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A recent post by Kaushal Mashruwala over at Financial Express titled "SOA Strategy and Execution is Failing in Many Companies" inspired this particular post that will look at BPM a little more closely with the use of a tool that I consider critical when discussing BPR.
"the SOA value proposition is fundamentally unimportant to business people. It’s just another way to implement an application. What’s more important to business managers is how they can change, through technology, the way their businesses are run. And that’s where BPM comes in."
TIBCO Business Studio is a Business Process Modelling application by TIBCO Software Inc. (NASDAQ:TIBX) out of Palo Alto, California. Simplistically, the software provides two distinct views of a single process model that are relevant to both IT and Business, providing a means of collaboration between the two groups that would have otherwise required the use of multiple applications. The software also incorporates robust simulation capabilities using either real data or provided algorithms, that integrate quite well with the overall interface.
The purpose of this specific post is to share my personal perspective learning how to use this application that I think many would argue is a relatively advanced piece of software. It is this advanced functionality that frightens a lot of BPM practitioners and keeps them latching on to the more comfortable tools like VISIO, not allowing them to tap into some of the more useful benefits of a tool like Business Studio.
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This is continuation of the post published on March 4, 2008.
3. Manage a scope. Usually scope management is understood in a context of balancing the project’s budget, deadline and requirements. I would like to look at scope management in a context of program planning, rather than project management. Establishment of a linear and/or parallel set of projects delivering small sets of processes with limited functionality over short periods of time creates a more productive environment for the initiative to succeed.
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CRM Enterprise software initiatives are rightly considered to be the most challenging Enterprise Software undertaking by many people in business, yet many companies dip their proverbial ‘toes” into this dangerous “water”. The attraction is, that when these initiatives do succeed, the return on investment is very fast and spectacular. It is interesting to understand what the critical reasons for such volatility are. I will explore them in this post, based on my own experience as well as what I have learned from various discussions with other practitioners.
1. Clear definition of objectives. The objectives are often articulated in terms which are not specific or measurable - “Improve Customer satisfaction”, “Obtain 360 degree Customer visibility”, “Increase time available for Sales calls”, “Improve Sales efficiency by 13%” - are quite common and absolutely useless if not harmful.
First and foremost, we have to manage better communication….Project failure and success seem to depend on saying, “Are you able to accurately articulate and collect what the requirements are?” and “Are you able to express the right estimates?”…. Too many times, the collection process is weak, because the customer is not easily able to articulate [his needs] in language the people [on the project] understand. [S]oftware estimation is not a trivial exercise; it is still an art rather than a science.
JP Rangaswami is the Managing Director of Service Design at BT Design
There is either no measurable target or agreement on base line and measuring methodology. The agreement is the crucial word in this sentence because we deal with an open economic system which can be influenced by multiple market factors outside of the sphere and control of this initiative. So it is difficult to come up with clear metrics which would allow for measurement, i.e. accountability, and people are not often motivated to do difficult things without effective leadership. The result is a list of features and functions which are collected without asking a fundamental question - How this feature, function or process would affect the GOAL?
2. Effective leadership. The leadership is very often outsourced or delegated to IT after initial, very loud announcements:
In American culture, we tend to equate leadership with yapping. There is no correlation. Lead Well and Prosper, by Nick McCormick.
I would like to thank Michael Krigsman for posting these and some other excellent references and analysis in his ZDNet blog.
That is why effective leadership is critical - Management is doing things right; leadership is doing the right things.
Peter Drucker
It is much easier to be a critic, so I will try to be constructive for a change, ranting can get very tiresome. From my Best Practices notebook I can suggest the following targets as examples:
“Reduce selling cycle by 5% first year, and 7.5% during subsequent 2 years without decrease of average deal size, normalized to our industry market condition”;
“decrease deal discount rates by 10% from the current (pre-initiative go live) levels, normalized to industry market condition”.
These do not reflect the whole CRM footprint, but I found the SFA part is more challenging, that is why I have included these examples, but I hope it is illustrative enough to extrapolate to Marketing, Support, etc.
Oh, I would love to use this new SFA system!
It is business leadership which needs to step up to the plate and articulate WHAT do they want to achieve, and WHY these are the most critical targets to aim for. It is also very important that achieving agreed targets does not become an IT challenge, but remains a business challenge thru training, adoption, and compliance management. The IT is an enabler, not a deliverer of economic results.
I will continue later with the rest of the W’s
I have six honest serving men,
They taught me all I know.
Their names are Who and What and When,
Why and Where and How.
- Rudyard Kipling
There are many excellent blogs and other resources on the Internet which explore methodologies and Best Practices for business process re-engineering, project management, systems implementation, software engineering, and change management. However I could not find much help with unlocking value of integrated utilization of these disciplines to facilitate Organizational Transformation. In this blog I would like to focus on this subject. I would like to stress that this is not an academic inquiry, but a practitioner's desire to discuss and share practical business knowledge and Best Practices. Let's see how it evolves - "Every brilliant idea quickly degenerates into a lot of hard work" - Peter Drucker.