livestreams of conference sessions and workshops (recordings are also available, so you can watch everything you want) PLUS new options possible thanks to the new format of the event:
* BBC Conference Extra
* Practitioner’s Chats
* BBC People’s Choice Discussions
* Virtual Coffee Roundtables and
* BBC Beyond

With nearly 100 presenters, 18 conference tracks and 4 trails there are hundreds of possibilities for you to learn something useful and meet new people.

Learn more about BBC 2020 and register. If you plan to attend BBC 2020 the following code “BPMBBC” will give you a 15% discount.

PS. You can also watch selected recordings of sessions from BBC 2019 to see how much you can learn there!

Fundamentals of BPM

As you may recall in a last year edition of this post I wrote that 2  great MOOCs by professors Marcello La Rosa, Marlon Dumas, Jan Mendling and Hajo A. Reijers (available on Future Learn and QUT) are no longer available, but this should change in 2019.

While (sadly) there is still no possibility to sign up for those courses in a normal form I have a great news for you!

You can access all the videos via Fundamentals of BPM website:

http://fundamentals-of-bpm.org/mooc/

(you need to look for part “Links to all video materials are available here (Copyright 2015-2017, Queensland University of Technology. All rights reserved).”).

Those links will lead you to PDFs with links to the videos.

UPDATE:
Professor La Rosa kindly allowed me to present content of those PDFs in a form more convenient for you.

Materials from a short introductory MOOC, “Business Process Management: An Introduction to Process Thinking“ (about 1,5 hours!) are available on a following pages:

Business Process Management: An Introduction to Process Thinking – Week 1

Business Process Management: An Introduction to Process Thinking – Week 2

Business Process Management: An Introduction to Process Thinking – Week 3

Stay tuned for similar presentation of materials from a comprehensive MOOC “Fundamentals of Business Process Management”!

Apart from those two awesome courses you can also expand your horizons using other sources. Since there were no significant changes there you can use my previous post.

In the following weeks I will update this post with more information about other interesting courses and materials useful for people interested in BPM.

But before then, I wanted to share additional news with you

BPM Tips is a Media Partner of the Building Business Capability 2019 conference.

If you plan to attend BBC 2019 the following code “BPMBBC” will give you 15% discount.

More info about this coming soon!

He was working hard for hours but without success. And it was because he did not take a break to sharpen a saw.

What was his reasoning?

“I don’t have time to sharpen the saw. I am too busy sawing.”

How is this story connected with a daily life of BPM practitioners?

If we allow ourselves to be too busy to sharpen our skills and learn new things all our hard work will be for nothing.

You may say: I know I should learn, but I don’t have the time.

And this is where podcasts come handy.

My daily commute is 2*25 minutes. For you, it is probably even longer.

And this time is enough for two or more podcast episodes.

Below you can find a list of podcasts that I find useful for BPM practitioners.

Not all are directly about BPM. But all are great sources of inspiration. Give them a try and you will start your day with new ideas.

Podcasts come and go. So, to show you only the active ones I used 2 criteria:
a) More than 5 episodes
b) Latest one from 2017.

Enjoy!

1) AIIM
http://info.aiim.org/aiim-on-air
Lots of goodies for people interested in Information Management.

2) BPM.com
https://bpm.com/bpm-today/podcast
This was my reason for figuring out how to listen to the podcasts. Pure gold.

3) Mastering Business Analysis
http://masteringbusinessanalysis.com/player/
Interested in Business Analysis and Agile? This podcast by Dave Saboe is for you.

5) MWD Advisors
https://www.mwdadvisors.com/category/podcasts/
If corporate innovation is your topic you cannot miss this one.

6) Process Excellence Network
http://pexnetwork.b2biq.libsynpro.com/
I discovered this one recently and enjoy it very much.

And a bonus one
BPM Tips
http://bpmtips.com/interviews/
Audio or video interviews with BPM experts.

Do you have other favorite podcasts? Share them in comments!

To make this more useful for participants I asked few of the best BAs in the world to share their tips for the fresh analysts. Today I want to share those tips with you too.

I framed the question as follows:

Let’s imagine that child of your best friend wants to start a Business Analyst career and wants to borrow your learning curve. What would be your advice for a fresh BA?

Below you can find the answers from BA experts.

Laura Brandenburg, author of How to Start a Business Analyst Career
http://www.bridging-the-gap.com
http://www.bridging-the-gap.com/free-email-course-for-business-analysts/

You probably learned all of the analytical tools you needed to learn in school. Your success from here is going to be more dependent on your business relationships and your ability to communicate. So keep practicing deceptively simple skills like active listening. And don’t be afraid to volunteer to take on new tasks to add even more value to your team.

My career as a business analyst started to grow rather quickly once I just started doing higher level work and solving bigger business problems. And I was managing a team of BAs, PMs, and QA Engineers at the “young” age of 28.

Alex Papworth, Business Analyst on a mission to bring out the best in all BAs
https://www.linkedin.com/in/alexpapworth/

Alex published his answer on LinkedIn too:
https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/what-best-approach-learning-new-business-analyst-alex-papworth

Seek teachers and the opportunity to learn everywhere

My advice would be to use every conversation as a learning opportunity. And to seek teachers who can provide you with that learning. Learning can happen inside and outside of work – take opportunities wherever they are offered. People who are generous with their time are not easily found, but they usually do it because it is a passion for them (but only if their time and advice is valued).

Demonstrate your enthusiasm with a generous spirit by inspiring them with your vision and passion, listening, asking questions and taking action on the advice offered. If you do this, your ‘teachers’ will gladly share their time.

My recommended topics for learning…

1. How are new digital products delivered? You need to understand the process at a high level. Get into the detail when you want to understand how the business needs are understood and translated into delivery. Here are some links – https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Software_development_process; https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Systems_development_life_cycle

2. Learn the core BA skills by taking training. Business Analysis Practice and Requirements Engineering are ideal (most relevant in the UK but useful everywhere). If you are on a budget, read some recommended books. Business Analysis by Debra Paul, James Cadle et al is good starting point. Agile Business Analysis by Lynda Girvan and Debra Paul is a good addition. And here are some relevant articles: The business analyst super powers The top 8 behaviours of great business analysts

3. How does the modern business operate? I recommend you start with the organisation where you work or where you have some contacts. What do you need to consider when the business is being changed in some way? The BA training or reading from point 1 should help you with this. Wikipedia can give you a starting point.

4. Who would I work with and what is their role? What are their pain points and how can I help them be successful? You can use (1) and (2) to give you ideas on who you would work with. This is something that you will and should be asking yourself on any piece of work. As you get more experienced, you will have a better idea of the answer. However, making assumptions can be dangerous…

5. How can you get the best results when working with other people? This is not a question of managing others. This recognises that most of what you achieve will come from helping other (to help you and the business). It is actually quite a deep question if you dig into it. A starting list for you to work with would be: facilitation; influencing and negotiation. One good book to read to help you with this and other topics is The Trusted Advisor.

Finally, practice the art of self-reflection. Your early (entire career probably!) career should help you identify your strengths, what you enjoy and where you excel. Spend time writing this down on a regular basis. Check in with people who know you or get to know you and ask them – how would you describe me? What are my strengths?

Oh and take ownership of your own learning. Do NOT wait for your employer to help. If you have a budget and some training, enjoy it but don’t leave it at that.

Every assignment is a learning opportunity. Share your insights with generosity and work out loud. Find others who want to learn together. Never stop learning.

This will help you decide what you ‘want to be when you grow up’. Some of us are still deciding.

As a closing point, this is not my learning curve. This is how I would advise my younger self and others with the benefit of hindsight. Also, 1 to 4 are the fundamentals – everyone should be focussing on these. Focus on 5 and 6 as well and you will be on the way to being a great business analyst (or whatever you decide in the end).

(here are some more webinar resources on various important BA topics)

Bob Prentiss, Bob the BA
https://www.bobtheba.com/

I would not borrow from my learning curve… I would crush it, surpass it and set a new learning curve! I don’t live with regrets, however, if I were to do it differently, I wish I had known more about this profession when I was younger. I wish I had not stayed in the same box for so long – you need to get out and experiment with different jobs, companies and approaches to business analysis. Challenge yourselves to do more. Get in touch with your abundance mentality. Do not operate from a position of scarcity. Embrace the idea that there is enough for everyone so you can learn more, take on more, do more. Absorb every bit of knowledge you can about the profession now because in 20 years it will not look anything like it does today. There are 400+ techniques in business analysis. The IIBA BOK only lists about 55. Learn them all. They will make a difference in your ability to make great decisions when doing analysis. Take…the…challenge!

Adrian Reed, IIBA UK
www.adrianreed.co.uk (blog)
www.badigest.co.uk (newsletter sign up)

1. Don’t (unknowingly) re-invent the wheel: Business analysis is a fascinating profession, and we have a rich lineage of tools, techniques and frameworks. Get to know these frameworks and tools even if you don’t need to use them yet. It will stop you needing to ‘reinvent the wheel’ later in your career. Trust me, I wish I did this earlier in my career

2. But… don’t be afraid to ‘re-invent’ the wheel sometimes: Particularly if working in a large organisation, you’ll probably find there are tools, standards, templates etc. These are all useful–to an extent–but don’t be afraid of adapting them to the context. Practicing in a pragmatic way enables us to get some awesome stuff done

3. Network: Yes, yes, the word networking instils fear in people… but it is so important, and something I didn’t realise until late in my career. This could be networking with business people, going for coffee. It could also be networking (online and in the real world) with other BAs in your organisation and outside of it. I am so glad I have a strong network!

4. Be Brave: Business analysis involves asking difficult questions. Sometimes, people don’t like to be asked these questions–but it is our duty to do so. We must act ethically and in the client’s (or project’s) best interest but we must be brave and bold–often needing to influence without authority.

5. It’s all about communication…. So much of what we do is about communication. Speaking, drawing, modelling. So communication is a good skill to hone.

6. …and the interpersonal skills: You could be the best, most talented modeller in the world; if you can’t interact with people you’ll find analysis hard going So, building interpersonal skills & stakeholder management skills are so important.

Dave Saboe
http://masteringbusinessanalysis.com/

Ask ‘why’ a lot. Having a natural curiosity about your organization, its processes, and how it makes money will lead you to discovering the real value behind stakeholder requests. Instead of implementing a solution you’re handed, ask ‘why’ to discover the underlying problem the organization is trying to solve or the opportunity it’s trying to capitalize upon. Doing so may allow you to discover different, better ways to achieve the goal, which leads you to becoming a trusted advisor.

Most of the books below are Kindle eBooks, which is my preferred format of reading, but usually you can buy them in various formats.

For the books published by Future Strategies you can use the code BPMEE provided by our friends from BPM Eastern Europe to get a lower price (which is useful if you are buying few copies of print version).

My 2016 reading list

BPMN 2.0 Handbook Second Edition
Robert Shapiro, Stephen A. White PhD, Conrad Bock, Nathaniel Palmer, Michael zur Muehlen PhD, Prof. Marco Brambilla, Denis Gagné et al

What I like in this book is broad overview of various aspects of BPMN from many experts. Plus it has a chapter about making BPMN fit for business with ADONIS

BPMN Method and Style, Second Edition, with BPMN Implementer’s Guide
Bruce Silver

First edition of this book convinced me that BPMN is not too complicated for business users and helped me understand many of the BPMN silent assumptions. Highly recommended.

Business Process Change, Second Edition: A Guide for Business Managers and BPM and Six Sigma Professionals
Paul Harmon

Useful overview of BPM-related tools and methods. I always have it next to my desk at work.

Business Process Management: Profiting From Process
Roger Burlton

I bought it after my colleague from work told me about Roger Burlton and his methodology. Very useful.

Digital Transformation: A Brief Guide For Game Changers
Jim Sinur, Peter Fingar

Bought it after interview with Jim Sinur to learn more about Digital Transformation. It’s a very useful book with lots of practical strategies and case studies.

How to Start a Business Analyst Career
Laura Brandenburg

Very useful book for people who want to start a career as a Business Analyst or (like in my case) wish to understand better how Business Analysts work. Helped me a lot with content preparation for my course BPMN for Business Analysts on Udemy.

Prozessmanagement für Experten: Impulse für aktuelle und wiederkehrende Themen
Franz Bayer, Harald Kühn

Great book written by my colleagues from work. My #1 motivation for learning German – still cannot order a meal, but know how to name most of the BPMN elements and what are Kernprozesse already

Questioning BPM?
Paul Harmon, Roger Tregear plus over 30 BPM experts

As the name suggests this is a book with questions (and answers). 33 experts answer most burning questions about BPM today. Many important perspectives and lots of useful ideas. Left five star review on Amazon.

Reimagining Management
Roger Tregear

I got this book for review before it was published and loved it. It gives you actionable tips for various stages of BPM implementation in organization.

My 2017 reading list

After running BPM Value Summit and preparing several roundup posts (on BPMN, DMN, BPM skills and selling BPM in organizations) with contributions from over 60 experts one of my resolutions for 2017 is to keep learning from the best (and share with you what I learn).

Below you can find a list of books which I plan to read.
If you can recommend one of them (or some other books) please leave a comment.

BPM

BPM Boots on the Ground: How to Implement Strategic Business Process Management: Lessons Learned from one of the World’s Largest Organizations
Jim Boots

Business Process Management: Concepts, Languages, Architectures
Mathias Weske

Business Process Management: The Next Wave
Jim Sinur, James Odell, Peter Fingar

Fundamentals of Business Process Management
Marlon Dumas, Marcello La Rosa, Jan Mendling, Hajo Reijers

Passports to Success in BPM; Real-World, Theory and Applications
Nathaniel Palmer, Frank Kowalkowski, Peter Schooff, Mark von Rosing, Henrik von Scheel, Lloyd Dugan

Publisher link (use code BPMEE for a lower price): https://bpm-books.com/products/passports-to-success-in-bpm

Why / Por qué BPM?: Business Process Management
Pedro Robledo

Social BPM: Work, Planning and Collaboration Under the Impact of Social Technology
Keith Swenson, Nathaniel Palmer, Sandy Kemsley, Keith Harrison-Broninski, Max Pucher

Publisher link (use code BPMEE for a lower price): https://bpm-books.com/products/social-bpm-print-edition

The Art of Business Process Management: BPM Strategy and Real-World Execution
Nathaniel Palmer, Linus Chow, Dr Mathias Kirchmer, Robert Shapiro

Publisher link (use code BPMEE for a lower price): https://bpm-books.com/products/the-art-of-business-process-management-print-edition

BPMN, CMMN, DMN

DMN Method and Style: The Practitioner’s Guide to Decision Modeling with Business Rules
Bruce Silver

Real-Life BPMN (3rd edition): With introductions to CMMN and DMN
Jakob Freund, Bernd Rücker

Real-World Decision Modeling with DMN
James Taylor, Jan Purchase

The MicroGuide to Process and Decision Modeling in BPMN/DMN: Building More Effective Processes by Integrating Process Modeling with Decision Modeling
James Taylor, Tom Debevoise

Decision Management

Business Rule Concepts
Ronald G. Ross

Decision Management Systems: A Practical Guide to Using Business Rules and Predictive Analytics
James Taylor

Knowledge Automation: How to Implement Decision Management in Business Processes
Alan N. Fish

The Decision Model: A Business Logic Framework Linking Business and Technology
Barbara von Halle, Larry Goldberg

DMN in Action with OpenRules: A Practical Guide for Development of Business Rules and Decision Management Applications using Decision Model and Notation (DMN) and OpenRules
Jacob Feldman

Techniques relevant for BPM practitioners

Be a Great Problem Solver – Now!
Adrian Reed

Best Practices for Knowledge Workers: Innovation in Adaptive Case Management
Nathaniel Palmer, Keith Swenson, Jim Sinur et al

Publisher link (use code BPMEE for a lower price): https://bpm-books.com/products/best-practices-to-support-knowledge-workers-print

Common Approach – Uncommon Results: How Adoption Delivers the Results You Deserve
Ian Gotts, Richard Parker

IMPORTANT: please note comment from Ian below: he has number of copies and is happy to donate them. Thanks Ian!

Design Thinking Methodology Book
Emrah Yayici

Empowering Knowledge Workers
Nathaniel Palmer, Keith Swenson, Steinar Carlsen

Publisher link (use code BPMEE for a lower price): https://bpm-books.com/products/empowering-knowledge-workers-print-edition

Operational Leadership
Andrew Spanyi

Outside-In. the Secret of the 21st Century Leading Companies
Steve Towers

Process Mining: Data Science in Action
Wil M.P. van der Aalst

Workflow Modeling: Tools for Process Improvement and Application Development
Alec Sharp, Patrick McDermott

Business Analysis

Business Analysis: Best Practices for Success
Steven Blais

Business Analysis For Dummies
Kupe Kupersmith, Paul Mulvey, Kate McGoey

Software Requirements
Karl Wiegers, Joy Beatty

Visual Models for Software Requirements
Anthony Chen, Joy Beatty

Addendum

Thanks for your great comments suggesting more valuable books!

Marco Fargnoli recommends two books by Andrew Spanyi:

Business Process Management (BPM) is a Team Sport: Play it to Win!
Andrew Spanyi

More for Less: The Power of Process Management
Andrew Spanyi

Scott Francis posted about this list of BPM books and suggested two more:

Business Process Management: The Third Wave
Howard Smith, Peter Fingar

BPM Everywhere
Nathaniel Palmer, Keith Swenson, Peter Fingar, Reddy Surendra et al.

I am running a giveaway, where you can win two copies of recent book Questioning BPM? edited by Paul Harmon and Roger Tregear with Paul Harmon’s signature.

This book is unique in many ways as it gives you answers to 15 important questions about BPM today, not by a single expert, but 33 BPM thought leaders.

Enter the giveaway.

The giveaway is over. Congratulations to winners: Katherine and Muhammad!

Visit the publisher page to buy the book.

For BPM market BPMN is now the standard for modeling processes. But is it also the case for BA’s?

To find out what are the best practices, I asked some of the best BA and BPMN experts in the world a simple question:

“Why, when and how should business analysts use BPMN?”

I got 19 responses from the experts and their answers are awesome.

The post is pretty long, so I have added navigation to make your life easier:

Jonathan Babcock
Joy Beatty
Teresa Bennett
Steve Blais
Brad Botz
Laura Brandenburg
Kathy Claycomb
Alexandra Cordes
Abidemi Stephanie Famuyide
Jakob Freund
Doug Goldberg
Don Hussey
Paul Mulvey
Alex Papworth
Tobias Rausch
Adrian Reed
David Saboe
Bruce Silver
Emrah Yayici
Key Takeaways

Now, let’s dive into the answers.

Jonathan Babcock

Jonathan Babcock is a Senior Manager at Jabian Consulting, an Atlanta based management and IT consultancy. His areas of expertise include business analysis, process optimization, and solution delivery methodology.
Prior to joining Jabian, Jonathan worked in several different solution delivery roles in both Fortune 500 wholesale and retail distribution company, and a “Big 4” consulting company.
His passions include helping organizations to improve their solution delivery capabilities, and individuals to reach the next step in their personal progression.

WWW: practicalanalyst.com

Twitter: @jonbab1

From a business analyst’s perspective, creating visual process models, whether in basic flowchart form or a formalized notation such as BPMN, is valuable in helping to contextualize and visualize a process so stakeholders – both business and technical – can refine and understand it together.

Generally, I use basic flowcharts to capture process flows because my audience is more familiar with them and there is less of a learning curve.

However, in environments where process automation capabilities are leveraged, the value of BPMN increases significantly, as it enables stakeholders not only to understand the process together, but, with relatively little technical effort, to simulate and test proposed process flows to validate rules and results and troubleshoot before actual coding takes place, resulting in a more reliable finished product.

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Joy Beatty

Joy Beatty is a Vice President at Seilevel, a professional services company whose mission is to define software that customers love to use. The Seilevel team provides business analyst and product management services for F1000 companies across the US. They also help companies modify their approach to software requirements to be more effective, so IT projects deliver their intended business value. Joy implements new methodologies and best practices that improve requirements elicitation and modeling. She advises customers as they build business analysis centers of excellence. Joy has provided training to thousands of business analysts and is CBAP  and PMI-PBA  certified.
She co-authored Visual Models for Software Requirements, with Anthony Chen from Seilevel, and Software Requirements, 3rd Edition with famed Karl Wiegers.

WWW: seilevel.com

Twitter: @joybeatty

BPMN is a very powerful modeling language for modeling very complex business processes; and with that, it is often too powerful for most of what a BA does. So when I teach BAs to model business processes, I point them to a process model that uses simpler syntax. Arguably, it’s really just a subset of BPMN’s syntax, so maybe they are still using BPMN at some level. I think it’s important for BAs to understand the basics about how and when to model business processes, and a select few will benefit from learning the full richness of BPMN.

There are a variety of scenarios when a BA should use a business process model:
1. Working with business stakeholders to understand or describe how they do their job – they are such an easy model for business stakeholders to understand (and sometimes create), so it’s my go-to choice for that type of work.
2. Showing the sequence of when things happen – many models show relationships between pieces of information, but process flows are the best way to show the order that things need to occur.
3. Showing the current state (as-is) and future state (to-be) of the business process – this would be impossible to do well in words, so we suggest you create the as-is, then update it in a new copy for the to-be flow.
4. Showing the order in which systems interactions occur – this is a variant of a business process called a system flow, where the swimlanes are actually systems instead of people and the steps are steps within systems.

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Teresa Bennett

Teresa has 20 years of experience working in IT as a business analyst and software tester. She started The Analyst Coach, LLC in 2010 with the goal to help individuals and businesses increase IT project success through effective business analysis. Teresa’s organization is an IIBA endorsed Education Provider and has provided training for hundreds of business analyst employees, consultants, and contractors.
The Analyst Coach also provides analysis training to IT sales teams and BA informational training to staffing firm recruiters. Teresa can be reached at Teresa@theanalystcoach.net or 1-866-968-6657.

WWW: theanalystcoach.net

Twitter: @TheAnalystCoach

If you are going to do define how processes should be executed, then BPMN is a great way to do that. Because BPMN is a standard for doing just that, if you are consistent in using BPMN, your stakeholders will have a better understanding of the diagrams you produce.

Just like anything else, if you aren’t consistent, the stakeholders will have difficulties understanding and may blame BPMN for those issues when in fact it’s the preparer of the diagrams that’s to blame for the confusion.

I have heard complaints that BPMN is complex and hard to understand, but if you use the following criteria it will go a long way in alleviating some of that complexity:
1. Limit the number of symbols you use
2. Review your diagrams with stakeholders instead of just sending it to them to review on their own
3. Include a legend that explains the symbols

Your goal should never be to use as many different symbols as you can. You are not trying to show your BPMN prowess, your goal is to show (in the simplest way possible using the right symbols to help the stakeholders have a clear visual representation of what is happening) how a process should be executed.

Do not send the diagrams to them electronically and tell them to just let you know if they have questions. Walk them through it; help ensure they understand the diagrams.

Including a legend at the bottom of your diagram will help explain the symbols and the meaning behind them.

Just like any other new standard, process, tool, etc., BPMN may seem overwhelming in the beginning but if you’ll keep these things in mind you’ll find that it can be very beneficial to your projects.

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Steve Blais

Steve Blais, PMP, has over 43 years’ experience in business analysis, project management, and software development.  He provides consulting services to companies developing business analysis processes. He is on the committee for the IIBA’s BABOK Guide 3.0. He is the author of Business Analysis: Best Practices for Success.

WWW: http://www.amazon.com/Steven-Blais/e/B005E4B49S

BPMN is an excellent diagramming tool for business analysts to use to model the problem domain. Because of its emphasis on the business processes rather than the computer systems the notation helps the business analyst integrate the computer based technical solution with the overall business processes, something that is often forgotten in the rush to develop the software.  Documenting the business processes feeding the computer system being changed and consuming the results of the computer system helps the business stakeholders and the solution team understand the context in which the computer system works, and better understand the scope of the business problem being solved.

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Brad Botz

With 14+ years experience in the Business Analyst role with several companies, Brad Botz is the creator of the Business Analyst Academy – businessanalystacademy.com.  
He has been known to, occasionally, write articles for ModernAnalyst.com

WWW: businessanalystacademy.com

Twitter: @BA_Master

In my opinion, the decision to use BPMN is a fairly easy choice.  It is a well established modeling technique with strong tool support.  BPMN is fairly easy to learn with tons of information available in books or online.

A business analyst should consider using BPMN anytime there isn’t an existing process modeling notation or models are needed that are more descriptive and technically accurate (As opposed to simple Visio models, for example).  I find BPMN specifically beneficial when transitioning a process from physical (paper, forms, etc…) to a more automated solution (web, app, etc…).

The BA should keep in mind that end users may not easily understand BPMN without some education, which may not be an option.  However, more technical people, used to modeling in general, will likely appreciate BPMN as being more descriptive of the actual process.

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Laura Brandenburg

Laura Brandenburg, CBAP is an internationally recognized leader known for helping mid-career professionals start business analysis careers. Laura brings more than a decade of experience as a full-time business analyst, consultant, and hiring manager to help you find transferable business analysis skills, expand your business analysis experience, and start your business analysis career with confidence. Find her at www.bridging-the-gap.com.

WWW: www.bridging-the-gap.com

Twitter: @LLBrandenburg

In my experience, there are only 3 good reasons for using BPMN notation.
1. You find yourself stuck using the handful of most commonly used workflow diagram elements to represent a concept.
2. Your organization requires you to use it.
3. You are applying for a job you are otherwise qualified for that requires knowledge of or experience with BPMN notation.

Excerpt from “3 (and only 3) Reasons to Use BPMN (Business Process Modeling Notation)” quoted by permission of Laura Brandenburg. Read the full article on: http://www.bridging-the-gap.com/bpmn-business-process-modeling-notation/
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Kathy Claycomb

Kathy Claycomb brings nearly 20 years of IT experience to the classroom. She has participated in all phases of application development across a wide variety of platforms, and has used numerous methodologies to analyze, design and implement systems. Kathy holds a Bachelor of Science in Business and has worked in transportation, training, and software development organizations.

Kathy’s first love is teaching, and throughout her career she has always managed to spend a portion of her time instructing. She has an engaging, highly interactive teaching style that ensures students leave the course with a thorough grasp of the material. Her students consistently praise her teaching abilities and her talent for drawing on her personal experience to enhance their learning.

WWW: b2ttraining.com

Why:
* BPMN is more business-friendly than ANSI or other flowchart notations
* Additional symbols in BPMN allow things like time-related events, looping or repeating processes, and information exchanges to be shown easily.
* BPMN is particularly good at representing conditional activities.  It has several styles of “gateways” that are not available in other notation standards.

When:
* As with flowcharts in general, BPMN can be used at many points in the project lifecycle.  Early on, it can be used to understand your As-Is state.  As the project progresses, a To-Be model can be developed.
* Early models will likely be high-level views of the process.  Later models will typically have an increasing level of detail.
* BPMN and other flowcharts are used when it’s important to understand the steps that are necessary to accomplish something, the order in which those steps need to be done, and who is responsible for doing the work.

How:
* BPMN is designed to be developed in “levels” or “layers”.  Ideally, each “level” fits on a page and contains no more than about 10-15 process steps.  You can then drill down into additional details as needed.
* A good rule of thumb for when you’ve got enough detail:  Stop when everyone in your intended audience understands the process step without additional elaboration.
* The “process pool” and “external lane” concepts in BPMN encourage modelers to focus on the portions of a process that are in scope.  Steps that are outside the scope of the current project are typically not shown.
* There are many tools available for developing BPMN models, ranging from stencils in drawing programs like Visio to specialized BPMN tools that are designed to support code generation.
* Unless you are using a specialized tool designed to generate code, worry less about the details of the notation standard and more about capturing the process in a way that the business will understand.  With BPMN, it’s easy to get distracted by things like the style of border that goes around an event, or whether an envelope should be black or white.

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Alexandra Cordes

Alexandra Cordes is the author and founder of The Business Analyst’s Toolkit and an ICT Business Analyst with over fifteen years of experience in a diverse range of business domains. Alexandra’s biggest driver as a business analyst is to deliver results that are highly attuned to the unique nature of each business problem and are correctly aligned with business strategy.

WWW: businessanalyststoolkit.com

Twitter: @AlexandraCordes

BPMN (Business Process Model and Notation) is a standard notation for business process modelling. BPMN specifies an agreed set of symbols for process modelling. This has a major advantage as it creates a consistent way to compare models and communicate with various stakeholders across an organisation.
Unlike unstructured approaches to documenting processes, BPMN provides a number of elements that you can use to model more complex business process patterns – consistently. This allows you to produce detailed requirements, which improves the level of information available to solve problems and explore options for identifying a solution.
Like any model or document that you produce, delivering value to your audience is the key.  How you deliver that value occurs through a variety of mechanisms, but it includes your models. Your primary aim as a business analyst is to communicate clearly and accurately to your intended audience.
You can produce models following the BPMN specification to the letter. However, if your stakeholders cannot interpret and visualise the process or solution you’re describing, your models are ineffective. They will contain significantly less value than the models that don’t follow good practice but successfully expresses the intended message.
In effect, your models must clearly communicate to your audience.
I use BPMN in my daily work because it provides me with a consistent way to model and communicate with my stakeholders. However, I try not to get carried away with elitism in any of my business analysis techniques as – most of the time – it doesn’t serve my audience. It’s about striking that balance between producing good models using BPMN, and expressing requirements to my stakeholders in a language that they can understand.

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Abidemi Stephanie Famuyide

Abidemi Stephanie Famuyide, CBAP specializes in business process management, requirements management, designing systems suited to users’ requirements and IT Project Management.
Her experience cuts across project management, database analysis, user support, business analysis and business process management. She holds a distinction in Analysis, Design & Management of Information Systems (Now known as MSc Management, Information Systems and Innovation) from the London School of Economics and Political Science.

WWW: businessanalystlearnings.com

Twitter: @StephFam

In our team, we use BPMN to:
1.    Standardise how processes are represented. Even though these diagrams are not currently created with the intention of executing them directly in a BPMN Engine (An executable process model can be implemented directly by a process engine), the day the company decides to make a move in that direction, we won’t have to start from scratch. Our process diagrams are however, tightly integrated with requirements specification and form the basis for the technical design of business applications. Workflow notations are necessary to indicate the sequence of process steps (BPMN is only one example).
2.    Convey meaning. The latest version, BPMN 2.0.2, provides 100+ different symbols. I have never had difficulty finding the right modelling notation to use for conveying the right meaning of process flows.
3.    Model to an increased and more accurate level of precision, e.g. displaying different types of events.

Excerpt from “Why Should Business Analysts Use BPMN?” quoted by permission of Stephanie Famuyide. Read the full article on: http://businessanalystlearnings.com/blog/2015/9/25/why-should-business-analysts-use-bpmn
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Jakob Freund

Jakob Freund is a co-CEO of Camunda, author of ‘Real-Life BPMN’ and a regular speaker at conferences such as bpmNEXT. He is in the BPM space for more than 10 years now. Jakob’s absolute passion is the big picture of scaling up business models by well-defined and automated business processes, using BPMN as the common language for Business and IT.

WWW: camunda.com

Twitter: @jakobfreund

BPMN is the right tool if you want to describe business processes that have a certain amount of predictability (or should become more predictable as a result of your process improvement project). If you really know BPMN, you can create process diagrams that are easy to read and directly executable in a BPMN process engine. That is not a wish or promise, but reality.

However, BPMN is not the best way to go if we are looking at less structured activities, also known as cases. If it’s about case management, look at standards like CMMN. Again, you can model and execute your activities, and you can combine those models with BPMN models in order to implement a business process in an end-to-end fashion.

Finally, keep in mind that business rules should not be reflected as a combination of BPMN gateways and conditional flows. That’s what decision tables are for. Yet again, they can be maintained by business analysts, and executed by an engine – a decision engine, that is compliant with the DMN standard.

All three standards are from OMG, and combining them makes obviously a lot of sense.

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Doug Goldberg

Doug Goldberg is a Senior Business Analyst in the Dallas, TX, USA market. He has 15 years experience as an analyst in application development for financial, health care and technology companies. He has also programmed Java/J2EE for a period of time.

Additionally, Doug is an avid business analyst mentor both online and in-person, a facilitator for CBAP study groups, an active guest blogger, and the current VP of Professional Development for the Dallas Chapter of the IIBA.

WWW: http://www.bridging-the-gap.com/author/DougGtheBA/

Twitter: @DougGtheBA

I find that BPMN is a powerful visual modeling tool and concise language to convey structured concepts. It provides a consistent understood approach to documenting.

Like anything else, though,  the practitioner must be mindful of the intended audience. While the value of BPMN is high, it’s utilization with an audience not prepared to understand the notation will result in lost work effort. This is unfortunately a very common occurrence as teams seek to work in rapid fashion with less focus on documentation and traditional methods of delivery.

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Don Hussey

Don Hussey serves as Managing Director for Seventh Morning, a leading provider of business analysis training and advisory services.

Prior to founding Seventh Morning, Mr. Hussey was Senior Vice President of Global Internet Strategy for a global financial institution. In this role, he drove online strategy for the private bank, oversaw all business analysis and project management for the bank’s online channel, and overhauled the way these functions were run.

Before this role, Mr. Hussey was a star Project Manager/Business Analyst with a top investment bank. Earlier in his career, Mr. Hussey held various roles in sales and sales management, client service, operations, and technology. He currently resides in Washington, DC.

WWW: seventhmorning.com

Twitter: @SeventhMorning

Why?
BPMN is often the best modeling notation for business processes, simply put. It provides more rigor and insight than simple flow charts. It is more understandable (to non-techies) than UML Activity diagrams and better suited to process analysis and design. Also, if you’re going to be working with Business Process Modeling software packages, they tend to favor BPMN over the other notations.

When?
All Business Analysts should be conversant in BPMN. I recommend analysts use BPMN whenever they’re working on projects that deal with processes of intermediate complexity or higher. There are some circumstances when BPMN isn’t suitable, however. If your audience is primarily technical, UML is a medium they already have depth in. On the opposite end of the spectrum, if your audience is model-phobic, simple high-level flow charts will be better suited.

How?
Others will speak to BPMN mechanics in depth, but my best advice is that you use it often. Invest a couple hours up front in understanding the basics, and then create models for every process you come across. You’ll quickly become an expert.

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Paul Mulvey

Paul Mulvey is a sought-after business analyst, instructor, coach, CBAP with 20+ years of analysis experience.
Often-requested instructor and presenter, able to engage audience and students in order to transform a company’s business analysis discipline. Transforms by understanding root cause and business pain points and providing cost-effective solutions to address them. Business Domains include CRM, Sales, Pricing, Revenue Management, Logistics, and Management. In addition to authoring “Business Analysis for Dummies“, volunteers with industry organizations such as Greater Atlanta Chapter of IIBA, BABOK V3 writing committee, as well as treasurer of the West Forsyth Band Boosters

Twitter: @PaulTheBA

Two quick advantages come to mind when asked this question:
1. BPMN is built as a top-down modeling approach, so the deeper into the weeds you get in the process, the deeper you can model it. The advantage is this is the use of partitions (or “swimlanes”) to show exactly who or what is performing the process. With the assignment of roles or systems to each lane, your audience can quickly see the party performing the work. I have even taken this swimlane model down to the level or individual modules in a system performing the tasks.
2. The second big advantage is the use of the data icon. Business Analysts can use this to quickly note where a task requires data, and what kind of data. It doesn’t need to be completely detailed out to the individual data elements or data types in the model, but only to the extent to show data is required for a decision. For example, an approval process for a vacation request often requires knowledge of the employee’s vacation history and available vacation days. Seeing these data icons in the model is a great reminder to talk about all the information the process needs.

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Alex Papworth

Alex Papworth is the founder of Business Analyst Mentor. He is a business analyst who has worked in IT for over twenty years and a former President of IIBA UK.

Alex is passionate about the BA community and their collective power – this is why he has built BA Mentor to tap into this network with the specific goal of accelerating the professional development of ALL BA’s.

WWW: businessanalystmentor.com

Twitter: @alexpapworth

Business analysts should use BPMN because process models are the simplest, most effective and widely accepted form of visualising requirements. They should use BPMN as it is a widely recognised standard that ensures consistency (other standards are available!).
BPMN can be used throughout the business analysis effort from the outset when we tend to work at a high level, conceptual view through to the end when detail becomes paramount. It is most valuable at the detailed stage when precision is critical. At the conceptual stage, it is often more useful to produce a simplified linear process where it is more important that it is easy to understand.
BPMN models would be produced before, during and after requirements workshops or interviews. In the early stages, the workshops would be designed to produce a draft model. Later workshops would review and modify the BPMN models until they are ultimately approved.
Obviously these meetings should also produce the usual artefacts such as requirement documents (or user stories) and should use other supporting models such as prototypes.

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Tobias Rausch

Tobias Rausch is the Product Manager at BOC Group for the ADONIS Business Process Management Toolkit as part of BOC’s Management Office suite. Previously Tobias has been working for the BOC offices in Austria and Ireland and his role as a Senior Consultant offered him the opportunity to manage and be part of (large-scale) projects in different industries. His main fields of expertise are in introducing and implementing BPM in organisations, approaches for process-driven requirements definition and software development and in risk management scenarios.

He co-authored the chapter “BPMN for Business Professionals: Making BPMN 2.0 Fit for Full Business Use” in “BPMN 2.0 Handbook Second Edition“.

WWW: boc-group.com

Twitter: @BOC_Group

Addressing the “Why”, and knowing that one should not answer a question with another question, I’ll do it nevertheless by saying “Why not?” In plain and at its very heart BPMN is just a modelling notation and therefore a valid mean for process modelling and flow charting (like any other notation).
There are some obvious advantages for doing so, such as that many students will have learned BPMN at university, publicly available literature and courses and there some aspects of the model and notation you might find helpful in your BPM projects.

The “When” is probably the most difficult part to answer. On the one hand there is an obvious benefit using BPMN for projects with a clear goal to “execute” the processes within process execution / workflow engines. That is where BPMN is coming from and the main focus of the BPMN specification. Often business analysts will be involved in such projects to reflect the business’ needs, but in general the processes will be quite technical and designed by IT (and not readable for persons from the business).
On the other hand BPMN can be used for simple flow charting with a reduced set of classes. “Pure” BPMN however will not address any requirements a business analyst and business people will have going beyond the simple “flow charting exercise”, as it does not contain any concepts needed for proper documentation of business, quality, risk and further typical BPM and/or IMS (Integrated Management System) scenarios.

This leads us to the “How”: naturally this can have many flavors, but I’d like to recommend what I have seen important to make it work practically: Firstly select what you really need from the BPMN notation for use with business people (both in terms of designers/contributors and end consumers) and then use it consistently. Typically you will see that many concepts provided in BPMN will not be needed for business process modelling (attached events, 85% of activity and event markers, complex Gateways …). In our tools we address this by offering pre-defined “BPMN light” modes for users. Secondly use an approach where BPMN is not an isolated method for flow charting, but integrated into the BPMS and extended with concepts for business users and analysts. We have called this making “BPMN fit for business” (more info on this approach can be found in the BPMN Handbook).
Finally using BPMN should be supported by a tool not only to support modelling and manage the information and changes efficiently, but the right tool will also provide support in syntax checks, model validation, translation, governance, business analysis and publication to end consumers.

So: Why not now, with a consistent approach, necessary extension for business and supported by the right tool!

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Adrian Reed

Adrian Reed is a true advocate of the analysis profession. In his day job, he acts as Principal Consultant and Director at Blackmetric Business Solutions where he provides business analysis consultancy and training solutions to a range of clients in varying industries. Adrian is President of the UK chapter of the IIBA and he speaks internationally on topics relating to business analysis and business change. You can read Adrian’s blog at http://www.adrianreed.co.uk  and follow him on Twitter at http://twitter.com/UKAdrianReed.

WWW: www.adrianreed.co.uk

WWW: blackmetric.co.uk

Twitter: @UKAdrianReed

This is an interesting question!  Taking a step back, as business analysts we should of course focus on the problem being solved, rather than jumping straight to the solution.  This is a tension that we manage on every project that we work with.  We should take the same considered approach to the techniques we use.  Rather than asking “Why, when and how should we use BPMN” we should instead ask “What is the best tool for this particular situation, context and stakeholder community on this project”.  It is very easy to immediately revert to a ‘favourite’ technique — which is something I am sure we are all guilty of!

Having said this, there is no doubt that BPMN is a useful standard.  One of the core benefits, I believe, that BPMN and other structured modelling techniques provide, is the ability to use a common notation.  This ensures that everyone–from our users, to our sponsors, to our developers, have a common view of the problem.  Of course, we may choose to ‘abstract away’ detail when giving a high-level view to our sponsor, but the beauty of a model is that the detail is still there if they need it.  In fact, creating different views of our models is crucial–else we will end up drowning people in the detail.   So, if we find ourselves in an environment where it is necessary to communicate very precise nuances of a process accurately, BPMN would be a good candidate. Particularly if the stakeholders have an existing understanding of the notation, or if there is time to bring them up to speed.

The beauty of the BA profession is that we have a whole range of tools available to us.  BPMN and process modelling more generally are very useful tools to have in our tool-box.

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David Saboe

David Saboe is an accomplished leader and Agile Coach with extensive experience in business analysis, project leadership, operations management, and business transformation within the financial services industry. Over 15 years experience in leading technical and process reengineering projects from concept to closure while managing geographically diverse teams for Fortune 500 and Global 100 companies.

David is on a mission to elevate the role of the business analyst, which he does through his podcast, Mastering Business Analysis. He helps business analysts and agile teams achieve their full potential.

WWW: masteringbusinessanalysis.com

Twitter: @MasteringBA

Whenever I’m asked why or when to use a technique, I reflect on the expected outcome.  Using an approach such as Business Process Model and Notation (BPMN) certainly results in output (the process model/diagram), but what value is the organization expecting to achieve from that output versus another approach such as flowcharts?

If the expected outcome is to create a shared understanding of the process, the extensive graphical notation used in the BPMN standard is far from intuitive for most business stakeholders.  If we use only a subset of the notation, why not use another technique?  BPMN usually falls short if your goal is to create a shared understanding unless your stakeholders fully comprehend the full notation.

Even if the organizational standard is BPMN and your diagram is expected to be combined with other process models, think about the expected outcome and whether or not BPMN is the best technique to meet that outcome.

When does using BPMN result in a valuable outcome?  BPMN has the greatest value if you will use the model to run simulations – either of the current process to identify inefficiencies or resource needs or to perform “what if” analysis of process changes.  If you use a tool that allows you to import and create models using BPMN and run simulations to learn what works in a safe environment, that’s an outcome that (potentially) using BPMN can achieve.  Some tools even allow you to build executable applications from BPMN diagrams.

The best use case for spending time using BPMN is if you want to run simulations or build working software from your BPMN diagram.

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Bruce Silver

Bruce Silver is an independent industry analyst and consultant focused on business process management, also founder and principal of BPMessentials.com, the leading provider of BPM training and certification.
In 2009 Bruce got involved with drafting the BPMN 2.0 specification in OMG, and wrote a book, BPMN Method & Style, which is now in second edition.   Together with Nathaniel Palmer he hosts an exciting annual event, bpmNEXT, focused on the next generation of BPM-related technology.

WWW: brsilver.com

Twitter: @bpmswatch

BA’s should learn BPMN because, unlike traditional flowcharts, the meaning of the process logic is independent of the tool used to create it and the modeler’s private conventions.

That means BPMN diagrams communicate to those beyond the modeler’s immediate project team members.  BA’s and developers are not forced to use the same tool… a huge benefit on its own.  The same modeling language communicates both to business and technical users. But these benefits have a price: while BPMN adopts the basic look of flowcharts, to use it you need to learn the semantics and rules.  And to use it most effectively you also need to learn additional rules – like Method and Style – that ensure that the meaning is clear from the printed diagrams.

If you try to learn it from the spec (don’t try it!) or a “dictionary” of the shapes and symbols, it would seem too complicated.  But trying to learn English by reading the OED would lead to the same conclusion.

When BA’s (and more importantly, process improvement consultants) say “BPMN is too complicated,” they are really saying the following:
* “I’ve been doing flowcharting for 25 years and I don’t want to learn anything new.”
* “I don’t like using software tools; I want to keep putting stickies on the whiteboard.”
* “I am happy to capture process details in a long text document that nobody reads.  For me, the process diagram is just a sketch to give a hint of that detail.”  Translation: “I don’t believe in model-driven requirements.”

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Emrah Yayici

Emrah Yayici contributes to IIBA® (International Institute of Business Analysis) as a chapter president. He is the author of the best-selling Business Analysis Methodology Book, Business Analyst’s Mentor Book, and UX Design and Usability Mentor Book.

He is one of the managing partners of UXservices, BA-Works and Keytorc. He started his career as a technology and management consultant at Arthur Andersen and Accenture. Afterward he led global enterprise transformation projects at Beko-Grundig Electronics.

During his career he has managed multinational and cross-functional project teams in banking, insurance, telecommunications, media, consumer electronics, IT industries, and startups.

He also contributed to UXPA (User Experience Professionals Association) as a member and ISTQB® (International Software Testing Board) as a former international board member. He is now sharing his experience about business analysis, business development, entrepreneurship, product development, customer experience design, UX design, usability, and quality assurance by publishing articles and books, leading training sessions, and speaking at conferences.

WWW: http://www.amazon.com/Emrah-Yayici/e/B00D2OGYYC

Twitter: @emrahyayici

“What appear to us as motions of the sun arise not from its motion but from the motion of the earth and our sphere, with which we revolve about the sun like any other planet.” – Copernicus.

After the acceptance of Copernicus’s theory, people perceived the sun as the center of the planets in the solar system. This was a paradigm shift in the mindset of human beings who used to envision the earth as the center of the universe throughout history.

In recent years a similar change has also occurred in IT business.

Previously the legacy systems at companies didn’t have an open architecture. It was not easy to update them or add new components. Although these systems were highly reliable, they allowed limited changes. Most of the business unit requests could not be fulfilled due to technical constraints. As a result business was mostly driven by IT.

However, due to fierce competition and dynamic business environments in every industry, business units focused on differentiating their products and services by fully benefiting from technology. They became more demanding of IT departments. This fact increased the need for more flexible IT systems, which led to the advent of new software development approaches like object-oriented programming and SOA (service-oriented architectures). Software started to be developed with an open architecture of integrated components. This new way of software development brought more flexibility to IT systems, which meant more tolerance to fulfill business requests.

In this new approach, the most important success factor became achieving seamless orchestration of integrated system components. This required utilization of modeling techniques like BPMN as a major part of the software analysis and design profession. This factor increased the strategic importance of business and system analysis in parallel.

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Key takeaways

1. BPMN is getting more and more popular
2. It gives you a standard way of communication between e.g. business and IT users that ensures consistency (as opposed to e.g. flowcharts)
3. As with every tool you should think whether it fits your purpose. In this case – does your way of modeling work with the intended audience.
4. Don’t get discouraged by the number of available symbols. In practice you will need only rather small subset unless you plan to automate your processes.

Do you want to learn how to use BPMN? Sign up for my free course!