Pretty likely you have some resolutions for this year, perhaps including some process-related ones If so, let me know in comments (or drop me an e-mail at zbigniew@bpmtips.com), so that I can share with you helpful content.

This post is a part of the experiment I planned for this year. Apart from the standard posts you know well from my website (e.g. BPM skills), I want to see if you like the new formats of content. 

Below, you can see an example of the first format: process mention. What’s the idea? When I read or listen to something outside the BPM universe, sometimes processes are mentioned from an interesting angle. Instead of making notes for myself, I want to share some quotes with you. Let me know if you find it useful!

Content:  HBR IdeaCast / Episode 833 There Still Aren’t Enough “Good Jobs”

In this podcast episode Zeynep Ton (a professor at the MIT Sloan School of Management) talks about a need for a different approach to creating jobs. She tells a lot about “bad jobs” in US (some examples are pretty scary/sad funny), but she also gives arguments why employers should treat their workers differently.

Quote: “How can you differentiate yourself in the eyes of your customers if your workers are changing all the time and they can’t focus on the job and their job is not designed to create high value?” 

This is an incredibly valuable point IMO: designing job to create high value. BPM can be useful support here.

Quote: “[…] we need leaders to start thinking differently about their people. Not as inputs, but as human beings who can drive performance, who can drive sales, who can lower costs. And unless leaders change the way they think about people, for as long as they think about people as just a cost to be minimized, I don’t think that the changes would last.”

Also very important point. Pretty often, I hear that automation can save costs, because we can fire people. This may work in a short period, but in a long run this is a risky idea.

Interesting case study (Costco): “So, why is it that they’re able to pay their workers so much more and offer lower prices to their customers and create great returns to their shareholders? Because they leverage their investment in people. Because they empower their employees to be able to make decisions for their customers. Because they empower their employees to cut costs everywhere else. Because they design the work so that employees can be extremely productive.“

Quote: “Is a second important step because when a company changes into a good job system, there are many changes that they will have to make. It’s not just paying workers more, but it’s also designing the work differently.“

Designing of work reminds me of Deming’s famous quote about 94% of cases where problems and potential improvements are within the responsibility of management.

Interesting case study (Sam’s Club): “They use automation to take out the unwanted tasks. They simplified the work and the result has been outstanding for Sam’s Club. It wasn’t just pay. It was a holistic effort and their whole team understood the whole system that was required to change, including the changes in the supply chains. But that’s a fantastic example about a company that has changed, and that is now doing a great job with their customers, with their members. They have membership growth, their same store sales growth has been fantastic, and it didn’t cost them at the end. It ended up being a driver of their performance.”

While this podcast does not mention directly “The Great Resignation”, I thought you may also enjoy two more links:

https://www.weforum.org/agenda/2021/11/what-is-the-great-resignation-and-what-can-we-learn-from-it/

https://www.hfsresearch.com/research/the-great-resignation-can-our-industry-survive-the-great-talent-dearth/

PS. How did you like this new post format? Let me know!

Reimagining Management (by Roger Tregear)

Business Process Change: A Business Process Management Guide for Managers and Process Professionals 4th Edition (by Paul Harmon)

Books about process modeling with BPMN
BPMN Quick and Easy Using Method and Style: Process Mapping Guidelines and Examples Using the Business Process Modeling Standard (by Bruce Silver)

Real-Life BPMN (4th edition): Includes an introduction to DMN (by Jakob Freund and Bernd Rücker)

Books about change management
While those books do not cover process management directly, they can be very useful source of inspiration, interesting techniques and great stories you can use in your BPM initiatives.

Switch: How to Change Things When Change Is Hard (by Chip and Dan Heath)

Smarter Faster Better: The Transformative Power of Real Productivity (by Charles Duhigg)

Think Again: The Power of Knowing What You Don’t Know (by Adam Grant)
I just finished reading this one and have to say it is very inspiring.

And last, but not least – something both for kids and adults:
Our Iceberg Is Melting: Changing and Succeeding Under Any Conditions (by John P. Kotter and Holger Rathgeber)

UPDATE:
I got this book for Christmas and can recommend it too
Loonshots: How to Nurture the Crazy Ideas That Win Wars, Cure Diseases, and Transform Industries (by Safi Bahcall)

PS. To celebrate Christmas I have a small gift for my readers. If you would like to get free access to my course about BPMN on Udemy drop me an e-mail (zbigniew@bpmtips.com) with subject “Christmas 2021” and I will send you back the link to enroll

This is a good question so I will share some of the elements we discussed live, hoping they will also be useful for you.

By the book it would be best idea to start building process architecture top-down (Burlton&Harmon style). However this will take some time and require the resources (just think about stakeholder analysis, workshops, agreeing the process architecture and process goals)

You can also try to make the process faster by applying some process frameworks like APQC PCF to avoid reinventing the wheel.

However what should you do if you are running a mid-sized project inside the organization and just want to make sure there is some order in the way you approach your models?

Here are some tips:

1. Try to identify what processes are in scope of your project. Ideally – try to connect them with the high level architecture or at least try to figure out what is above (how does it fit your company value stream). For the time being those can be just names of the processes, so it should not take you more than 15 minutes if you have appropriate people available. Easy? So move on.
2. Now let’s think what are the processes before and after those of your interest (they are sometimes called upstream and downstream). Here we are trying to see the connections and dependencies (more on this in the points below). 2 minutes per process perhaps?
3. For each of the processes document the most important elements. Apart from name of the process (by the way – it makes sense to have some naming convention for your process models with identifiers) you should at least capture:
   a) Who is the process owner. This person will likely have authority to decide when some important changes are needed and can help you connect with proper people who know what is going on in the process. In a perfect world – 5 seconds. In less-than perfect world – sometimes minutes (few mails and telephones ), and sometimes days (few workshops) may be needed to find a person that identifies as a process owner.
   b) What is the process goal. This is super important, because if you know why do we run this process, you can filter improvement ideas and make better design decisions. Again – it can range from minutes to days.
   c) What is the process scope. I personally more and more like IGOE approach in which you identify Inputs, Guides (e.g. company strategy, policies, …), Outputs (e.g. products) and Enablers (all the resources that allow your process to transform inputs into outputs). This can take you some time (but during few workshops I could do it in less than 10 minutes per process, but it is really helpful later on. Additional bonus – if you start with IGOE it is much easier to identify the start and end events of your process, which obviously helps when you need to do detailed modeling.
4. Now the fun part You need to recall what is the goal of your project, how much time/resources do you have and decide which processes deserve to be modeled in detail and which ones do not need a model. This last point actually deserves an additional post, so stay tuned.

Now it is your time. How do you approach creating (mini) process architectures in your projects? Put your experiences in comments!

One of her favourite episodes is “The Taxis and the first Postal System”.

Watching it with her I noticed the brilliant idea that allowed the Taxis family build their postal service.

Remember the quote?

Neither snow nor rain nor heat nor gloom of night stays these couriers from the swift completion of their appointed rounds.

 

In this episode it was shown how the traditional approach (horse riders travailing across many countries with the post) could not compete with the new business model.

What was the difference? Traditionally travel was long, expensive and dangerous since the post riders:

1. did not change the horses (so they had to avoid too fast ride)
2. did not know the whole route (many countries with different languages -> delays due to communication problems)
3. could get robbed

Generally this job expected great commitment from the post riders.

The new business model introduced by Taxis was based on a different assumptions:

1. Instead of professional post riders they employed local people who knew the land, language and would not get lost (plus they would be robbed less often since they knew the dangerous places).
2. Instead of having the riders take the whole route they asked them only to travel few kilometers where they passed the mail bag to the next person. It also allowed them to ride faster as they did not have to worry about exhausting the horse.

The result?

Well designed system using non-professional employees doing simple things very well (Adam Smith anyone?) outperformed the “business as usual” way of handling the post where expectations towards post riders were very high, but the system did not support them.

For the customers (e.g. kings) this led to messages reaching the destination point days faster than before, which resulted in Taxis family obtaining the monopoly for the postal services in few countries plus got elevated to knights (and later to princes).

The change did not require great investments (at least on a basis of the movie but new way of thinking and continuous improvement approach (I loved the part when they did PDCA experiments and found out that blowing the horn can make other riders prepare in advance for taking over the mail bag).

So – if some medieval guys could transform the whole industry by using the simple process improvement techniques what results can you get? Maybe you will also become a prince or a princess (at least for your happy customers)?

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