Library clips

"Real knowledge work is about handling the exceptions. Everything else can be automated.

Thinking about the frustrations you’ve had with anything you’ve tried to accomplish in getting work done (save your own shortcomings or those of others). A good majority of them are either due to over-automation (not allowing for exceptions) or underautomation (leaving you to manage mundane tasks).

What IT methodology focuses on assessing for such balances? NONE!"

“…work activities that are complex, nonroutine processes, predominantly executed by an individual or group highly dependent on the interpretation and judgment of the humans doing the work for their successful completion”and notes that most business processes are made up of both structured and unstructured processes. Unstructured processes are costing organizations a lot of money in lost productivity, lack of compliance and other factors, and you can’t afford to ignore them. Although most processes aimed to meet regulatory requirements are structured, unstructured processes provide a company’s unique identity and often its competitive differentiation, as well as supporting operational activities."

"…the BPMS vendors are looking for ways to incorporate “barely repeatable processes” into their systems, allowing users to create their own ad hoc processes on the fly but still capturing the audit trail so that it’s not just happening over email or the phone in an unaudited fashion. The idea is not to pre-define all of these processes, but to provide tools that allow process participants to have a sufficiently unstructured environment to do what they need to do, and augment that process with their own call-out at that point."

“Typically exceptions to the ERPs, anything that involves people in non-rigid flows through education, health, support, government, consulting or the daily unplanned issues that happens in every organisation. The activities that employees spend most of their time on every day. Processes that often starts with an e-mail or a call. A process volume, measured by time and resource spent at organisations, probably larger than for the Easily Repeatable Processes. These are mostly handled and organised - frameworked - by systems like paper based rules and policies, e-mail, meetings, calls and now in more modern organisations by wikis and other collaboration systems and methods.

Known by extensive loss of information (e-mails residing on HDDs), little knowledge acquired and reused (typical research says 70% of problems solved before without being known) and most of all, untrustworthy processes (oops, forgot to send that mail). In other words not an iota (well almost) of business process thinking or methodology applied to this huge untapped area of business processes.”

“The way organizations adapt, survive and be productive is through the social interaction that happens outside the lines that we draw by hierarchy, process and organizational structure. The first form of social software to really take off to facilitate these discussions was email.

Most employees don’t spend their time executing business process. That’s a myth. They spend most of their time handling exceptions to business process. That’s what they’re doing in their [e-mail] inbox for four hours a day. Email has become the great exception handler.”

"…‘barely repeatable processes’ - a good way to look at them - where you need a quickly built app that includes the process loops in order to solve the problem."

"One thing to be careful with is that you want to provide enough structure to the process to add value, but not so much as to strangle it. Given that most of these processes are executed today via documents and email, we built our tool as an extension to those standard office tools - allowing the same ad-hoc feel, but adding a layer of management, tracking and reporting.

"For many of these processes an initial formal model is overkill (and at odds with the needs of most knowledge workers) - at most you want a guideline or best practice that gets modified as the work gets done. Then these emerging models can later be used to create a more formal model if needed (I’ve blogged on the topic of in-situ process discovery on our blog http://blog.actionbase.com/in-situ-process-discovery)."

"Human work is: Dynamic Tacit Ad hoc Crossing boundaries and silos Saturated with peer to peer interaction If you want to manage a human workflow like fraud investigation or a product change request or any other, you need to accept the “chaos” and face the facts - structured, rigid process does not fit into this paradigm."

"Human processes are business processes that generate a business outcome that is heavily dependent on interactions between people. These are also called “tacit interactions” by economists, which is an attempt to differentiate between routine transactions and interactions that rely heavily on judgment and context. These “tacit interactions” are the most prevalent kind of business processes in which knowledge workers take part.

Most of the work of involved in executing these human processes is with the communication, coordination and management aspects of the process. Currently most human processes in business are executed using standard productivity tools (e.g. MS Office), email (e.g. Outlook) and meetings.

"Unstructured - there is a standard framework for the process and how to achieve the intended result, but each case is handled separately and requires human understanding (for both decisions and flow) as part of the process. There isn’t enough standardization between instances of the process that allows for a formal, complete and rigorous description of the process end-to-end.

Dynamic - the flow of the process changes on a case by case basis, based on available information and human decisions. A flow can also change while the process is being executed based on new information, or a changing environment."

"None of the agile processes as described by their originators is perfect for your organization. Any may be a good starting point, but you will need to tailor the process to more precisely fit the unique circumstances of your organization, individuals, and industry. As Alistair Cockburn once told me, “Having a chance to change or personalize a process to fit themselves seems to be a critical success factor for a team to adopt a process. It’s the act of creation that seems to bind teams to ‘their own’ process.”"

"Becoming an enterprise 2.0 is not a goal for any enterprise and should not be. The only one is : improving the way things are done everyday, the way it produces.

But what does “production” really mean ?"

"Being able to produce something defined, following a process in which everyone knows exactly what he has to do, when, and how."

"Being able to overcome any breakdown or insufficiency […] goods and services have to be more and more customised. As a consequence, production is less and less standardized and the need for readjusting it according to clients who have more and more specific requests is not an accident anymore but a norm […] their unpredictability has to be admitted and a framework has to be defined in order, even if things are not under control in the strict sense of the word, they respect some essential rules. Paying no attention to that and focusing on the traditional FPC causes many dysfunctions and put employees in unbearable situations."

"Being able to innovate and produce unexpected things […] has to be facilitated because it’s key in a disruptive economy"

"…businesses have to develop these three points. Not one of them, all of them […] Companies should facilitate the switch between these three systems because it’s what people need to get things done […] There’s no unique satisfactory way of doing things. People have to know how to switch from one to another.

"…processes can become calcified and accepted as the rule even when they do not work and make no sense."

"A process is like a standard. It provides a common definition for others to build upon. This is generally a good thing […] At best, a process should serve as a reference model. Something that others can reference when completing a task. Something that can be leveraged for innovation, a boundary condition for experimentation at the margin."

"…meticulously defined and managed processes continue to be a powerful source of competitive advantage for many companies. Look at Toyota, for instance. Its highly engineered manufacturing processes not only give it superior productivity but also provide a platform for constant learning and improvement. The formal structure, which is anything but democratic, spurs both efficiency and innovation - productive innovation - simultaneously"

"The simple group-forming and information-sharing software tools now being introduced and refined will often provide greater flexibility and effectiveness than more complex "knowledge management" systems. But even in these cases, processes aren’t going away; they’re just changing. There can’t be organization without process."

"Bad processes can destroy individual initiative, but well-designed processes, even very formal ones, can encourage individual initiative and, importantly, guide personal and group creativity toward commercially productive ends. I’m not sure you need to balance process and people so much as harmonize them"

"…we need to standardize those processes where differentiation brings little or no incremental value, so as to avoid the huge inefficiencies involved in re-inventing the same process over and over again."

"An innovative business looks for the proper balance between process - covering those aspects of the business that can be designed, standardized, and increasingly automated - and people - who bring their creativity and
adaptability to handle everything else. In a world that keeps getting more and more complicated and is changing faster and faster you need both - but even
more, you need the innovation which, when all is said and done, is the truly human element."

“The problem is not business processes. The problem is trying to automate business processes."

"We are more efficient than before, but we’re disappointed nevertheless. Yes, our coordination costs are lower than they were with ad hoc and / or manual processes. But now we want more! We want to keep enjoying these improvements in efficiency and productivity, but we want the creativity and innovativeness back, which we are somehow certain that we’ve lost"

“The traditional notion of a business process comes from the manufacturing world where you can standardise the inputs and outputs of a given process,” he explains.“With ‘white collar’ processes, the very reason you have human beings doing them is that you cannot standardise those inputs and outputs.”

"If work was like a water flow and the given framework was the pipe it flows through, then BPM would be the system whereby pipes were shifted from side to side and valves opened and shut to direct changes to the flows. Good enough if the flow is water.

Not so good if the water molecules had a mind of their own and actually were able to make directional decisions underway. Funny thing, people can. And more; it’s wanted because people are smarter than machines and that’s why you hired them. Ever broken business rules or botched the main systems just so you actually can get your job done? But of course you have."

"Many organizations struggle to balance the conflicting demands of efficiency and innovation. Organizations can become more efficient in the short run by replacing costly, unpredictable problem solving activity with consistent,
streamlined routines. However, this efficiency often comes at the cost of long- run adaptability. The more organizational activity is dominated by stable routines, the less the organization learns, and the more rigid and inflexible it becomes. To escape this fate, the authors of this working paper theorize that highly disciplined organizations must actively engage in strategic and selective perturbation of established routines. A perturbation interrupts an established routine and creates an opportunity to innovate and learn."