On Process Improvement – Theo Priestley
We need to teach organisations that it’s not bad practice to throw something away entirely in order to achieve the greatest gains. We need to educate the leadership that the retention of a process out of some nostalgic desire and misty eyed belief it works in today’s context is wrong and that it’s ok to say goodbye to a beloved one and make way for a newborn.
On Change Management – Elise Olding
First – stop using “change management.” It’s a myth, change can’t be “managed.” All of us certainly know we can’t change someone else and likely have learned this well in our personal lives. It holds equally true at work but somehow we don’t take this into consideration and continue to pursue managing change at work. What you can do is influence, entice, engage, suggest, mentor…
On BPM Survey – Anne Stuart
Seventy-five percent of those surveyed cite operational efficiency as the top driver for using, planning to use or considering investing in a BPM suite (BPMS).
Nearly half the respondents hope that BPM will help them reduce costs, while 44% are seeking to increase business agility. More than a third hope that BPM will improve service.
What about the organizations that aren’t using BPM suites and don’t plan to do so? Among those, 48% say they simply don’t see a need for the technology.
On BPM for C-suite executives – Connie Moore
CIOs, business technology leaders, and business process champions, don’t expect great results if you go into the C suite with process maps, process architectures, or “as-is” and “to-be” diagrams. Remember to keep it simple: 1) business outcomes, 2) customers, and 3) improved processes — in that order
On Process Change – Deb Miller
Perception is reality – if the process change is perceived as unfavorable then it will be so. To be successful then we need to design the user experience to serve each participant role, including focus on the all important customer role
On Process Mining and the Bicycle Riding Problem – Keith Swenson
The person may in fact have the ability to accurately perform the process, but can not explain how they do it. Many work behaviors are like this where people operate on tacit knowledge that they can not put into words. Finally, the person may have an accurate understanding of their part of the process, but they may not be willing to say exactly what it is. They may feel that the process as it is performed is broken, and so they will report instead what they thinks that the process should be. All of this gets in the way of discovering the real process. Process mining cuts through all this by analyzing the real evidence behind the process, and giving you an ego-free picture of the process as it really is.
Adam Deane 
Very true. People forget about objectivity & the scientific method. This can be applied to Lean, Six Sigma & Constraint Theory practices. When you ask these practioners ‘where do you get your data from?” the response “is we talk to the users” or “conduct surveys” or “use data from run sheets”. As Keith points out there is ego here. There is also normal human biases.
How do you know your data is correct? If the event logs are recording what the process is actually doing and the surveys recording what people think the process is doing then you may have a problem.
My point is you should be using one source of data and it should be unbiased. Process mining is going to be a lot faster too.
Like the riding the bicycle people have a sense of how processes works but often can’t describe it in detail.
By: George on 29/03/2012
at 8:53 am