A few years ago, Donald Trump wrote The Art of the Deal, a colorful bit of biography which discussed his approach to influencing people and building his real estate empire.  Copping his catchy title, I want to talk about ‘The Art of the Peel,’ an approach to working with BPM clients to ‘peel the onion’ of their business processes.

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.”

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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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