I don’t subscribe to the gloom and doom predictions we hear from many Business Process Management (BPM) practitioners.

When you merge Adaptive Case Management (ACM) and Business Process Management (BPM), you get a rare 1+1 =5 boost.

It’s easy to rationalize the situation.

BPM handles structured work, ACM handles unstructured work, ACM/BPM handles any mix of structured/unstructured work. It does not matter whether the mix is 5/95% or 95/5%.

The way you bring stakeholders on board makes/breaks each implementation.

Don’t appear off the street and start lecturing functional unit managers/staff on the merits of languages/notations. They won’t be able to get rid of you fast enough.

Instead, say

“How about YOU build a representative workflow and have this mapped, compiled and running in 30 minutes?

Decide amongst yourselves who should take over the mouse and I will help if, as and when necessary.

We want you go gain a level of confidence that allows YOU to develop, own and manage YOUR workflows. 

Of course, you will need some assistance from IT in the area of rule set building and interoperability but, aside from this, you will be able to  develop, own and manage YOUR workflows referencing YOUR Forms.

If you feel this initiative will fail, pick the most inept person across your stakeholders and nominate this person to build the demo workflow (just make sure you don’t tell them what the mission is).

The objective is to end up with a means of managing workflow that makes your jobs easier, not more difficult.”

There’s the elevator pitch and once you make it, 95% of “resistance” will go away.

The caveats are:

1. Don’t pick a mapping approach that requires learning languages, notations or standards. The stakeholder nominee will not know anything about languages, notations or standards.  You will be lucky if they can walk and chew gum in some cases, so the basics are nodes connected by directional arcs, with the occasional decision branching box.
2. Don’t worry about forms painting. Take ALL of the forms the organization has, image these, and put them in a “bucket” at the process map level so that the designated process mapper can drag a form out of the “bucket” and attach it to a workflow step.   End of.
3. Make sure all of your form images have a “memo” field because, after the workflow is compiled and rolled out, you will get complaints re the workflow logic, the forms etc. and it’s handy to be able to record notes at process steps/forms
4. Set an alarm so that the sample workflow is complete and ready to roll out for “piano-playing” in 30 minutes. Most of the stakeholders want “instant gratification” so you have get to where a workflow is mapped, compiled and rolled out in around 30 minutes.

Once the organization has mapped, compiled, rolled out, validated, updated/improved workflow YOU will OWN the stakeholders providing you help them acquire a run-time environment that allows them to manage their day-to-day operations without fanfare.

Get yourself and your client to this stage of maturity and the organization’s processes will sustain.

If you subject your clients to what is not that far removed from medieval “chants”, your days as a consultant will be numbered.

Don’t shoot me, I ‘m just the messenger!

Courtesy to Walter Keirstead. This blog is also available on http://kwkeirstead.wordpress.com/

Follow