more than just a conference …
In a recent post in his fantastic blog, Seth Godin, discusses the lovely idea of Toothache Marketers. These are people whose services are much in demand to deal with immediate and insistent pain but in the absence of pain they are invisible.
I wonder if selling BPM to executives and others in our organisations might be like that? Is there something about the way a dental practice works that might inform our efforts to develop the process view?
Open wide!
In preparing material for ProcessDays presentations around our themes of The BPM Tipping Point and Changing Minds I’ve been re-reading a umber of books as part of my research. In case you have way too much spare time, here’s my library (in the order they were piled on my office floor and with a link to the details on Amazon.com):
No doubt there are many more excellent references. If you have some other suggestions, I’d be pleased to hear them. Now I better get back to my reading!
At the ProcessDays 2008 Conference, the pre-dinner presentation, Now That’s An Event! Fireworks, Olympics and the Pope, will be given by Ian Steigrad. Ian will share his experiences in manging massive events such as the Millennium and Olympics fireworks in Sydney Harbour and the 2008 World Youth Day. As the Director, Event Planning & Operations, for World Youth Day (www.wyd2008.org) Ian and his team will have managed the logistics associated with the largest event Australia has ever hosted. WYD will attract over 125,000 international visitors - more than the 2000 Olympics. Up to 500,000 people will have been at the final WYD event at Randwick Racecourse and Centennial Park.
Ian will have some fascinating stories to tell of the highs and lows of massive event management.
Designing and populating the ProcessDays Conference program is a fascinating exercise. What are the key issues? What do delegates what to hear about? How should we present the various sessions? Who can communication the messages? What are the compelling topics?
As part of the design process every year we search for the elusive species - the BPM Aware Senior Executive. Our holy grail is to create at least one plenary session where we have fair dinkum executives talking about process. Not BPM practitioners but perhaps the people they report to. They don’t need to be BPM experts but they do need to have a well developed “executive perspective” about why BPM is important. The sort of person we look for has little knowledge of BPM at an operational level but certainly knows why it is important from a strategic and executive management point of view – a good high level understanding of what BPM means to the organisation and why it should be supported. The key BPM practitioner probably reports to this person. Like Sir David Attenborough searching everywhere for rare life forms, we search high and low for that fabled creature ”the executive who has bought in to BPM”.
Such people are, of course, hard to find. And perhaps even harder to get into the spotlight. The bpmase* seems to be a rare and timid creature. Perhaps they hesitate to reveal themselves because they know that they have with their grasp significant competitive differentiators based on BPM? But we never give up our search to find one or two out there in the wilderness that we can coax into ProcessDays for an hour or two.
If you spot a likely bpmase in your travels, let us know. We’ll send out a retrieval team.
[*BPM Aware Senior Executive]
In his recent BPTrends Advisors Paul Harmon has been leading an important discussion about the differences between product (manufacturing) processes and services processes. Seems to me that the differences are about complexity and one key driver of this is sequencing.
As Paul shows in his hotel example, the service processes don’t have the same fixed sequence that is a feature of most (but not all?) production processes. Will Roger call room service tonight or will he go the restaurant? Will he have laundry to be sent out? Will he check out early or late? By comparison, a manufacturing process will almost always have a fixed sequence of activity.
Although it’s not the multiplicity of customers that cause the differences between process and product processes, the sequencing decisions are made largely by the customer so the complexity is customer-driven. There is a “service process selection matrix” and the service processes have a (quasi-)random element to their execution. Perhaps a “web of processes” rather than a “value chain of processes”.
Important not to lose sight of the fact that “processes deliver value to customers and other stakeholders” and that is absolutely the same for both product and service processes.
Can we always make a clear distinction between service and product processes? The home delivery pizza shop is clearly doing both product and service processes. Maybe the useful distinction is whether there is a repeatable sequence of processes rather than just whether the output has mass as well as value? And there might be a mixture of both at various levels in every process architecture? A key test will be: with what certainty can we predict what the next process(es) will be?
These are important questions that may well have an impact on the achievement of The BPM Tipping Point.
Reading a book called “Made To Stick: Why Some Ideas Survive and Others Die” by Chip and Dan Heath (yes, they are brothers). The authors acknowledge that this is an extension of Malcolm Gladwell’s “Stickiness Factor”. A very useful extension I think. We need to understand how to make the idea of BPM sticky.
Why are the ideas embedded in urban myths, proverbs, great speeches, successful business ideas, jokes, war stories and conspiracy theories so potent? How do they stay around for years (in some cases hundreds and even thousands of years) and cross geographic and cultural borders?
The book describes six principles of successful ideas: Simple Unexpected Concrete Credentialed Emotional Story. Lots of examples and useful practical advice about how to achieve these characteristics.
One idea I have from the book that I’m finding very sticky is the Curse of Knowledge. This talks about the difficulty we have in remembering what it was like NOT to know something. In our BPM context I think we often get too complex too quickly. We’ve been thinking about process-based management for years and, when we are explaining it to someone who is new to the idea, we unconsciously make assumptions about what they already know. These assumptions are based on our knowledge, not theirs. The Curse of Knowledge! Maybe we should NOT be trying to tell everyone everything all at once. Maybe it will work better if we have a staged plan that nudges people closer to an understanding of BPM as a management philosophy one step at a time?
These ideas, and many more, will certainly be on the table at ProcessDays 2008.
Just three months to go to ProcessDays 2008. Registrations are pouring in. We’ve never had so many at the three month mark in any of the previous five ProcessDays. New program, new format, new venue - all being well received by the regular attendees and first timers as well.
This year we’ll have Brad Blaze, the caricature artist from Red Faces, back at ProcessDays. He was a hit last year and we are delighted that he’ll be back again in 2008. Here’s a particularly handsome image he produced in 2007!
The speakers at ProcessDays wrote the book on BPM!
A sub-theme of the Conference is Changing Minds. In seeking to create a critical mass to escalate the adoption of BPM we need to create a new awareness of the potential of process-based management. What strategies can we adopt to facilitate this changing of minds? Of course this is related to the BPM Tipping Point - we get to the tipping points when enough minds change.
I read recently and interesting comment along the lines that the only mind we can change is our own. All we can do for others is seek to influence their thinking. Seems pretty right to me.
There must be finite number of approaches to influencing others to think process. I’m looking forward to the ProcessDays Conference sessions helping to define and document those approaches.
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