Author Archives: Tom Molyneux

A BPM playbook for the Last Mile

Posted on May 22, 2012 | 12 Comments

Making process ‘stick’ is a real challenge facing process management initiatives. Most BPM professionals try to solve the problem in a similar way…they create the Playbook, the Electronic SOP or the Emergency SOP. Each is a flawed answer to the challenge but could look like progress.

Years ago, before the triumph of  mobile phones, there was the concept in telecommunications of the Last Mile, “the final leg of delivering connectivity from a communications provider to a customer.”  The last mile was the challenge that the call seemed “almost there” but was, in fact, missing a particularly  important piece. It was, in fact, missing the single most important piece.

Convergent evolution

BPM has the very same problem nearly everywhere. Enormous resources are invested getting to the point where processes are agreed upon and ready for use by the employees. But how to truly affect the organization and get things done in new and better ways? This is a very real challenge that confronts all organizations at some point in their ‘process lifetimes’.

At a recent APQC conference, I heard organization after organization talk about attempts to take various process initiatives to the masses. Each had eerily similar ways of ‘packaging’ their results for consumption, but each fell short of the Last Mile. Just the fact that each arrived at the need to ‘sell’ a package was a great example of convergent evolution, getting to a similar result despite different starting points.

‘Unsuccess’

Getting to the same place was not validation of their success. In fact, getting to that spot without having the Last Mile figured out is the opposite. What each needed was the delivery mechanism that kept process owned, current and relevant to roles and functions in their organization. Without that, orphaned and stale information was going to be quickly ignored in favor of “the way things have always been done.” While they all seemed on the verge of the big process payoff, each was far from successful at changing the way business was done.

There are no shortcuts for the Last Mile. Organizations need a centralized way to own, store, amend and communicate process. Employees need to have a role-based view of their world that also provides contextual references for getting the job done. They need to trust the system is accurate and intelligent.

What methods or tools are you using to deliver your processes to the last mile?

→ 12 Comments

Posted in Continuous Improvement, Disciplines, Process Management, Strategy

The commoditization of Big Data

Posted on May 11, 2012 | 2 Comments

A wise man once said, “What has been, will be again.  What has been done, will be done again.  There is nothing new under the sun.“

We’ve seen this before

The year was 1996 and the birth of the term Web 1.0 was ten years in the future. A new computer technology was just becoming mainstream, and business people were trying to make sense of it and how to put all the pieces together.  By our standards, the technology was clunky and hard to use – single threaded CGI scripts, poor session management, limited integration, and development tools on the level of Notepad and FrontPage.

Developers with any depth of experience were rare, those with both depth and breadth of experience were rarer still.  Few in large enterprises knew how to put all the pieces – web servers, application servers, email, databases, search – together in a way that delivered value.  However, in just 4 short years virtually all this changed and web apps became ubiquitous because they were extremely easy to architect, develop and deploy.

Back to the future

The same rapid capability evolution is happening today with Big Data and the Hadoop ecosystem and platform.  Today’s Big Data world looks very much like the web landscape of 1996: Somewhat immature tools (Hadoop only just released a 1.x version), few people broadly trained in the needed skills, fewer still with ability to put parts together or who have actually  implemented successful projects, and few development tools to support rapid development, testing and deployment.  But a very strong sense that the future is arriving.

The very scarcity of talent and tools confers real opportunity and a competitive advantage for those few who can deploy big data solutions right now.  The wine recommendation engine that knows not just what the experts say, but what you liked in the past, the clever algorithm to promote customer loyalty and other solutions stand to pull ahead of their less ‘intelligent’ competitors.

This window won’t be open forever as big players emerge, small players are acquired or blow up,  and big data becomes another piece of the technology stack. Until that happens, however, those who figure out how to deploy quickly and successfully and those who incorporate it into their model effectively will leap ahead of the competition.

What is your plan for Big Data?

→ 2 Comments

Posted in 2 Second Advantage, Data Analytics, Disciplines, Disruption

Tagged , , ,

Falling back on willpower

Posted on May 7, 2012 | 12 Comments

Does everyone in your organization understand the ‘why’ of improving the business? Is ‘the right thing to do’ an automatic behavior?

Five months ago I lost over twenty pounds and have easily managed to keep it off.  Losing the weight took little effort and holding onto my success takes little willpower.  It was so easy because I knew the ‘why’ of making the right choices and I was supported by what became automatic behaviors.

The ‘why’: We were never designed to eat the low nutrient, high calorie, very processed Standard American Diet (SAD) that has become the norm.  This diet is the primary reason over one third of Americans are obese and nearly two thirds are overweight.

‘The right thing to do’: I lost the weight by eating what we were designed to consume: a whole foods, plant based diet (I’m not alone, either, even Bill Clinton is doing the same). It was simple and choices were easy.

The key to success:  I didn’t need to rely on the scarcest of human assets, willpower.  Let’s face it, change is hard enough and if change involves long periods of doing what you really don’t want to do, it is doomed.  It seems simple, but too often businesses that are seeking transformation make this mistake.

Business willpower

Great change initiatives, from continuous improvement to customer satisfaction, are started because of organizational ‘weight gain’ that hurts profitability and customer perception. But soon enough, the excitement of early gains fades and people naturally return to the way things were always done.

Organizations need to have a science and push automatic behaviors to make any meaningful change to the way business is done.  The science involve root cause analysis coupled with research about what practices have worked for others. Behaviors must become cultural and automatic. They must pervade every decision from how teams are formed to how work is executed and measured.

Every time I look in the mirror, I know this works.

→ 12 Comments

Posted in Continuous Improvement, Disciplines, Workplace reality

Tagged ,

Oops, that was your turn

Posted on May 3, 2012 | Leave a comment

Timely information is the competitive differentiator in life and business.

It’s 6:15 AM on a weekday morning and we’re trying to get out of San Francisco. We’re not alone. We’re competing with a surprising number of cars doing the same. It shouldn’t be a competition but clearly is.

Timely data

We have a GPS in our corner…a literal ‘dashboard’ guiding our decisions, but this 2004 Acura navigation system is dated and creaky. Information is coming too late to be actionable. In the absence of timely information, we follow our gut and end up going 20 mph in Downtown Oakland. Our competition becomes tail lights in the distance, still moving at 70 mph.

‘Gut’ is often based on the past but decisions require information in the moment. It needs to come before the forks in the road and ahead of the competition. The speed of today’s marketplace makes this an imperative.

Do you have the right information at the right moments or are you headed for Downtown Oakland?

→ Leave a comment

Posted in 2 Second Advantage, Data Analytics, Disciplines

The tragedy of free floating data

Posted on April 24, 2012 | 9 Comments

We’re getting exceptionally good at grabbing metrics from anywhere, and in real time, too. Business intelligence tools have evolved into visualization apps and as a result, colors, shapes and lines tell us whether we should be happy or unhappy about data. We are awash in ‘cues’ from inside and outside our enterprise. But by itself, more data and better visualization aren’t the answers to better business outcomes; they are just free-floating data.

Getting to the reward

Cues are only as good as the behaviors they stimulate in response. Without paying close attention to the behaviors, which we call business processes, we end up with a ‘fog’ of activity that isn’t repeatable, isn’t accountable and is unlikely to gain the reward (which can be avoiding a disaster or increasing revenue) that the cue signaled. Worse, we can’t be sure activities that should cross functional boundaries are doing just that. This is the tragedy that befalls most organizations.

Context

Beyond a response, processes form the context for metrics. Organizations that haven’t modeled their enterprise may have the greatest dashboards but lack an ability to know how and where to make change when data shows a problem or offers an opportunity. Cues are wasted when they aren’t understood or framed properly. “That’s the way its always been done around here” is a great answer when there’s no better explanation for why and when we respond to a cue.

Best-selling author Charles Duhigg talks about the management of responses to cues in his bestseller, The Power of Habit. The cookie story is a great analogy for not understanding the context of a metric, poor organizational response and an undesired business outcome. His message is simple but powerful: Understand the cue, be deliberate in response, and gain the most favorable outcome.

Continuous improvement

Once we’ve figured out when and why we measure, we need to understand what to do when data tells us to act. We need to be constantly looking for better ways to respond and make the reward more consistent and larger. We need ways to know that each member of the organization is aligned with what cues mean, what activities cues prompt, and what outcome we’re expecting. That requires either an enormous amount of labor or automation tools that can make the effort manageable.

Going beyond data

At some point, enough cues have been analyzed, put in proper context in a business model and outcomes sufficiently optimized that the organization reaches a higher level of sophistication. Better and more meaningful cues are developed, targeting more specific opportunities, resulting in an ability to manage complex events with complex responses. The most sophisticated organizations have created a platform for a cycle of analysis, correction and organizational change. It is a virtuous cycle that only starts with data but ends with predictable reward.

What are your thoughts on the tragedy of free-floating data?

→ 9 Comments

Posted in Data Analytics, Disciplines, Featured, Future of work, Process Management

Tagged , ,

Dilbert and BPM’s geek speak

Posted on March 28, 2012 | 8 Comments

The phrase “Dilbert moment” is etched in American culture and for very good reason. Scott Adams’ Dilbert cartoon is so wildly popular because there is always a fair amount of truth behind the workplace situations that Dilbert, the Pointy-Haired Boss, Wally, Ted, Alice and the rest of the cast live out in a comic world. It can be called “painfully funny.”

Geek Speak

Unfortunately, when many people in the organization think of BPM, they imagine conversations that are very Dilbert-like with phrases such as “overcome challenges and drive transformations”.  This leaves them scratching their heads and questioning,  ”where’s the value?”

BPM matters

This is truly a shame because there really is something behind BPM-done-well.  When organizations take the time and have the discipline to say what they do, they can then do what they say. This is a game-changing concept but only happens when business process management is meaningful and not geek speak.

What are the concrete steps to avoid the pitfalls of incoherence and irrelevance? Look carefully at your language and ask yourself, “If I wasn’t in process management, what terms would I use?” The answer is that you’d be talking about the specific problem, the specific steps to a solution, and the specific expected outcome. In a word, you’d be talking about ‘traction’.

Traction is the opposite of geek speak. It is the way you go about describing and achieving concrete results. Your reputation and your success depend on it.

→ 8 Comments

Posted in Workplace reality

Van Halen’s Management 101

Posted on March 13, 2012 | Leave a comment

Could healthcare take a lesson from the rock band Van Halen?  Atul Gawande, author of The Checklist Manifesto, describes a simple management tool that Van Halen used to quickly gauge process quality and compliance at their concert venues. By demanding M&M’s with all brown ones removed or face cancellation of the show with full compensation to the band. Evidently, they followed through on the threat once in Colorado after finding brown M&M’s:

“This turned out to be, however, not another example of the insane demands of power-mad celebrities but of an ingenious ruse.  As Roth explained in his memoir, Crazy From the Heat, ‘Van Halen was the first band to take huge productions into tertiary, third-level markets. We’d pull up with nine 18-wheeler trucks, full of gear, where the standard was three trucks, max. And there were many, many technical errors—whether it was the girders couldn’t support the weight, or the flooring would sink in, or the doors weren’t big enough to move the gear through. The contract rider read like a version of the Chinese Yellow Pages because there was so much equipment, and so many human beings to make it function.’

So just as a little test, buried somewhere in the middle of the rider, would be Article 126, the no-brown-M&M’s clause. ‘When I would walk backstage, if I saw a brown M&M in that bowl,’ he wrote, ‘well, we’d line-check the entire production. Guaranteed you’d run into a problem.’ The mistakes could be life-threatening, the radio story pointed out. In Colorado, the band found that the local promoters had failed to read the weight requirements and that the staging would have fallen through the arena floor.”

The little things are the best indicator of the bigger ones…

Brown M&M’s in healthcare

Healthcare is also a very complex ‘show’ to pull of successfully time after time. There are many details to be carried out flawlessly or safety is compromised. What’s even tougher on care professionals, reform legislation makes facilities pay for their mistakes, such as patients getting other illnesses and injuries while under care, and preventable readmissions.

Healthcare has an opportunity to take the Van Halen approach. There are events and non-events to correlate and spot problems before they reach crisis stage. Project RED is a great example of specific ways to reduce readmissions by paying attention to the seemingly small details.

This evidence based approach, used by over 250 hospitals, identified 11 key components common in low readmissions discharge processes. It is great to know the factors, but how many facilities have the capacity to manage those points with each and every patient? I would be willing to bet that a facility that can’t manage an 11-point program could be in danger of a host of other challenges.

Transparency

The only approach that makes sense is to be systematic and to manage ‘brown M&M’s’ to the task level for each role in patient care. There needs to be two-way transparency that allows every patient-facing role to know when and why they play an important part, and to be able to see the guidelines and know when and where each component ‘lives’ in the patient journey.

 

It isn’t difficult to have this level of transparency, but it takes commitment from the healthcare organization to make it detailed and meaningful. As reform plays out, everything will depend on it.

→ Leave a comment

Posted in Compliance, Healthcare

Tagged , ,

Locals Only!

Posted on March 5, 2012 | Leave a comment

Every week or so, my wife and I bike from our home in Newport Beach to Huntington Beach on the seaside bike path.  This is a relaxing, 16 mile ride on fat-tired beach cruisers.  While I have my trusty Paul Frank Helicopter bike, we rent a cruiser for my wife each time since it is easier than storing and maintaining yet another bike.  After just a few rentals, our local bike shop began offering us the bike for half the price ($5.39) and dispensing with the rental forms entirely.

Off menu

Today, my wife asked for a a coffee holder to hold her hot drink. “Not a problem,” they said, and it was thrown in for the same price.

We’d achieved that coveted “locals only” status – personalized pricing plus personalized, off-menu services. The equivalent of “animal style” at In-N-Out (if you don’t know what that means, you unfortunately don’t know In-N-Out burgers).

Loyalty

Like any conveyed status program, even if informal, this type of personalized service offering promotes customer loyalty.  As we walked today to the bike shop, a  friend offered my wife the use of one of his three bikes at no charge.  After giving his offer a moment’s thought, we turned him down. It would have been disloyal.  They’ve earned my loyalty so solidly that even ‘free’ won’t take away my business. After all, I’ve recommended our bike store to several friends, the definition of having a high Net Promoter Score.

Big Data in a small town

We had a second experience with personalized pricing on our way back from Huntington Beach, but this time with a large, international chain.  We decided to stop at our local Safeway to pick up dinner items.  The store had just introduced a new, personalized coupon service and there were laptops helpfully placed on a folding tables to facilitate sign-up.

Once signed in the Safeway website crunched the data of my past purchases to predict what our family might want to buy. San Pellegrino water had somehow fallen off of our buying radar for the past six months. I was presented with a personalized offer of $1.40 per bottle, a 25% savings. We bought a bottle, of course.

I realized in that moment that this international chain managed to achieve something very similar to a local business, simply by crunching Big Data.” I found myself wondering, “How much further can they go to reach ‘locals only’ loyalty?”  Not far at all.

What are we doing to give our customers “locals only” status? 

→ Leave a comment

Posted in Data Analytics, Retail, Strategy

What Makes Change Sustainable? #NewYears2012 #Resolutions #BPM

Posted on January 4, 2012 | Leave a comment

Tom is a business process consultant at some of the largest enterprises in the world. His experiences in the strategic use of technology give him thoughtful insights into the rapidly changing world in which we live.  He has a strong background in finance, education and technology.

Resolutions

It’s just past the holidays when many people make New Year’s resolutions.  How many will stick around to see 2013 and how many will be forgotten by March?   How many resolutions are already forgotten or failed? This question got me thinking about a documentary our family recently watched – Food, Inc. — and the types of solutions that last and those that don’t.

Eating

A big problems the movie discussed was the poor health of feedlot cattle. The cattle’s poor health was brought about by a number of conditions including overcrowding, sustained unsanitary conditions and a diet of cheap corn, a food they were never meant to eat. One widely adopted solution; keeping the cows permanently drugged up on antibiotics, is a great example of throwing technology at a problem without understanding the big picture or thinking about sustainability. How long before the people who eat the beef start to get seriously sick from all the drugs that shouldn’t have been there in the first place? This is a question on the mind of many, but it hasn’t changed what people eat in a meaningful way despite warnings and expert input.

Short-term thinking

We see this pattern of short term technical fixes everywhere.  For example, in our recent housing boom we reached a point where families could no longer afford housing. The short term fix was to engineer suicide financing – Option Arms, Liar and NINJA (No Income, No Job, No Assets) Loans that gave the appearance that the system was still functioning normally.  Until it blew up.

Big-picture thinking

Contrast this to a much abridged example of a more sustainable approach to problem solving. In the early Twentieth Century, Henry Ford wanted to expand the market for his cars. His approach was to make his workers more productive by better designed processes. He could then pay them better, which he did – instituting an unheard of $5 a day minimum wage at his factories in 1914, thereby doubling the wages of many of his workers. This then led to a larger market for his cars as many workers were now able to afford cars for the first time. The point I’m making is that Ford developed a sustainable solution that lasted for years. It also contrasts with the two earlier examples in that its elements supported and reinforced each other. It was a virtuous cycle.

Stickiness

How does all this tie into BPM? We’ve all heard the complains and stories of short term gains from exciting initiatives such as SCOR, Six Sigma and Lean, but then cynicism about how long the change lasts or what it really did for the bottom line. Cynicism is organizational cancer. How do you make sustainable change?

  • Easy – Sticky change isn’t too difficult to adopt and doesn’t require excessive effort
  • Simple – Technology isn’t the only way to effect change
  • Programatic – Make business process improvement part of an ongoing program
  • Cultural – The things that define us as a company get more of our efforts
  • Exec-supported – Anything that lasts is supported at a high level; the C-level
  • End-user-supported - The most important of all and the result of doing the other things well.

Business process management is all about managed, sticky change. Are you creating change that sticks?

→ Leave a comment

Posted in Workplace reality

Tagged ,

On Demand Learning

Posted on October 24, 2011 | 4 Comments

The following is a guest blog by Tom Molyneux. Tom is a business process consultant at some of the largest enterprises in the world. His experiences in the strategic use of technology give him thoughtful insights into the rapidly changing world we live in. Tom is stepping in while Chris climbs in the Himalaya.

——————————————-

Old School Learning

Over a decade ago, my company sent me to a two day training course for a particular project management software package.  The scheduling was based on the existing course schedule, and HR selected a slot for me based on availability.  Great course – knowledgeable and enthusiastic instructor, interesting and motivated peers, good hands-on lessons.  By the end of the second day I thought, “Wow, I really know this stuff – it’s easy”.

Then two months passed before I actually had to use the software in a project.  When time came, I found that I was a beginner again – I had forgotten virtually everything I learned beyond the basics covered in the first half hour introduction.  In a sense, my company could have obtained the same outcome by sending me to a half hour training session minutes before it was actually needed.  We’ll come back to this point a little later.

Lest you think that I’m particularly forgetful, studies of the brain and how we learn and retain knowledge show this to be the norm.  Indeed, as John Medina points out in Brain Rules, research shows  “People usually forget 90 percent of what they learn in a class within 30 days.  He further showed that the majority of this forgetting occurs within the first few hours after class.  This has been robustly confirmed in modern times.”

The Future

The 1999 movie “The Matrix” gives us an idea of one vision of the future of learning might look like.  In one scene, Trinity, the heroine, needs to fly a B-212 helicopter.  She calls in the requirement on her somewhat retro cell phone.  Two seconds later she’s hovering outside a skyscraper office unleashing a torrent of machine gun fire.  What I think is really interesting about this, beyond the ability to “download” skills, is the idea of a system that delivers the required skills just before they are needed. 

Right Now

How might we move from the first example towards the second?  If you’ve read The Two Second Advantage, you’ll see that this fits in with a much larger trend in how businesses and society are starting to use real-time information for a competitive advantage.   In the old “database” world approach, companies would seek to provide mountains of training -  90 percent which research shows will be forgotten by the time it’s actually needed.  In the real-time approach, the objective is to try to provide just the right training to the right person at the right time.  How?

This is where process plays a critical role.  It also gets to the heart of why training is provided in the first place.  Most training is required to allow individuals to perform a specific activity (or set of activities) in the context of a process.  Because BPM lets us know both the process being performed and who’s performing it, it’s not much of a leap to see how it also tells us what training must be provided at that specific point in time.   This training could be as simple as the clearly readable process itself or as complex as a required certification or an existing course in an LMS.  In this view, every process could not only have an input and output, but also some way to attach, embed or otherwise enrich it with “how” to perform the process itself. 

BPM has the inate ability to answer the critical question that leads to 90 percent of the waste in training – “When?” Have you seen BPM systems used to enable on demand learning?

→ 4 Comments

Posted in Future of work, Workplace reality