Successful Workplace

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 […]

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 […]

What type of company makes a good target to be acquired? There are the obvious revenue, strategic, market, product, and R&D considerations. Those are all opportunity plays and are in themselves good reasons, but what about the risk? How do you decide in advance which companies can be acquired without being destroyed? For that, there […]

Recently, I’m finding that I’m working with more and more startups. This is exciting – to get an early glimpse at tomorrow’s industries and products. It’s also rewarding in that it shows that today’s startups (as opposed to their extinct Web 1.0 ancestors) are consciously leveraging the proven body of management theory in savvy new ways. I took […]

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 […]

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 […]

The following is guest post by Julie Hunt, a software professional with a career spanning technical to process, sales and go-to-market strategies. Julie shares her thoughts on the her blog Highly Competitive. Julie runs her own consulting business and lives in San Marcos, Texas. For those who work directly with business process management, it’s second […]

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 […]

Journey won 8 awards including Game Of The Year at the DICE conference this week, an accolade which was well deserved for a number of reasons. You control a solitary figure and guide it through a personal story, along the way meeting the occasional lone figure who is controlled by another over the net. But […]

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, […]

Rational managers for the past thirty years have tightly focused on efficiency, cost cutting, and day-to-day execution — perhaps to a fault. With increasing industry disruption, efficiency is fast becoming of secondary importance to innovation and agility. Many large organizations have too little capacity for external sensing, strategic reflection, and business transformation. As a recent WalMart […]

I couldn’t sleep last night. Something to do with too much Red Bull. Anyway, I digress because my mind wandered to the subject of managing unstructured, ad hoc and mainly paper/ email based processes that are mainly in the domain of the “Knowledge Worker” and then it dawned on me that there is another community […]

There is great power when strong processes meet solid governance practices. I had a recent real-life experience of the opposite, process without governance, which could have had grave results. A group of us were at the movies and a couple sitting on the row in front of us got up in the middle of the […]

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 […]