The Leonardo Blog

Process performance measures are the ‘vital signs’ of organizational health, providing a current status assessment, giving clues to possible health issues, and showing progress towards recovery. A government organization implementing a new service did a lot of planning, created a large number of process models, and had many sessions with a wide range of stakeholders. Green lights everywhere, so the service was launched with appropriate ‘ribbon cutting’. Two days later, all were relieved that the launch had gone well; two weeks later, there was a slowly rising murmur of complaint; two months later, service delivery was in virtual gridlock and the murmur was a cacophony. A month after that, it was finally discovered that a key process in the service delivery was often failing, causing significant rework and introducing inordinately long delays. Further analysis found ways to reduce the delays by 95%. After resolving the backlog, normal service delivery resumed. Customer, and staff, memories of the fiasco will, however, never be erased.

What’s the problem? My favorite question is “What’s the problem we are trying to fix?”— so we should start with that.

If you are looking convert a large library of EPC models to Swimlane models (model type EPC – Row Display), a customized automatic conversion script is what you are after.

The question about who should manage the BPM tool administration arises when it comes to the bridge that crosses the business/IT domain. In some contexts, this can be a “push-pull” situation between the business and IT teams to administer the tool. It needs to be clear that the separation between business and IT is on the administration components at the software level of the tool, and not the hardware piece (i.e. ARIS Designer & Architect server). The server management, including the hardware maintenance and database application backups, remains with IT.