Successful Workplace

How often do we think about the way we usually operate at work? Whether we’re performing an informal five-step process for evaluating a new proposal, or setting priorities for managing our time, how often do we think about consistency and efficiency? Our ability to improve the ways we do things depends on defining and shaping […]

Over the years a constant theme is that the ROI of a BPMS implementation or BPM approach is one of the trickiest to pin down and prove. Whilst you can calculate hard efficiency and headcount benefits (which is always the wrong way to solely measure and plan for BPM success) there are a myriad of intangible benefits […]

If you have been bitten by the process bug, like me, then you always see parallels between business, process, and everyday life. It drives my wife, mother, and friends crazy, but I always see them, and it is usually in the context of how I can make the process better at the airport, church, restaurant, […]

Most people think standard operating procedures are a strait jacket that limits their flexibility. Yet in our increasingly complex world of work, with so many possible decisions and steps, clever use of standards can liberate. They can actually make it easier to tailor customer experiences at low cost. Consider how standards are helping the Cleveland Clinic, rated one […]

This blog post looks at the promise of new entrants into the UK retail banking sector. It also discusses in general where retail banks should focus on in order to stay competitive in an industry that is marked by ever more assertive customers and disruptive technology changes. There is always a sense of expectation when […]

Your processes are in a mess. You have no idea how much work actually comes into the organization. You want to invest in a Case Management tool but just don’t know where to begin. The vendors all pitch forward with suggestions and want a few coins for a decent licence sale so it makes sense […]

There’s a classic episode of the American television show Seinfeld called “The Comeback” where a main character, George Costanza, is in a meeting, eating shrimp as quickly as he can. A coworker quips, “Hey, George, the ocean called and they’re running out of shrimp.” George, caught off guard, has nothing to say. He thinks of […]

This may ruffle feathers of the Black Belts among you but I’m going to highlight an example to explain precisely why the majority of pragmatic clients aren’t interested in the upper levels that Six Sigma goes to. I’ve found through experience over the years that a client is more interested in building a continuous improvement […]

The IT world is a dichotomy. On one hand we have our peers and educators telling us that to learn to code creates a foundation for entry into the world of the software business and yet in our own enterprise domain we yearn for the ability to create without code. Take a look at the […]

Rules are everywhere. Literally. You can observe them in everyday life all around you whether you’re in the office or not. I see people standing on empty streets waiting to cross the road and blindly obeying the crossing sign for the sake of common sense. I watch people automatically line up to fob their ID […]

Put the ‘BPM as a Concept’ aside for a bit and look at BPMs tech-related benefits. One of the things at the top of your list is likely to be how it is a Rapid Application Development platform and how it helps you quickly put together process based solutions with much less development effort than […]

Companies increasingly use outside specialists to do their work. Driven by the ever-lower costs of global communication and online collaboration tools, Henry Ford’s vertically integrated organization is yielding to Procter & Gamble’s network of external innovators. Almost anything can be outsourced to specialists and reconnected. While companies have outsourced low-value work such as payroll processing […]

Companies put a great deal of focus on goals and strategies and often less effort goes into the tactics and guidance for how work actually gets done. If you’ve seen the viral video for the Harlem Shake, it illustrates what most companies look like under their corporate covers. Doing the Harlem Shake Enjoy this short […]

When Microsoft launched their original Surface tables it was easy see plenty of enterprise use for the device…more than simply moving photos around a pretty screen. Surface was a commercial disaster and the product is still more of a gimmick and isn’t part of  to-day-business use by businesses. Sadly, Microsoft lost the plot, so let’s not […]

How do you evaluate a BPM product ? There’s lots of various critera to choose from in an attempt to assess just how good the vendor and his amazing tool is. For instance, where is it placed in the Magic Quadrant ?  After all, the hard work in gathering requirements and scoring has been done for you, […]

Here’s a pre-coffee morning thought and following on from recent posts about enterprise social here on Successful Workplace: with social creating a wave through the business process space, removing silos and increasing collaboration in the enterprise, does this mean that specialised and centralised functions like a Center of Excellence should no longer exist ? Two sides of the coin […]