I've attended and spoken at a couple of BPMG conferences, as well as attending the new chapter meetings here in Toronto. I've never really understood the organization; some people refer to it as a "buyer's club", where membership just gets you discounted on their proprietary training and methods, and I since I'm not interested in their 8 Omega methodology (the name of which still makes me laugh), I haven't found any reason to pay for a membership since my first time around. The quality of their output can be a bit uneven, and most of it appears to be driven by Steve Towers and Terry Schurter, both of whom I have met at the conferences (in fact, I wrote a review for Terry's recent book).

This week, some weird things started happening. First, the usual weekly BPM email arrived from Steve Towers, but with a statement "I can't point you at any articles on the bpmg.org site as it has been down for several days (more on that very soon)" -- with no explanation, although the email came from Steve Towers' address rather than BPMG.

Then, an email from Terry Schurter announcing that he has resigned BPMG, lengthy but no more informative:

Today ends almost 3 years of work with the BPM Group for me and I have many fond memories that I will cherish over the years.

I feel it is important and necessary to share with you a few things about my resignation to help you understand why this change has occurred.

I leave the BPM Group under duress. I will simply say that things have come to the point where what I get from the BPM Group won’t buy any “bread” and I’m not an “open-source” thought leader/CIO.

I retain my positive relationship with Steve Towers and will continue to work with him on the latest hot BPM concepts including CEM, the CEM Method (CEMM), Outside-In, SCOs, etc. CEM, CEMM and much of the other latest insights into the customer focus in BPM are the intellectual property of Bennu Group LLC, Terry Schurter and/or Steve Towers. These resources will no longer be available through the BPM Group but they will remain available...

Because I am not “going away” in fact; I see this as the trigger to take the best concepts forward without the chains of “inside-out” thinking placed on me by some of the directors in the BPM Group (not including Steve Towers of course). The place to visit me and have access to these resources is www.bennugroup.net. I hope you have the chance to stop by and visit.

Of course, I’ll be out there speaking at conferences (visit www.terryschurter.com for more on that) and I will be doing lots of other things as well. Whatever I am up to, you’ll find more about it at the sites listed above.

I hope that during my stay at the BPM Group I have helped to enrich some of your lives in some small way and I hope to have the opportunity to stay in touch with as many of you as possible.

Finally, in closing I wish to apologize for anything that the BPM Group may have promised you that they have failed to deliver on. If I could have left the BPM Group without duress my departure would have been carefully structured to help ensure an orderly exit from the business. Unfortunately that has not turned out to be the case.

As we say on the internet, WTF?

Then yesterday, a missive from BPMG (or what's left of it):

I am writing to you to inform you of the official company position regarding issues with regard to BPMG and its web site.

I have been a non-executive director, director and shareholder of BPM Ventures Ltd the holding company of BPMG for some years. Recently a dispute has arisen in the company about some invoices and payments that have been claimed to be improper. A board meeting was called to consider the best action for the company until such disputes had been resolved. I have have been appointed managing director and the executive authority of David Lyneham-Brown and Steve Towers have been suspended whilst due enquiries can be made. I must emphasis that there is no implication of wrong doing at this stage by any party but it is normal in these circumstances to suspend individuals until due enquires have been made.

One of the disputes involves a company called Bennu, run by a Mr Terry Schurter. This company had the responsibility, amongst others, of running and maintaining the BPMG web site. One of their invoices has been claimed to be improperly submitted and is in dispute. A matter that I intend to resolve as quickly as possible. However Bennu have taken it upon themselves to re-direct the BPMG web site to their own website. We would like all parties to know that they are improperly doing this and have no grounds or authority for this redirection. We will of course be taking appropriate action but that will take time.

The training that BPMG have so successfully delivered over the past few years has not changed and we intend to continue to honour all training course and responsibilities. To this end David Lyneham-Brown remains involved in the day to day activities of the company and along with our colleague Rose Butler, will remain available for any questions you might have regarding the delivery of BPMG services. In addition both he and Rose will be your contact points for any new bookings. All training materials and IP remain the property of BPMG but customers need to be aware of possible improper use of materials in the future.

It is most regretful that a subcontractor to BPMG has seen fit to take such actions over a minor invoice that has been questioned in its validity and will be resolved in a short time if the submitted invoice is genuine. We apologise to our customers for any inconvenience that this may have caused and we will take all and any actions necessary to protect our customers position and ensure that all services are delivered to the usual high levels of standard that we have always delivered.

Finally, I wish to assure you that the company is solvent (as agreed by the board yesterday) and remains in a position to honor any proper financial commitments made by the company. We will be doing our very best to get normal service resumed as soon as possible.

We will be setting up a web site in the near future where further information will be available.

Stewart Ashton

As a temporary measure you will find us at www.processperformance.com along with details of how to contact us.

The BPMG site is still redirected to Terry Schurter's Bennu Group website, and Ashton's letter and the BPMG logos are on the site that Ashton mentions at the end of his letter. The BPMG.org domain registration is private, but presumably Terry has control over it if he was able to redirect to his own site -- an action that appears to be in tremendously bad faith, even if not illegal, since I assume that BPMG owns its own trade name and domain name, even if Terry was managing the website and domain records.

Given that the two key visible people at BPMG are no longer on active duty -- Terry has resigned and Steve has been suspended by the board -- it's not clear how BPMG can continue to do business.

Posted by Sandy Kemsley at 03:57 PM in BPMG | Permalink | Comments (5) | TrackBacks (0) | Add to del.icio.us

Earlier this month was the second meeting of the Toronto BPMG chapter, following a successful turnout at the first meeting. Unfortunately, this one fell on a Friday after a large snowfall when the city had warned people not to travel unless necessary, which encouraged many people to take a snow day in spite of it turning out to be a sunny day with all of the snow melting. (For those of you who live in places where you don't have snow days, try to imagine the pure delight of missing a day of school and spending it at the local park sledding down the hills, then apply that feeling to missing a day of work. Of course, everyone claims to be working at home...) The result: all the vendors and consultants struggled through the slush and made it to the meeting, and almost none of the "practitioners" (end-customers) did, resulting in an embarrassing total of three practitioners -- including the speaker -- out of about 25 people. It was funny to hear, however, that three people at the meeting said that they attended because they read about it on my blog.

As with the last meeting, Jim Baird talked about BPMG, then Ultimus (the meeting sponsor and the vendor to our speaker) gave a short overview of BPM without too much of a product plug. The main speaker was Jodi Starkman-Mendelsohn of West Park Assessment Centre, who I had heard speak earlier that same week at the Gartner conference in San Diego. Although I had heard some of the WPAC story, this was in much more detail:

• One key business line for them was to assess injuries from auto accidents, with patient referrals from both insurance companies and lawyers.
• The main driver for improved systems, including BPM, was 300% revenue growth over a 3-year period that basically broke their manual scheduling process. With increased numbers of double-booking and no shows, they were finding it hard to maintain their service levels and estimated that $3M/year in revenue was at risk.
• They defined a strategic plan in 2001 with the objective to improve productivity and operating efficiencies by integrating multiple web-based applications together seamlessly to address their scheduling and financial management needs. They set a target of a 3-year return on investment.
• In October 2002, they went live with a new scheduling system, a new financial system, a fax server, and Ultimus BPM for process management and to bind together the other components. Events in the scheduling system initiate processes, and there's integration between BPM and scheduling throughout the processes. The fax server is kicked off at various points in the process to generate outbound documents. There are nightly uploads to the financial system (which is deemed adequate frequency), and occasional downloads of the master file.
• Currently, they have 79 different processes, 29 active users, and 6,000 active incidents/month. I was surprised at the large number of different processes: maintaining 79 business processes that may be only slight variations of each other would be a significant burden, although I don't know how similar the individual processes are.
• They saw huge benefits: ROI in 3 years, reduced turnaround times, improved business efficiency, and reduced errors, allowing them to grow beyond their previous capabilities and meet market demands. They're also adding value to customers by providing better visibility into processes, and have better agility of the business logic by externalizing it in the BPM rather than embedding it within financial or scheduling systems.

The big success story that Starkman-Mendelsohn talked about at Gartner and here was what happened to them when SARS hit Toronto in 2003. Although SARS didn't affect most of us in Toronto all that much, it had a severe impact on health-care facilities, where all but critical services were cancelled. Although a private business, WPAC operates within a public healthcare facility, which meant that they were shut out of their own offices with very little warning. Prior to their new systems, this would have put them out of commission for the entire seven weeks of the lock-out, costing them $600K in direct revenue and untold damages in lost opportunity; with all of their applications available online via web interfaces, however, they were managing their business processes as usual by the next day, and two days later had outfitted space in a local hotel with examining tables and equipment to allow them to continue business as usual. Since they're not capturing the patient files electronically, they still needed access to the paper files, but were allowed to send one person back into their offices once per day to fetch the necessary files.

I created a short course on business continuity planning last year, and I talked about exactly this issue: how having your business processes and other applications online can save your butt when disaster hits. If you have mostly manual processes, consider that that process is actually embodied within the worker's heads, and likely in paper files on their desk or notes saved only to their local PC. Take away the physical desk, and they might have a hard time reconstructing a particular instance of a business process. Take away the specific worker as well, and you can forget about reconstructing that process instance until you can get access to either their desk or the person. If the business process is online, however, most of the notes and other instance-specific data is captured within the online process, making it possible to replace the original worker and/or remove them from their physical working environment with a minimal impact on their ability to complete the business processes, as long as they have access to the online systems.

Starkman-Mendelsohn talked about challenges that they are facing now due to recent deregulation in the auto insurance industry: first of all, one part of their business is likely to decrease because of changing rules around the use of assessment centres for resolving insurance disputes. Secondly, if someone is required to have an assessment, there is now a maximum distance that they're required to travel. They were able to change their business processes to suit the new requirements and remain competitive -- although the decreased business has resulted in reduced staff numbers -- and set up four satellite locations, enabled by the ability to access the business applications remotely. In other words, the easy adaptability of the systems is providing them with the business agility that they require in a rapidly-changing business environment.

She finished up by noting that a BPM system needs to evolve over time, it's not a one-time project -- a big vote for not over-customizing your systems. She also said that involve their subject matter experts in process mapping and implementation was a big part of their success, and resulted in good staff buy-in.

And the final big win for them: the Infoworld 100 Awards named them as a winner in the health-care sector in November.

Posted by Sandy Kemsley at 10:33 AM in BPM • BPMG | Permalink | TrackBacks (0) | Add to del.icio.us

After the successful first BPMG chapter meeting here in Toronto, there's a second one planned for March 2nd. It would be nice if BPMG actually made some space on their site to advertise chapter events; you wouldn't find this information if you weren't on their mailing list (or one of my readers ;) ).

There is a description of the event in a PDF file on the BPMG site, and I posted it on upcoming.org. It's free to attend, but you need to register in advance.

Posted by Sandy Kemsley at 11:09 AM in BPMG | Permalink | TrackBacks (0) | Add to del.icio.us

A couple of weeks ago, I was at the first BPMG Toronto chapter meeting, along with 25-30 others: pretty good attendance for an initial meeting, although I think that 3 of them were from the host, webMethods, 2 were the speakers, and 1 from BPMG. Based on some later conversations, the split between vendors and practitioners was around 50:50, and the split between business and technical people was around the same.

Jim Baird, who is organizing the North American chapters, gave a brief introduction to BPMG; as usual, this left me with the burning question "Is 8 Omega just a silly pun on Six Sigma?" as well as wondering how the BPMG process maturity model differs from BPMM and others. There was also a weird bit taken from the Australian chapters that states that presentations from vendors and consultants can't be more than 5 minutes; since I get slotted into that "consultant" category, that implies that there's no perceived value in what I might talk about, and that it would just be a sales pitch. As a fairly regular conference presenter, I beg to differ.

The main event, however, was a presentation by TD Bank on their BPM projects. Like any other large financial organization, TD has 100's of systems, a ton of manual processes and procedures, and an expectation from management that they must "do more with less". A few years ago, this wouldn't have been a problem, since there was plenty of low-hanging fruit for implementing some degree of automation and gaining some benefit; that fruit, however, is long since plucked, and the benefits were used to pay for point solutions (like tactical uses of Visual Basic and Adobe Acrobat) that can't grow with the business. What they were left with were ad hoc existing systems that were "good enough" for the job at hand, and no easy business case to replace those with systems that provided both agility or reusability.

They did have one big thing on their side: an executive-level vision of continuous process improvement, which led to the establishment of a corporate competency centre in business process modelling, an enterprise licence for Pega BPM, and a workflow team within the IT group. The CIO had the insight to provide the time, money and air cover for a production proof of concept within 4 months, and it was the workflow team's challenge to find the right first project and get something from the drawing board to production in that time frame. By applying some agile programming techniques, which I found pretty remarkable for a large financial services organization, they were able to go from concept to production in 4 months, including a month of QA, and have only had 1 defect reported to date: amazing on all counts.

Of course, there were challenges. First, a problem that I often see in projects, was the business users' desire to include everything in phase 1 of a project, which makes it difficult to select a project and also to control scope creep. Part of the problem is that the users can have a hard time envisioning how they could do their job with only part of the functionality that they think that they require, but a big part of it is a (historically supported) dread that this is their only chance, and that the workflow team is never coming back again after phase 1. Second, they had to shift from data-centric thinking to a process-centric view in order to get the focus on process improvement rather than data processing, and found out that not everyone "gets" process thinking. Third, they didn't fully understand the capabilities of the Pega product before they started, so likely did things less effectively -- and possibly with less reusability -- than they will in future projects. In particular, they're not using the rules engine that lies at the heart of Pega for anything other than basic validations, but they recognize the need to take a closer look at that for future implementation.

Some great lessons learned:

• Define and publish common terminology ("process", "workflow", "agile", etc.) for use in all project communication. It doesn't really matter if you use definitions put forward by a standards group or by your BPMS vendor, it only matters that you're all communicating consistently.
• Understand the capabilities and limitations of the selected BPMS, so that you don't end up building something that you can't grow with. I've seen many, many cases of over-customization of BPMS because the core capabilities of the product were poorly understood, which can lead to un-agile and non-reusable systems as well as masking many of the key functionalities of the BPMS. I've written (ranted) about the dangers of over-customization many times before.
• Start small but deliver value. They didn't try to do a complete process rework, but settled for some incremental process improvement that could show some benefit.
• Understand corporate culture and how it impacts team dynamics and development approach, then pick an approach that can be blended into your culture. You'll want to check out a couple of different approaches to see what fits best.
• Accept that you're going to make mistakes; this requires team members to live with some degree of uncertainty, which is difficult for many people within large, conservative organizations.
• Choose team members who have a commitment to doing what's right for the organization. I find this one to be particularly important, since it drives the decision-making on a project, but also difficult, since you need to find people who are not necessarily influenced by popular opinion or corporate politics.

A couple of odd comments along the way: it was stated that BPM is "new in Canada", yet the project that I heard described is not different in nature from what I was implementing at Canadian financial institutions in 1994 (although the tools are much, much better now :) ). Also, when I asked if the process modelling at TD was being done as part of a larger enterprise architecture modelling effort, EA was positioned as being "under workflow", which implies that they actually mean IT architecture and don't have a sense of enterprise architecture at this level. Because they're using Visio for process modelling, which has a direct link to Pega, they're not using more rigorous modelling tools that might tie in with EA modelling efforts.

Posted by Sandy Kemsley at 08:32 AM in BPM • BPMG | Permalink | Comments (2) | TrackBacks (0) | Add to del.icio.us

I was on the BPMG site today, specifically the articles launch page, and I noticed that they appear to be using a graphic that is identical to the Bloglines plumber (the page that Bloglines puts up when they are down for maintenance). Who's copying whom?

Posted by Sandy Kemsley at 01:25 PM in BPMG • OffTopic | Permalink | TrackBacks (0) | Add to del.icio.us

BPMG Toronto is kicking off with its inaugural meeting on November 29th, 8:30-11:00am at webMethods' downtown Toronto office. You can see all the details and express your interest at the upcoming.org link.

The meeting is free and all are welcome, but you need to RSVP to Jim Baird if you plan to attend.

Posted by Sandy Kemsley at 06:30 PM in BPMG | Permalink | TrackBacks (0) | Add to del.icio.us