Monthly Archives: January 2012

Faking out cows

Posted on January 30, 2012 by | 4 Comments

We drove back down the Owens Valley from our ski vacation at Mammoth today and once again saw the famous cattle grids that keep cattle and sheep from leaving their pastures. They are an enormous time saver, allowing vehicles to enter and leave a grazing area without the tedious effort of opening and closing gates. The hooves of grazing animals are unstable on the narrow bars and make a cattle guard as effective as a fence. They’re everywhere in the West.

Fake boundaries

What’s even more interesting is the false cattle grids that are at the beginning and end of every pasture section along California Highway 395. They are merely painted lines on the road with the same side bars as the real deal, but smooth and easy for trucks and cars to cross at highway speeds. These painted lines have the same effect on livestock accustomed to the real thing. They won’t cross the painted lines; in their minds, there is no difference.

There’s actually a name for this…it is a skeumorph of a cattle grid. The pattern of the painted lines resembles the real thing. It imitates the real thing enough to keep the animal from crossing the false boundary. It is no different than false shutters on a house or a flame-shaped bulb on a chandelier. Kudos to the person who figured this out.

Self-induced boundaries

How many times in life do we see something that looks like a boundary and is real in our minds? We all have boundaries like time, money and self-doubt. We think we can’t go outside of what we’re used to, so we won’t, even if that boundary is completely false.  Marcel Marceau made a living out of pretending to find barriers that didn’t exist. And everyone laughed without thinking too much about it.

Do you ever refuse to cross a false boundary? In our work lives we create a multitude of imagined boundaries:

  • It has always been done this way, so who am I to change it?
  • Someone else needs to propose this because they won’t listen to me
  • It is too much change for others to accept
  • It is too much work and I’m busy enough already
  • I’m not talented enough to do this

The truth is that none of these excuses are real boundaries. Great things happen to people who are unwilling to accept false boundaries.  We’re smarter than cows, no?

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Posted in Featured, Workplace reality

Technology learns to ski with #social #mobile and #data

Posted on January 29, 2012 by | 5 Comments

On a recent trip to Mammoth Mountain, California, I had a first-hand look at mobile, social and data at work.

I’m a lifelong skier. I fell for the sport as a child and never looked back. I worked on farms in Upstate New York where I grew up just to buy my equipment and I paid for college working in ski shops. To this day, the smell of burning ski wax brings back my best memories.

While technology rapidly changed most of my world, my beloved winter fun remained mostly unaffected. Sure, skis and clothes changed, lifts got faster and snowmaking got better, but even mobile technology came late; most mountains only gained cell coverage in the past few years. And it was only a short time ago when pulling out a cell phone on a lift would be met with frowns of disapproval by the purists, who were many in number. Skiing was a way to get away from technology.

Mammoth Mountain

Mammoth Mountain, California is just what the name says and covers over 3500 acres. Runs are everything from easy to expert runs that drop from the mountain peak itself. It is our favorite place to ski. On a recent trip, we had a chance to see the same mega trends of mobile, social and data come to one of the last holdouts for technology. It was a great example that few things will be left untouched by what’s happening in every aspect of our lives.

RFID

The first major change was the ticketing system that is now RFID. No more teens in resort uniform wading through the queues of skiers checking for tickets. No more paper flapping in the wind from your zipper, with each day a different color to prevent fraud. In the off season, Mammoth installed the largest RFID gate system of any resort in North America. 68 RFID-controlled arms support 19 lifts, all at key access points to the mountain.

The goal is to reduce wait times at lifts and the ticket window, two areas that test skier patience. Even better, once the skier has the card, it can be recharged online or through the Mammoth app. It never has to leave a jacket pocket, but it does need to be kept separately from credit cards and metallic items. Anyone not following those simple rules can be seen at the RFID gate doing what the staff calls, “The RFID Dance” as they try in vain to trigger the sensors.

The app

Cell phone coverage is now a skier expectation and phones have replaced radios as the means of skier and staff communication. It seems everyone has a smart phone and Mammoth has their own app. Trail maps, forecasts, lift information and more, plus the ability to add days to your RFID pass (integration!). It even allowed me to create a persona and share thoughts and experiences with other skiers and snowboarders…just find me at ‘ski_fiend’. It helps build a community around Mammoth Mountain that adds a dimension to a sport that has long been about individuals, small groups of friends, and family. It offered to search my contact list and find friends who also have the Mammoth Mountain app. It is very mobile and very social.

As visitors ski the mountain, the app maps runs against a map of the resort, showing exact tracks on the mountain. It also tracks distance covered, vertical feet, and average and maximum speeds. Once back at the condo, I was able to download a file to Google Earth to have a visual representation on a satellite photo of the resort.

The app isn’t over-the-top in technology, but it brings together mobile, social and data in a way that wouldn’t have been dreamed of just a few years ago. It would be far less rewarding to ski at resorts that don’t put so much data and communication at my fingertips.

Data

But what does Mammoth Mountain get in return other than customers who are informed and connected? They get an amazing amount of valuable marketing data. Each card is linked to name, address, birth date and phone number. They can accurately determine a skier’s ability level and what type of offers should be sent. They can determine who only skies infrequently and might be enticed to come more often. They know their customers in new ways and can design the experience better to meet the needs of those who come most often. It is a leap forward in marketing for an old-world sport.

Personal touch

Imagine my surprise when I received a thank you from the mountain for my business, along with a survey about my experience. My interaction with Mammoth was managed from the first contact (the RFID card) to the survey after the experience.

When data, social and mobile have arrived in my beloved sport of skiing, we can say it is reaching for ubiquity. What comes next? Stay tuned.

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Posted in Data Analytics, Mobile, Social, Sports

Tagged , ,

Social BPM and the signal to noise ratio #SocialBPM #BPM

Posted on January 25, 2012 by | 4 Comments

image

Early today, I came across a blog post by Gartner’s Jack Santos, Musings: The Amplification of Communication.  Jack recites the maxim, “Sending a message does not necessarily mean it was received” and makes the case that people and the system become worse off for having tried and failed to communicate, “…one can only wonder when the whole trend will hit critical mass and collapse into a new dark age.”

Social learning curve

I can understand his arguments about appropriate use and the problems of duplication. As someone on the sending and receiving side of both traditional and the latest forms of media, I can tell you that it takes some getting used to. I wrote recently about the need to develop a social voice from my own challenges with the apparent signal to noise ratio. I had one false start on Twitter over a year ago before giving it a second shot last year. I get it now.

Turn back the clock?

SOPA and PIPA went down in flames last week, perhaps only temporarily, with many of the vocal opponents like Clay Shirky arguing that the true intent behind limiting piracy was to limit the content people can have to what they buy from media giants. Shirky argues that the reason the big studios and recording companies would like to shut down piracy is a veiled attempt to shut down all file sharing. He supports his arguments by pointing out that the language in the law that would have put Google and others on the hook for any illegal files they hosted or facilitated. Any site that allows posting of media would never be able to guarantee that all of their content is original and not pirated, therefore file sharing would cease to happen, making the studios and record companies the only ones with content. We would go back to the way things were in the days before the Internet when media moguls controlled what everyone consumed. We know who the winners would be.

Mother of invention

My issue with Santos’ contention that we should focus just on effective channels is that it takes away the democratization (great) that is part of the chaos (bad). Whoever owns the decision about what is an “effective channel” would have media mogul-like power to control content…a significant setback. Keep in mind that from the seemingly negative things, we’re finding many new and innovative ways to manage the noise because necessity is the mother of invention. What Santos calls “throwing solutions against the wall to see if communication ‘sticks’” is also the trial and error that leads to innovative ways to do business.

In the end, the duplication and channels will sort themselves out in the grand sifter of relevance. Great content will find its way to the top and trash will settle. What matters is having a single channel that connects everyone, even if one of several options people have (why Facebook is still beating Google). Communication chaos will sort itself out without organizations having to create limits by force.

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Posted in Social

Has process lost its meaning?

Posted on January 23, 2012 by | 16 Comments

My first meeting of the business process management support group. Hey, I’ll admit I was nervous. It went something like this:

Chris: (sits down in the empty chair)”Hello everyone, my name is Chris and I’m new to this group.

Everyone: “Hi, Chris”

Chris: “I’ve been using the word ”process” instead of describing specific system outcomes since…I can’t even remember. I did this recreationally for a while until I joined the software industry where I found myself around other people, colleagues and customers who used the word process indiscriminately. Before long, I was matching them, word for word, unaware of how my behavior was affecting my customers, my colleagues, even my wife and my children.”

Chris: (clear his throat and presses on) “Thankfully I hit rock bottom a couple of weeks ago when I asked the customer to confirm that he was talking about the process of process. I was way far gone and I might have even said ‘meta-process’. I know, I know, you’ve been there, too. It was a rude awakening when my favorite customer looked into my eyes with a glazed look and said ‘Wow, you need help’.

Everyone: (heads nodding) “Amen”,  ”Uh-huh”

Chris: “But at that fragile moment, a coworker that I used to see at conferences, shouting ‘it’s all about the business architecture!’ pulled me aside and said ‘you’re where I was. I know where you can get help.’”

Chris: (with visible relief) “And that’s why I’m here”.

Everyone: (applause and shouts from the crowd) “we’ve been there, brother”. “Its about the business outcome!”

Chris: (his voice dropping to a barely audible whisper) “I now realize that talking about ‘process’ was confusing, misleading and was tearing my life apart. People see the value and appreciate you for talking plainly about better business outcomes. It’s really about increasing customer satisfaction, cutting cost…connecting people, delivering information wherever work gets done and giving people the ability to make the right decision with the right amount of information delivered in the right moment.”

Back to reality

Ok, it didn’t happen quite this way. But I did come to the realization a few years into my time in business process management that the term ‘process’ has lost meaning. Whatever it once meant, it now has about the same value as the word ‘excellence’. It means something different to everyone.

In fact, the best analogy comes from The Simpsons, the cartoon that is more about real life than most live-action TV. When his employer wants to give Homer a meaningless award, he receives the, “First Annual Montgomery Burns Award for Outstanding Achievement in the Field of Excellence.” It is wickedly ambiguous but seemingly meaningful, just like ‘process’. The reality is that process is the activities that take place to achieve business value…specific business value. So if that’s true, why don’t we talk about the value and not use vague terms? I know that my customers are looking for cost savings, compliance, orchestration of ERP transactions, etc.

The ‘Process’ Pledge

For the next month, I will make every attempt to avoid the use of the word ‘process’ in my business dealings and my blogging. I will focus on the business outcomes that matter, not the jargon that has lost its meaning. Wish me luck!

If you’d like another take on this challenge, check out Ian Gotts’ blog, Making You Think.

Thank you, PEX, for this great video.

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Posted in Featured, Workplace reality

What Cleopatra can tell us about Social BPM #BPM #SocialBPM #CES

Posted on January 22, 2012 by | Leave a comment

Tens of thousands descend on Las Vegas every winter to see the gadgets and gizmos that we’re told will change the world. For some it is a chance to see the butterfly effect while  the monarch is still flapping its gossamer wings in Africa. The Consumer Electronics Show is a chance to predict and benefit from future ‘hurricanes’ in consumer and business markets.

For others it will be a chance to make their voices heard as a waterfall of tweets brings us individual analysis of the ‘real meaning’ behind this year’s CES; hype that often outweighs reality. Case in point…2012 was all about the ‘ultrabook’, essentially a thin laptop. As one writer observed,  “If you want to be the first to own a new ultrabook, travel back to 2008 and buy the first MacBook Air.” Ouch. Hype just took a shot to the jaw.

CES is so compelling because it offers brand-new, shiny things that grab our attention and help us believe that the answer is ‘out there’. But what if the answer to what will change our world is actually ‘in here’?

Social data

It was alluded to in this month’s National Geographic, no where near as anticipated and talked about as CES. The February 2012 issue has an info-graphic entitled “United Dates of America”. Dating websites were analyzed and profile terms were mapped by density to their zip code. It was a geographic map of what people are talking about. It showed “acting” in Los Angeles, “musician” in Nashville, “God” in Georgia and “cornbread” in Mississippi. While those may not seem so surprising, why was “Cleopatra” the hot topic in New Mexico? There is significance behind it if we look.

‘Cleopatras’ at work

Data is what we see in National Geographic and can find in the socially enabled enterprise. It is far more useful than the newest hardware gadget but less sexy and less hyped. Social data is a treasure trove of information around what people are talking about…not just what words are being used, but topics that are of interest either broadly or within segments of the workforce (or customer base, but that’s another topic). And data we don’t expect to see or don’t understand, ‘Cleopatras’, provide valuable insight into inefficiencies and opportunities. They can be the organizational pain points or concentrations of passion. Either way, meaningful data shows up on the social radar before any BPM initiative can ferret them out, but only for enterprises that enable conversations and pay attention to the results.

Data

We don’t need to travel to Las Vegas conventions to understand what’s coming next and will change the world as we know it. We don’t need to follow vendor hype. Data is the new/old technology and news ways of using it are the shiny part. The organizations that gather and understand their data will be able to put it to competitive use. And social data can tell us a great deal.

What if we start by using our social ‘radar’ to read our own data as a way to better focus our BPM resources?

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Posted in Data Analytics, Future of work, Social

A view from PEX Week – There’s an app for that #BPM #PEXWeek

Posted on January 18, 2012 by | 4 Comments

I sat on a PEX Week 2012 panel yesterday with Clay Richardson, Sandy Kemsley, Nathaniel Palmer and Steve Towers. The question for the panel was what we saw coming in BPM.  I’ve weighed in on this topic recently with my 2012 predictions and a broader view of BPM’s future. I was prepared to restate much of what I’ve been saying, that BPM needs to be broadly seen as a soup-to-nuts practice that involves everything from structured to unstructured work and from human activities to automation. But spending time talking with people and listening to speakers put me on a different tack.

Data god

The reality of how we work is different from the way software vendors design applications. An application thinks in data terms; how information is routed and modified in the act of conducting business. As workers, we have been forced into this view by ERP, CRM and other systems that make humans slaves to transactional systems instead of making systems that are easy to go straight at what we need. Think of the number of clicks to get to most data, and the onerous tasks of updating sales forecasts, leads, time sheets, and expenses. In each case, centralized data is our god and we serve it through cumbersome interfaces that we love to hate. Truthfully, if you don’t think about data design in your interactions with these systems, you end up scratching your head over the error messages and prompts to complete a required field. We’re there because we serve the data, and not the other way around.

Process bits

Our reality is more like work in process fragments. Unless we’re on an assembly line, we do things that require us to stop and start nearly everything we do. Done well, our day fits together like a puzzle as we sandwich in less structured work between our structured tasks. Spending hours on a single, high-value task is a luxury saved for long flights or, unfortunately, evenings and weekends. Do our work systems align with this reality? Not at all. The time to get into and out of a data-focused system is often greater than the time to accomplish the task at hand.

An app for that?

The rise of the app, mostly thanks to Steve Jobs’ vision, is a perfect example of going at things differently. Apps serve a tighter purpose than long workflows…they are light, quickly developed and go straight at the problem. If you’re like me, you spend some part of our day moving in and out of other apps, like banking, blogging, tweeting, Facebook, LinkedIn. We check things, create things, respond to others all while living our life. We love the iPhone because it enables this pattern. Why couldn’t the same thing be the dominant feature of how our work is done? Back-of-the-napkin, here are some ideas for work apps that would keep us a safe distance from that monolithic system that saps our will to live:

  • Time card, expenses apps (using my phone’s camera to snap receipts)
  • Payroll and benefits apps
  • Corporate travel app (maybe linking to expenses app, if that makes sense)
  • Safety procedures app
  • Enterprise social media app
  • Managers approvals app (out of the box on this one)
  • Compliance reminders/acknowledgements app (if not on social media)
  • Training/testing apps
  • Leads, forecast apps
  • Form app that structures input I need to receive from multiple sources
  • Complex event app that allows me to choose discreet data and get an alert
Apps are light, purposeful and mobile.  They don’t care where the user is and they assume a limited screen size. The investment is small and therefore they can be approached as trial-and-error. Doctors are already using the Physician’s Desk Reference app and other narrow-purpose tools to treat in healthcare facilities, so why wouldn’t this approach work just as well for business process? I believe it would. In the end, an app approach would make it easy not to care where the data is located, where the user is coming from, and what platform they’re using. Just the right information in the right hands at the right time and place. 

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Posted in Future of work, Social

Selling BPM – Three things that make the difference

Posted on January 17, 2012 by | 11 Comments

Sitting through the kickoff sessions of the PEX Process Excellence Week 2012 in Orlando, Florida, what struck me most was the consistent message that ‘selling’ BPM is a large part of successful BPM. And selling just once isn’t good enough. When it comes to selling business process change, initial success is ‘no indicator of future performance’. Great ideas can become ‘unsold’ just as quickly as approvals were initially granted. To the unaware, this can be a very painful realization that serves to prevent future attempts to ‘stick your neck out’ and advocate for new ways of doing business process.

Sound familiar? There are three components to selling BPM, and they look like this:

Selling senior leadership

If you can’t get funding for an idea, it may not be your idea that holds you back. More often it is your approach. You have few chances to get the message right when you get your big moment to sell, so think about it well before firing the few rounds you actually have. Also, your reputation probably had more input to your success than the idea you raised, so pick your battles carefully and establish that you aren’t one to waste anyone’s time with poorly thought-through ideas. What few successful ‘sellers’ realize: Selling never stops. Even after victory is yours, you’ll need to resell continuously. Many ideas die because a win isn’t supported by ongoing reinforcement. Brent Wilson of ThyssenKrupp Stainless puts it this way, “Reconfirming, regaining commitment and the constant cycle of changing management makes a BPM leader a missionary lobbying for their cause.”

Creating the business case

With lots of cynicism around ROI calculations, selling a change without being able to get specific about the benefits and cost is very hard. “We’re going to do things better” isn’t a very convincing argument. Quantifying things that don’t have cost savings or market capture dollars attached is very hard, and BPM needs to be more than reduced cost. The way past this is to find an example of that has succeeded and draw parallels. If what you’re doing is so innovative that it defies comparison, you”ll need to get creative and the fight may be tougher. I would argue few things are genuinely innovative, or at least as innovative as the proposer believes them to be. Christian Seyfarth, also of ThyssenKrupp Stainless said, “By starting small, we didn’t need to worry about the cost as much, and then as we increased the number of BPM users, the benefits to a broader spectrum of the organization became very apparent.”

Getting colleagues to come along

Your management has accepted your analysis and signed off on your business idea…but your idea is only meaningful when everyone comes along. They will follow your lead when they realize that it is in their interest to do so. Sure, management can require people to behave a certain way, but that only gets you so far. ThyssenKrupp was able to get everyone onboard by  by training small groups at a time and showing them a relevant, role-based view of the world. Finance was trained on what they care about and machine operators on machine operation.

There will always be resistance to factor in. Christian describes the ThyssenKrupp Stainless method of overcoming it by saying, “We didn’t tackle the people who were most resistant, but instead focused on those who seemed open. We built a critical mass gradually.”  In the end, no person likes to be an island.

Comments welcome.

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Posted in Strategy

Creativity, process and putting man on the Moon

Posted on January 15, 2012 by | 1 Comment

Last week I wrote about process at the heart of creativity in Superbowl commercials. As luck would have it, we were at the Kennedy Space Center at Cape Canaveral, Florida today and had a remarkable view of creativity that happened at the very heart of checklists and meticulous process. The Space Program is to this day considered one of man’s greatest achievements, reaching its apex when Neil Armstrong stepped onto the surface of the moon–but also returned safely to Earth. What people may not realize is how much process went into the greatest exploratory effort ever undertaken.

Choices

When the program started, there were no agreed upon ways to even reach the Moon. They had to start by drawing up their best ideas, capturing them in cost and risk models, and then committing to a plan once they could find agreement. Scientists worked through the idea of shooting straight for the Moon (too complicated), setting up an orbit of the earth and refueling a separate lunar spacecraft (too costly) before settling on a single spacecraft to orbit the Moon and a separate lunar landing module. They never looked back from this decision.

Questions

Initially, there was no process and endless variables. For starters, there were three enormous questions:

  • How can a spacecraft locate, maneuver toward and dock with another spacecraft?
  • How can an astronaut work outside the spacecraft?
  • How will humans respond to extended space flight?
Trial and error
One of the biggest problems with resolving these issues was the inability to simulate realistic Space conditions on the earth. They had to experiment in Space, which meant starting out slowly, with what they did know. Then they had to take their newfound knowledge and create processes that would build an operational platform upon which to base their next set of experiments. As each mission gained insight, those insights were captured in engineering designs (knowledge) and operating procedures (process). By the time Neil Armstrong set foot on the Moon, every process was defined that could be. Anything new at that point was unknowable up to that moment. Most people don’t realize that three were five lunar orbiters that mapped the surface of the Moon and measured radioactivity between 1961 and 1967.  There were other craft that actually landed on the Moon…we had it down to a finely-tuned process before man ever went. 
Platform of knowledge

The Apollo missions were successful not because they broke through every technical barrier to reaching the Moon. They were successful, in the words of then NASA Administrator James E. Webb, because the technological skills that existed as early as 1961 were properly managed and used. Everything was captured as best practice as quickly as it was known. Astronauts were exhaustively trained in process until they were experts at everything they knew and liberated to reason through anything they hit that they didn’t already know. It came down to process over knowledge…management of human activity more than science. In the end, creativity solved technical problems, but excellent process management put a man on the Moon.

To see our personal story on this trip, click here.

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Posted in Workplace reality

Doritos, the Super Bowl and process #BPM #Superbowl

Posted on January 12, 2012 by | 2 Comments

Living in Los Angeles, it isn’t rare to know people who work in what is locally called, simply, “The Industry.” Since my work is focused on business process, it would be easy for my friends in The Industry to think we’re in very different career fields, but are we? The more one digs into what goes into the business of Hollywood, the more you find process and process management. From the smallest productions to the largest studios, there are best practice ways to get work done and plenty of room for creativity in the mix. Creativity is an input to the process of making entertaining products.

Kevin Willson

It doesn’t get much more creative than advertising, as each effort tries to maximize the viewer’s impression in a 30-second window of time. I have a personal friend, Kevin Willson, who has been selected as a finalist three times in the Doritos Crash the Super Bowl contest. Doritos has brilliantly crowdsourced their Superbowl advertisements to the public, and the result has been some of the most creative ads in history. I asked him why he does it, and his answer was simple, “Every year Doritos offer its fans the biggest stage imaginable, the Super Bowl, and offers to show a filmmaker’s work to over 120 million people. This is the biggest video context in history with over 6,000 people submitting videos and Doritos chose our own Sling Baby as one of the top 5.”

As the only three-time finalist, Kevin has clearly found a process that works. Let’s take a look at how it happens.

Ideas

Birthday Wish on YouTubeSome ideas come in the middle of night when you sit bolt upright with an amazing thought, but most come through reasonably structured process. The more creative people you speak with, the more you realize that there are best practices for how to gain the best creative ideas. Just like any industry, it has to start with expertise, in this case, knowledge of what the public will consider entertaining, and it ends with a sorting of ideas down to the one that is deemed most effective. Kevin’s process is to, ”Get a group of funny people together and work on an idea until it feels funny, visual and original.” Looking at and perhaps steering toward the themes that have done well in the past is an ingredient for success: Coworkers, babies, animals, slapstick comedy. Kevin’s finalist entry last year, “Birthday Wish” went outside the box and in the end, was not selected as the winner. Lesson learned?

Resources

Rounding up people, cameras, lighting and most importantly, money is as old as The Industry. Studios were built around the idea of having all of these elements on contract or under a single roof where they could be used frequently and through a very thought out set of processes. Go to any movie set in the world and you’ll see that there are very defined ways of producing entertainment. What you’ll see is no more than a highly defined supply chain. For a small operation like Kevin’s, everything needs to be assembled including locations and props. In his first finalist entry, “Casket“, he needed to purchase enough Doritos to fill a casket with the chips and to rent out a church where the filming was completed.

Creating Sling Baby

What comes out of the creative process is just as much a product as any widget created by industry.  In Kevin’s case, it is a product built ‘on spec’ with the hope that it will be ‘purchased’ by Doritos and used during the biggest commercial advertisement event of the television year, the Super Bowl. If he wins the $1,000,000 the assumption is that his career will be significantly enhanced by the exposure. Doritos, by selecting Kevin as a finalist, has purchased his ad and empowered him through their marketing reach to promote his work in a way that would be impossible on his own.

Publicity

This is where continuous improvement kicked into high gear. As a finalist three years running, Kevin has continuously improved his ways for reaching the public and giving people easy acces to support his entry. He created a website entitled Vote 4 Sling Baby that spells out the options for how the viewer can vote for the ad. There are choices that include Facebook, through a browser, through the Doritos website, Buzzfeed and even through an XBox.

Beyond the webpage, Kevin has encouraged his Facebook friends to change their personal photo to be an advertisement to go to the website. It all works together to ‘produce’ the desired  result of votes for his work. What may look like typical Hollywood-style marketing is really a very carefully planned thing. Sling Baby even has a video game that was played 60,000 times in its first six hours. These creative ideas help drive publicity even further than social media alone. You can take your own ‘shot’ at launching a baby by going to their site here.

Nonstop execution

When asked what this contest means for him, Kevin quickly replied, “For me as a struggling filmmaker who runs my video productions out of my garage doing primarily humanitarian documentaries, to win Crash the Super Bowl would change everything. Please help Sling Baby air during the Super Bowl by going to Vote4SlingBaby.com. Every time you vote you increase your chances to win $10K. You can even vote five times per day.”  Kevin clearly knows how the process works and is on-message. If he wins, this will be why.

UPDATE 2/6/2012: Kevin is now one of two Doritos commercials competing for the top score on the USA Today Ad Meter. If he gets the highest ratings , he takes the $1M. But don’t worry, he’s rallying his friends, hitting social media and of course, has a process for that. If you want to help him, click here.

UPDATE 2/7/2012: Kevin won the $1M prize for coming in first on the US Today Ad Meter. Congratulations!

Update 2/8/2012: Sling Baby officially hits the big time as the most recalled commercial AND the basis for a political cartoon about Romney and Santorum fighting over delegates.

The argument has been made that capturing and describing process has a stifling effect on creativity. I trust this example of excellent creativity side-by-side with great process demonstrates how the two lean on each other for success.

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Posted in Continuous Improvement, Disciplines, Featured, Workplace reality

When process management is culture — ThyssenKrupp Stainless

Posted on January 11, 2012 by | 1 Comment

The APQC Frameworks Study that concluded last Spring looked at a remarkable story of a new, $6B steel mill located near Mobile, AL. ThyssenKrupp invested so much because they believed in US manufacturing, even during tough times, and were determined to make their operation the most efficient and resilient of its kind. Successfully delivering a commodity process like rolled, galvanize steel means finding new ways to differentiate and earn business. They’re doing very well and attracting the best customers based on achieving five key ISO standards in a remarkably short period of eleven months. Companies like Lexus and BMW buy from ThyssenKrupp because they are guaranteed that their suppliers are delivering at their own high level of quality.

ISO

Commodity is a misleading term. Price only indicates the initial cost of steel. As a steel buyers, ThyssenKrupp’s customers need to be assured that the product will arrive as expected, at the quality level promised, without undue environmental or safety impact, and a host of other measures. This can only be done when the supplier has proven to independent auditors that they meet or beat the metrics that support these measures. Many companies out there create paper trails just for audit purposes, but the overhead of maintaining this is schizophrenic and a serious risk to the business. ThyssenKrupp has only one system to keep track of business process and compliance because they are one and the same for them.

Stainless steel sister

While ThyssenKrupp Steel USA went about their business, their sister company, ThyssenKrupp Stainless started out in more typical fashion using Visio and other tools to document and collaborate around processes, and with typical results. It was only after they were on this path for a while that they decided to make the switch to a true business process management system. The sponsors of this concept needed to help the organization understand why they should change gears and adopt a way of doing business that was completely new and would involve everyone from the executives to the folks in hardhats on the line. “How do you get an organization to change when they are on a different path?” is the most common question I get at conferences and from readers. ThyssenKrupp Stainless did exactly that and with great results.

PEX Orlando

ThyssenKrupp Stainless will be the Keynote Speaker at Process Excellence Week 2012 in Orlando, FL next week. I look forward to hearing from Brent Wilson, the ThyssenKrupp Director of Production Planning and Control as he relates their journey to making process cultural. I’ve had a preview, and it is a very good story.

If you’d like to know more about how ThyssenKrupp Steel USA achieved their goals through excellent business process management, check out the link to the BPTrends article, below:

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