First Look

When told that a recent survey of 146 firms showed 54% wanted BPM training but didn’t know which kind to choose, BPM expert Derek Miers – who delivered the pre-conference workshop  at Gartner’s BPM Summit – said he wasn’t surprised at all.

 “Is that all?” I actually would have thought it would probably be higher than that,” said Miers. “Because if they’re doing it right, they need to send all of your people on a training course; we’ve got so many questions and alternative directions and it’s really imperative that organizations ensure that their BPM initiatives are successful.”

But they really need to keep one thing in mind, and that is that with all this wonderful technology out there -- and yes, I’ve spent the last 20 years looking at this stuff – the people involved still need help,” noted Miers, who developed the BPM Learning Framework of on- and offline courses.

 A Yawning Skills Gap

At the same time, firms must organize BPM in a way that will assure success and master the toughest best practice techniques – they’re also being faced with what Miers called “a yawning skills gap that is starting to appear and getting worse.

“That’s from the top down on how to run the BPM project to begin with, and to assure the success of the outline, and also around the very special sort of skills that are required in business modeling and process architecture and analysis.

The BPM Focus site is designed to serve as ongoing resource to give people set up and run BPM projects and learning BPMN, but also as “a way of stepping outside the box and seeing the process for what it really is,” Miers said.

“But the BPMF Learning Framework is designed to be a balanced and comprehensive program of BPM-related training and skills with individual course components, detailed methods and best practices through project delivery through the modeling and process architecture and business analysis.

The Advanced Process Modeling course covers:

--Simulation, which Miers asserted should comprise comparing and contrasting assumptions and understanding process rather than a deterministic approach designed to fulfill management’s assumptions.

“Nine out of ten simulation model are deterministic in nature, i.e., in that the answer is decided beforehand and then we build a simulation to make it look like that.

--RADS: While Miers partner is the original core original author of the BPMNs specification, the APM course also incorporates Role Activity Diagramming, or RADS.

“That’s really about looking at how roles collaborate and work together in terms of being goal-focused; it’s very much more practice-focused.

--Business Capability Modeling: “Think of it as a sort modeling the business as a set of collaborating services. It’s almost like SOA for the business itself.

“IT people certainly need to grow business skills and the business people need to grow technology skills, because the two are really sort of fused together when you start trying to create The BPM Center of Excellence,” Miers notes. “The BPM Center of Excellence really sort of brings those two ends together and creates a group in center that can support and drive these sorts of improvement initiatives.

Business vs. IT Skillsets

Another objective is to show business analysts -- often trained in Six Sigma, Business Process Re-engineering experience, LEAN experienced Total Quality Management – all of which involve process – how to drive business performance improvement by capturing the right kind of information, analyzing the rules and the processes, looking at the cases that have been running through these process that might be existing already.

“Let’s say you’ve got a BPM suite that’s gathering the information; it’s being able to look inside the data that’s been you’ve been gathering the data over the last month and discovering that all right,  you see that for argument’s sake that the average turnaround time is .6 of a day, but 98 percent of cases go through in .2 of a day, but then there’s this other  2 or 3  percent of cases that take 20 days, and that’s where we should go look and improve next,” Miers noted.

“On the other hand,” Miers said, “the IT specialist who, for argument’s sake,  has grown up with UML and process flow diagrams and what have you, needs to really understand the drivers in the business and the things that really make a difference in terms of its competitive position in the marketplace and that means being able to become easier to do business with and turn cases around much more quickly and being able to look inside the state of a process and allow customers to actually see where things are up to.”

I mean think of, for argument’s sake, we take it for granted now, but FedEx have gotten to the points where they can predict within an hour of when they’ll have a package delivered to you,” Miers observed.”It’s gotten to the point where you can say, ‘I want it delivered at this time.’ Now when you think about the scale of that business and the ability to drive change through the organization and be able to understand their processes so well so that they can make that short of prediction, it’s a big step.

Starting With Small Projects

Now many people go out and they think, “Well, let’s go out and find a mission-critical application;  were going to address that,” when the reality is that the mission-critical application is a big problem that has had several go-throughs in the past,” Miers said.

“Really you’re far better off choosing the small things that you can prove success, build skills and build credibility with the organization. Getting that kind of message across is I think a very important thing to have happen in order for BPM to be successful in the long term.

For much more on BPM Training objectives – including more ways to become customer-centric, being easier to do business with, lowering costs,increasing speed, ensuring compliance and creating an agile enterprise – listen to the entire podcast.

For much more from Miers on the most desirable BPM skill sets – go to http://www.bpmfocus.org.