Is it possible to fit 100 slides into 10-minutes presentation? Check out this:http://blog.gardeviance.org/2008/10/gang-up-now-before-aas-cloud-gets-you.html

The presentation is about relatively new concepts - SaaS and Cloud Computing - but you’ll enjoy it even if you don’t care about these matters. I love when serious topics are delivered with artistic style. Wish to be able making presentation this way: perfect language, creative video row and at the same time sharp logic and usefull information.

Definition:

• “Enterprise Process” (equivalent term “End-to-End Process”) is a business process connected to external customer at both ends and going through more than one top-level company’s departments.

Axiom:

• A BPM initiative would pay for itself only if you target end-to-end processes.

Otherwise you’ll be guilty of suboptimization sin according to Lean methodology or will “shoot sparrows with a cannon” according to Russian proverb. Yet it doesn’t mean you must begin with such a process - you may use something else for training but you won’t win a medal for training only.

Typical errors:

1. BPM vendors love to illustrate their products by supporting processes like “Employee Onboarding” or “Expenses Report” thus provoking prospects to do the same. It’s OK for training but there is simply not enough money beghind these processes to justify enterprise-wide project which what BPM project is by definition.
2. Many prospect wish to go for “Negotiating a Contract” process. There are money behind it but is this a process really? For me it’s rather a fragment of end-to-end process “Sales of Goods or Services”. Customer’s concern being the end result - i.e. performance of the process as a whole - it may happen that the bottleneck wouldn’t be this particular fragment. Narrowing a scope leads to suboptimization.
3. And here is the worst case: “We have a process here, well-studied and alredy automated, now let’s implement it in BPM for comparison”. In other words, let’s make a race between good and better. For your project to be acknowledged by the management you must not only implement some process in BPM but also significantly improve it. You’d hardly make it with a process that was well worked on already.

OK, let’s assume that we do everything right and consider “Order to Cash”, a classic example of end-to-end process. (Good questions would be: “Why exactly this process?” or “How to pick up the best one from many company’s processes?” These deserve detailed answers however so let’s leave them for the next time.)

“Order to Cash” process in “produce-to-order” business scenario may consist of prepayment, manufacturing, delivery and closure subprocesses:

What’s wrong with the above diagram? It assumes (since we have only one pool) that manufacturing works synchronously with sales: no order - manufacturing is idle, order arrives - manufacturing starts working on it. If we got deeper into manufacturing subprocess, we would probably found materials and/or parts purchasing subprocess, sychronized with manufacturing in turn.

But businesses just don’t work like “one-two-three”!

Manufacturing does not switch on/off by every client’s order even if we produce to order. Clients’ orders are accumulated and picked up on regular basis, say daily by production scheduling process. Similarly, purchasing is not triggered by a single order usually but rather runs regularily or is triggered by stock level going below a limit.

Technically such work is implemented in BPM not by a singe sychronous process like shown on the diagram above but by several asynchronously executed processes that communcate with each other by data and/or messages. Such scheme can be drawn with BPMN and executed by BPMS - which, from my point of view, is a big advantage of BPMS over workflow. But let’s consider the correct diagram next time - what I’m going to say here is that asychronous execution is a core feature not only of this particular but of every end-to-end process.

Definitions:

• “Process Orchestration” means tasks execution sequence and logic within a single process frame.
• “Process Choreography” means the logic of several processes asynchronous execution coordinated by data/message flows.

Theorem:

• End-to-end process should be modeled by the choreography, not by the orchestration.

It was confirmed by practice and could be proved by the following consideration: since end-to-end process by definition goes through several top-level departments, you’ll have to take into account the working rhytm of each one of them, which means - modeling asynchronous execution.

An attempt to model it by pure orchestration is nothing else but following an anti-pattern which I will call “End-to-End Process Archistration”.

Sorry, this entry is only available in Русский.

Bruce Silver posted an article “BPMN’s Three Levels, Reconsidered” on his blog. (It’s a fllow-up to the earlier post on the matter: “Three Levels of Process Modeling with BPMN“.) From his two-years experience of giving BPMN classes Bruce noticed that many of students (he even says “most” couple of paragraphs forward) are simply trying to document, analyse and improve their processes and don’t bother about executable models. Bruce calls this Level 1 of BPMN usage. Level 2 also covers activity flow model suitable for direct execution inside BPMS that includes conditional logic, exceptions, events, messaging (process choreography assumed yet not mentioned).

But is it about BPMN really?

I like the statement Mark McGregor made on the cover page of his new book “Winning With Enterprise Process Management” (freely available at markmcgregor.com):

…process thinking takes many forms - Business Process Management, Continuous Process Improvement, Six Sigma, Lean Sigma, Business Process Reengineering and many others…

Mark is right: it’s about thinking. Process thinking. Different kinds of process thinking, to be precise.

Do you remember the times when object-oriented programming was just invented? It was noticed that it’s not about programming languages. One could write object-oriented software even with Fortran (and some people did when there were no decent C++ compilers) if he catched the idea. And of course you can (and many people actually do) write 100%-functional code on C++.

An interesting observation was made at that time: it’s much easier to teach C++ to a newbie than to experienced C programmers. The reason - it’s about installing a certain kind of mindset (object-oriented in that case) or changing it. The latter turns out to be much harder than the former.

Now I have absolutely the same experience with people trying to understand what BPMN (BPM, BPMS - you name it) is about. Those who deal with business processes for years and have strong background in BPR, ISO9000 etc. can’t grasp what’s so cool about executable process models. They always considered execution to be “implementation details”, something IT should care about. Some of them become irritated enough to say or write that BPM is nothing new, it’s pure marketing, it’s an “umbrella concept” etc.

By contrast, every student and/or junior consultant becomes excited about possibilities that this concept opens. When you just draw a process diagram you can make a dozen of them, all being valid and all being different. That’s no good. When execution is involved - even in it’s simplest form, with simple automatically generated screens and zero integration - you go from “diagrams” to “the diagram”. The analyst isn’t in position to draw an unconsistent diagram any more: if he does, the diagram returns back to him with developer’s note “sorry, can’t be executed this way, please correct”.

Getting back to BPMN Training - Bruce uses Process Modeler for Microsoft Visio by itp commerce for his classes. It could be a perfect choice: high level of BPMN compliance and strong simulation capabilities. But there is no execution. And you just can’t explain what is the execution by words and slides, without showing it.

When we realized this fact several years ago, we recorded and published a simple demo video showing BPMS modeling and execution. And it became a hit. Many people said “thank you” because it helped them understand the directly executable process model concept, regardless of BPMS used.

So Bruce, if you wish more people moved from Level 1 to Level 2, you must show them how a model can be executed in BPMS and how iterational modeling and execution is done. Don’t leave it implicit and don’t assume people know it already. Because as you say it yourself - most of them don’t and it’s the key assumption behind BPMN.

I have a blog of my own. You can find out who is “me” and what is this blog about here and there.

And right now - couple of words about what it costed to me. Four days: two on design, two on customizing Wordpress. What was the idea? Well,  to start with - I wanted a standalone blog. If you pretend to be an IT blogger but are unable to build it with your own hands - are you really an IT man? Or ex-one who didn’t write a line of code for last …teen years?!

Secondly, these Wordpress themes - they are awfull. OK you may say they are “nice” and I’d agree to this but I couldn’t find a single one matching the following requirements:

• cross-browserness (behave well in IE6 in particular)
• fluid layout
• variable fonts

Sacrifying usability for pretty design is not for me.

» read the rest