Many Process Analysts see themselves as “Process Engineers,” and they take the designation quite literally.  They like to staff the project with like-minded people, not those pesky line workers who say, “But that’s not how we do it.”  Shortly after project kick-off, the Analysts dive into as much process detail as possible, as rapidly as possible.  They generate thick notebooks of swimlane diagrams, waving them around as if they were Holy Writ. These Engineers preside over process work sessions which are jaw-droppingly boring, mistaking the nodding heads of dozing participants for some kind of agreement on issues.  They are invariably shocked and dismayed to find that their final output -say, a Requirements Definition document – is panned by project team and sponsor alike.

So, what are they doing wrong?

Frequently, they are not attending to the “People Stuff”.  Now, a thorough discussion of the People Stuff would take a good deal of time, and should really be the subject of its own training course.  I will just touch on a few key pieces of advice here:

1. Start working on the People Stuff during your very first discussion with the Project Sponsor.  That person has an agenda of his/her own (no, really!), you need to determine what it is, and whether it will be a barrier to success.  One of my best projects, years ago, was one that never even got started.  I determined in my initial meeting with the Sponsor that he was demanding a lot of time and money for automation which would be of minimal benefit to the organization.  I made the case for tabling the project (and I had to make the case multiple times, because he was politically influential).  I count it one of my great successes, because I actively promoted the good of the company over the pet project of one person.
2. Determine the stakeholders – ALL of them.  Any stakeholder whom you ignore will show up at the worst possible time in your project, count on it. And, a stakeholder who has been ignored can be a powerful antagonist to the success of the initiative.  A good way to identify the stakeholder is to use the ProVision Business Interaction Model. This modeler helps you to push your team through the task of identifying touch points and it provides a really useful visual for your scope-setting conference with the Sponsor.
3. Ask every stakeholder: “What does success look like to you?” Ask them to pretend that the new process has been implemented successfully, and has been operating perfectly for six months: “What are you seeing? What are the things you love about this new process?” These discussions will surface some objectives which no one has talked about yet.  If undiscovered, these desires would have been voiced only at the time of project ”go-live,” when it would be too late to address them. 
4. Push both the Sponsor and management to get some workers of all levels on the project team.  You really need the day-to-day experience of all levels in order to get clarity on what the process SHOULD do for them.  Managers will tend to define the process according to the documented policy, line workers will tell you how often they have to violate that policy just to meet the goals set by management. Your job is to surface the real process; identify the broken parts, and help your clients to design a better way of doing things. Bleasdale’s Third Axiom of Process Management:  Honor the REAL process. If it’s broken, fix it; but don’t pretend it’s working when it’s not.
5. Plan to do a lot of crowd control in your work sessions.  There is no free lunch for the Process Analyst:  you must prepare for the work session with forethought; spend a lot of time developing visuals which will elicit maximum understanding and engagement, generate a good agenda, and keep to it. Provide descriptive meeting notes and lists of “takeaways” for the team to work on for the next session.  Without these tools, your meeting will degenerate into a “venting session.”  All this preparation is very difficult, very time-consuming – and a big part of the “magic” which makes a project successful.  Incidentally, I strongly advise tag-teaming the work sessions, with at least two people working on facilitation and scribing.  It is virtually impossible for one person to facilitate AND take notes.  When the facilitator stops to document issues or questions, that lull in the action sucks all the energy out of the session.
6. Find out what individual team members like, and provide it.  If possible, get a small budget for refreshments. Keep in mind that the people staffing these projects are doing ‘extra’ work. Yes, they really have full-time jobs; and they must add these meetings, and your wearisome take-away assignments, to their already-crammed workload. This causes them to feel a bit entitled to a treat, now and then; and it is only fair for you to provide it.  If money is tight at my company, I pay for candy myself (customer service is my thing.). My clients are very appreciative of the fact that I care enough to learn their preferences, and the sugar keeps the energy level up for those long afternoon work sessions.
7. Perhaps the most important advice on the people stuff—Plan to work harder than the rest of the team. If you are running the process analysis portion of a project (or the whole initiative), you are the one who sets the tone for diligence, precision, and thoroughness. Your audience will care only as much as you do. So, you must be willing to set the standard for others to follow. And, from a pragmatic standpoint, you will not be able to hold other team members accountable unless you have demonstrated that you have gone above and beyond. 

 In trying to think of a way to synthesize it all, I remembered a conversation with a potential client a few years ago.  He wanted me to work with a group comprised of IT and Marketing folks, very cantankerous and opinionated.  He was concerned about the “volatility factor” on the team, and wanted reassurance that I could manage the personalities. He asked me, “Would you mind telling me your management style?”  I hadn’t had THAT discussion in years, and the question took me by surprise.  So I answered from the gut, but tentatively, “…I guess you’d call it:  “Mother Hen…” 

 Even as the words slipped out, I thought, “Oh, brother, this is a deal-killer for sure.”  But before I had even finished the thought, he blurted, “That’s eXACTly what we need!!!!”   

 That was an “Aha!” moment for me, as I came face-to-face with my own philosophy about The People Stuff, something I had never articulated before.  And, if you think about it, it’s really not a bad paradigm.  The mother hen clearly cares about her wayward charges, but she’s not going to be a pushover.  She constantly watches their progress, intervening when necessary to keep order.  She bothers them, and bothers them some more, until she achieves the desired result. She doesn’t harm them, but she doesn’t let them deviate from the chosen path either.

So, if you are your project’s Mother Hen, look at it this way: You may bruise ‘em a little bit – but you’ll keep ‘em all alive; you’ll all get where you are going; and you won’t inflict any lasting damage.  Not bad, as management styles go.

===========================

Pat Bleasdale is an AVP with Wilmington Trust, a financial services company in Delaware.  She is a veteran Business Process and IT professional, with extensive experience in management consulting.  She has been actively involved in process analysis and business transformation since the 1990s.  Her background spans multiple industries, in sectors as diverse as Financial Services and Manufacturing; and her clients have included Fortune 100 firms, as well as small and mid-sized companies.  In 2006, Pat joined Wilmington Trust as the Company’s Business Process Specialist, charged with developing and deploying a BPM framework, a process engineering methodology, and best practices throughout the organization. 

 Pat holds B.S., M.A., and PhD degrees.  In the 1980s, she coined what has become Bleasdale’s First Axiom of Process Management:  ‘Never automate a mess.’

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Charles Dickenson’s A Tale of Two Cities describes the economic disconnect between the lavish lifestyles of the French Monarchy and the marginalized citizens of France.  

This same drama plays out in organizations where regional departments insist on maintaining their own processes in order to accommodate their “regional differences.” These departments may not understand how their “superstar” performance may actually be causing underperformance in another department, or even the company as a whole. 

So what’s the cause of this process disparity? Well, the root cause is often “a tale of two processes.”

 From the perspective of the regional department, their unique processes allow them to produce at a high rate of efficiency.  They may not understand why the corporate office wants them to tweak their excellent processes.  Let them eat cake!

From the perspective of the downstream department, their daily work is chaotic due to the high level of process variation.  As a result of this variability the customer processes lose output efficiency – thereby becoming rate limiters to the downstream processes.  The consequences are unfortunate for the customer department as they become marginalized in the company. Cursed bourgeois regional departments!

Just as in the French Monarchy, executives in the company may understand that there are issues, but do not understand the root cause of the problem, scope of the issue or even the solution of how to fix it. 

Yes, the French peasants did eventually revolt against the governing class and threw the country into chaos, but I am not suggesting that you to go out and storm the executive floor of the office with torches and pitchforks (that may not go over well)!  

Instead, you should utilize the discipline of Business Process Analysis to help the entire organization see the “big picture,” to see how their actions are effecting the organization as a whole, and to understand that this “tale of two processes” needs to be remedied with a process revolution.   

Leading a process revolution must be conducted with participation of all key stakeholders, either as active participants or decision makers – just like we’ve learned in revolutions, success comes from accord.

The first step is developing the current state models with all the key stakeholders.  This model serves two purposes: first, it’s a basis for future state analysis; and second, it’s an eye-opening form of “group therapy” that allows all of the departments to understand how their processes impact other departments and the company as a whole.  The current state meetings sometimes start with short tempers and accusations, but will quickly turn to understanding and “hugs” as true complexity and  processes inefficiencies are exposed. 

Next, future state process models are developed with the same stakeholders who should now be refocused on improving the organization (the best revolutions work when you plan your post-revolution environment ahead of time!).  The future state models should drill down deep enough to expose the roles and responsibilities, deliverables, triggering events and decisions.  Through this exercise, a careful examination of regional / functional processes should be conducted, and a “best practices” approach that can be used by all departments should be explored.

And just like is typical to most revolutions, the improvement phase can have its own issues as vested interests in controlling new departments, roles and retaining power can muddy up the waters of forming a new process. This is where Business Process Management can come in handy, because the organization will have a way to enforce the changes, and keep the process revolution moving forward!

So my fellow revolutionaries, good luck, and Viva le Process!

==========================

Tom Holmberg is the Senior Business Process Analyst at a pharmaceutical company. Tom is responsible for all aspects of Business Process Analysis within Research and Development. His current focus is integrating Enterprise Architecture with the Business Process Architecture. He has 11 years experience in process optimization with specialty in aligning talent / technology / business process. Tom has worked in the Pharmaceutical, Medical Device and Supply Chain Industries.

Tom holds a B.A. Psychology with an emphasis in Industrial / Organizational Effectiveness; Masters of Business Administration from University of Phoenix and a Lean Six Sigma Black Belt Certification from the University of California, Irvine.

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Why do clients care about their processes in the first place?  They certainly aren’t interested in the intellectual exercise of ‘decomposition,’ for its own sake (If you are, you might consider another line of work.  Business people need someone who is focused on getting in, executing a useful project, and getting out).  They care about process because they’re trying to get something done:  slash waste, outsource, automate manual work, take on more business without adding staff.  The big barrier to accomplishing any of these objectives is that business areas have a really hard time expressing and detailing what they actually do – and without that understanding, try inking an outsourcing deal!   You’ll lose your shirt on all those ‘extra charges’ for the services you didn’t specify in the contract.  Why didn’t you specify them?  Because you didn’t know your people did those things in the first place.

 Well, how do we peel that onion?  How do we determine exactly what’s going on in our business?  The Process Model is quite a nice little onion-peeler.  I explain to my Business Unit clients that we are merely uncovering the ‘building blocks’ of their work.   I start at a fairly high level, for two reasons: 

1)       Everyone can agree on what we do at a pretty generic level, so I can get some consensus-building started right away;  and

2)      Working from a bird’s-eye view, I can show people how interconnected they are to many different components of the business.  This keeps them from being shell-shocked later, when we begin to show that their process spans multiple organizational units.

As I work through the components of the process, building out the model, I continually refer to it as a jigsaw puzzle; we are simply working together to fill in all those little gray areas, creating a complete picture of What We Do.  “That’s all it is,” I explain; “It’s simply the picture of our work.  It’s not technology, it’s not systems – it’s just What We Do.  And each of you is an expert in what you do.  So each of you has some pieces to contribute to the puzzle.”

For each activity in the Process Model, I prompt the audience for key descriptors:  Why are we doing this activity?  What’s its trigger?  What comes into it?  From whom/where?  What controlling influences dictate how it gets done?  Any governmental regulations, for example?  What does the activity produce?  Where does that deliverable go?  What kind of mechanisms are used to create the deliverables?  I stress the fact that, when we have completed the Process Model, we will understand the ‘story’ of the process, and will be able to explain its value in a logical, cohesive way.

The Process Model is particularly helpful because it is turf-neutral.  That is, it does not reflect roles at all.  It simply specifies ‘work.’  So, when people begin to jockey to take – or refuse – responsibility for specific activities, it’s useful to get them back on track by explaining, “This model does not address anything at all about who does what.  That is a topic for some other day.  This picture is simply of the work that gets done.  Let’s focus on that.”

My experience is that a thorough Process Model provides the foundation for discussions ranging all the way from the strategic intent of a particular business area to the specifics of automation projects.  The ability to facilitate Process Modeling work sessions  is an important skill for any BPM professional.   And, for business and IT people charged with defining an automation project, the Process Model can be a life-saver.  Why?  Well, as Bleasdale’s Second Axiom of Process Management states:  “Without an understanding of the business process, your business requirements are just guesswork.”

Want to learn more about the value of a process model? Don’t miss Pat’s discussion at the 2010 Metastorm Global User Conference, “Drowning in Swim Lanes? A Process Model Can Help.”

==========================

Pat Bleasdale is an AVP with Wilmington Trust, a financial services company in Delaware.  She is a veteran Business Process and IT professional, with extensive experience in management consulting.  She has been actively involved in process analysis and business transformation since the 1990s.  Her background spans multiple industries, in sectors as diverse as Financial Services and Manufacturing; and her clients have included Fortune 100 firms, as well as small and mid-sized companies.  In 2006, Pat joined Wilmington Trust as the Company’s Business Process Specialist, charged with developing and deploying a BPM framework, a process engineering methodology, and best practices throughout the organization. 

 Pat holds B.S., M.A., and PhD degrees.  In the 1980s, she coined what has become Bleasdale’s First Axiom of Process Management:  ‘Never automate a mess.’

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En route home from one of my latest trips, I received an email asking me to write a blog post about business process improvement projects.

As I sat on the airplane, and the pilot announced that we were next for takeoff, I thought, “This is all going just as planned. The process is working great, and in a few hours I will be home after a week of traveling.”

That’s when the engine and plane stopped. What had gone wrong?

Well, planning is the answer. The air traffic control out of Atlanta had stopped us on the taxiway because of some sort of congestion. Although there was undoubtedly a plan for us to take off at a certain time, some other factor had disrupted it.

That is when I started to think about how, to any business process improvement project, proper planning is just as important as process discovery. Planning out your work, goals, participants, and time helps tremendously in the entire process. And, just like the plane trip home, planning does not mean that there won’t be any turbulence or disruptions during the flight.

In fact, planning will help you be prepared for the turbulence.

The same way the airlines tell you to buckle up – there is some rough air ahead! – proper planning helps move you and your team members along your process modeling and improvement efforts, and helps you overcome and continue to move forward even if you do face turbulence.

So often we are having a pain in a particular area and just jump into buying, fixing, or even changing the business process and technology without properly planning or asking the important questions first. What solution do we need, and how will we use it? What solution best enables us to understand and improve our business processes and subsequently execute improved processes? How can we make use of our existing technologies, and does this solution aid us in doing so?

If you don’t take the time to plan properly, your team may initially be successful in spite of itself, which in turn creates a false sense that your success can be repeated again and again without “wasting time” to plan out your work. I have seen this attitude fail at the most inconvenient time – when things are the most critical to the business.

So, where do you start planning? This goes back to an acronym that I live by, and that is KISS, or Keep It Simple, Silly – or any other way that you have heard is stated. There are two simple questions that you need to answer:

1. Why are you starting the project? Without this simple, two line mantra you will wander all over the place never knowing whether or not you are headed toward the Promised Land.

2. What is the end objective? What I mean by that is – get an agreement or understanding from the project sponsors of what the definition of success is to them.

So, by now you will know where you are going, and how to recognize when you get there. But between Alpha and Omega, or the beginning and the end, there is something in between, and a time box that you should identify. Identifying key dates and milestones will help to ensure that the tasks are going according to plan. This allows for a redirection of resources if the milestones are not being met.

Finally, time box your entire effort. Analysis is integral, but make sure you avoid Analysis Paralysis by ensuring you keep it on a schedule, and that the project continues to move forward. Keeping things to a shorter time frame motivates the team to get things done – this prevents you from falling victim to the dreaded “never-ending project.”

To conclude I want to reiterate the high importance of planning your project out. Keeping things time boxed, and keeping your goals in mind will help to ensure a successful project. And don’t forget, keeping your sanity during the entire process should be one of your goals too.

Happy planning and Good Luck!

==========================

Brian Chaney is the Director of IT Strategy & Architecture at Copper River IT where he is responsible for Enterprise Architecture, BPM development, CMMI compliance and other process-centered areas. Brian has guided Six Sigma projects, more than 50 Enterprise Architecture initiatives, and successfully completed the life-cycle of Six Sigma and Enterprise Architecture into BPM.

Brian is a Six Sigma Black Belt with a proven track record of structuring and implementing projects that yield measurable results including reduced customer wait time, productivity gains through multiple change and improvement initiatives, and cost savings.

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First of all, the revenue leakage problem is purely an operational issue – the drugs have already been discovered, approved, marketed and sold so most of the ‘hard part’ has been done. Unfortunately, in this space pricing is not simple. Almost all healthcare products are ultimately paid for by someone other than the end customer – the patient. This of course results in a complex web of regulations, government pricing, managed care formularies and tiers and wholesale distributors – just to name a few.

To that end, Metastorm has experience working with and developing process solutions for all of the players involved (including the United States government), and can help your organization too. Our technology has the ability to solve your organization’s revenue leakage problem, and more importantly, the fundamental issue plaguing the industry as a whole.

According to IDC, 4.4% of all pharma revenue, which equates to $11 billion annually, is lost to revenue leakage. This is a staggering figure considering that only the top 15 companies in the entire life sciences space generate that level of total revenue. Just think of what that number is relative to your company’s business!

To eliminate this unnecessary cost burden, pharma manufacturers need to automate the processes by which they communicate pricing information to their wholesaler trading partners. While many companies have an electronic data interchange (EDI) solution in place to address the issue, the IDC numbers tell a different story.

Most companies have found clever ways to use statistics to make it appear that the revenue leakage problem doesn’t exist in their organization. For example, many commercial contracting departments cite 98-99% success/accuracy rates for pricing. While those are impressive numbers, and should be commended, the flipside tells a different story – one of unnecessary profit loss in need of a solution.

Consider the same statistic another way: a 99% accuracy rate means that minimally 1% of total revenue is in dispute (i.e. chargebacks), or written off because of other operational and reconciliation issues. Any manager/director would love to lead a project that could reasonably promise to deliver 1% of existing revenue back to the bottom line. For any company with over $1 billion in total revenue, that’s a minimum return of $10,000,000 per year!

Sound too good to be true? It isn’t, and Metastorm has the experience and customer successes to prove it.

Our business process management (BPM) suite of software tools has been used by multiple companies in the space to deliver these types of results to their organizations. With Metastorm BPM you can automate these processes to submit and update pricing between a manufacturer and wholesalers, then provide both trading partners with a combined audit trail to ensure that pricing information is sent immediately, and that both parties have complete visibility (at a line item level) into every price and pricing/eligibility change.

These capabilities first ensure prices are updated prior to the contract effective date (eliminating chargebacks related to the timeliness of information), and second that when discrepancies do occur that both companies’ representatives have the same view of the same information for each transaction (minimizing the time required to resolve the issue). Both of these benefits seriously increase your bottom line by eliminating dollars going out the door unnecessarily while also providing the added benefit of reduced processing time, which frees up resources for more value-adding activities.

But don’t just take my word for it. I invite you to review our customer testimonials and other solution information to see for yourself how Metastorm has, and can solve the pharmaceutical revenue leakage problem and can improve the financial health of your organization.

Want to know more? Check out our life sciences solution page, and read this article about how Metastorm helped two major pharma’s collaborate on chargeback management. 

===========================

Ethan Smith is the Director of Life Sciences Solutions at Metastorm where he oversees business and account development and solution creation for Metastorm’s global life sciences customers, partners and prospects.

Ethan has extensive experience in business process consulting in the life sciences industry. His areas of expertise include enterprise BPM strategies as well as the utilization of Metastorm BPM® and Metastorm ProVision® to establish Process Centers of Excellence. He has driven process initiatives across research and development, sales operations, incentive compensation, physician spend management and compliance functions. Prior to Metastorm, Ethan spent over 10 years in process consulting for the life sciences and insurance industries.

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Once, while at the breakfast table in yet another hotel, in yet again another part of the world, I thought about reliability and the human factor:

My waiter was slow.

While sitting there, two words came to mind – dedication and commitment. How strange that two things so simple get to be so complex.

At the very moment my food arrived, a thought sprang to mind—the chicken and the pig. 

Staring at me trusty bacon and eggs I realized that this chicken and this pig are my dedication and my commitment.

You see, as it happens to be – the chicken was dedicated – it contributed to my breakfast.

Albeit, I certainly appreciated and enjoyed the fruits of her dedication, and she certainly has to endure the pressures of life to produce – she will still do so day for every single day of the rest of her life.

She, however, did not give her whole self – she didn’t make a commitment.

The pig on the other hand, is fully committed. He contributed to my breakfast every fiber in his body so to speak. He gave his all.

You see, dedication is only a half effort. Commitment is investing every fiber of yourself, and settling for nothing but one hundred percent.

In the business world this is the same.

Some companies and their people are dedicated and do well. They consistently maintain steady growth, explore other areas, and generally keep their shareholders and clients happy.

Then you have the few that stand out above the rest. Those fully committed companies. The ones that do not grow “on average” – they dominate the market. These are organizations that are committed. They give their all, and in return, their success is unmatched.

And strangely – a study published in last year’s Harvard Business Review examined these very same, top global companies – the clear differentiator to their success is the management of business processes. Almost 90% of all companies surveyed live and preach process management. They are dedicated to it.  They live by it!

So my message – Be the new normal.  Be processed.

 – Francois Potgieter (Bytes Technology Group)

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Francois Potgieter is the Business Unit Manager at Bytes Technology Group where he is responsible for the Enterprise Information Management solutions (EIM). The business unit focuses on business process management (BPM), document management and general EA consulting. Francois is based out of Johannesburg, South Africa.

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