Transforming an Organisation’s IT Service Management

We have recently completed a project for a multi-national customer to transform their IT service management capabilities in only eight weeks. We achieved that by utilising a structured methodology and the easy to use process discovery and capture solution from Process Master.

Their Challenges

• ITSM processes not clearly defined and standardise
• Tools focus - no service or process orientation
• No clear definition of roles and responsibilities
• No integrated view of processes (silo based – Unix Team , Network Team, Desktop Team)
• No group wide guidelines and process documentation
• Users not satisfied with level of support
• Service level not clearly defined
• No ability to accurately track performance

And Goals

• Create standard support processes across the organisations
• Continuously improve the quality of IT services
• Make IT a business enabler
• Improve service level and user satisfaction
• Align IT services with the current and future needs of the business and its customers
• Provide more services for the same cost, and reduce the long-term costs of service provision

What was achieved?

• Service consistency and stability – repeatable processes
• Improved user satisfaction
• Identified clear responsibilities and authorities
• IT infrastructure under control
• Better use of resources – IT and the Business
• A shared ITSM process portal is available to the whole organisation (easily accessible on intranet)

The below presentation provides further details:

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Has BPMN delivered the expected benefits?

There has been much discussion recently about the BPMN standard, as the new version of the standard (2.0) is being agreed.

First to recap; the goals of the notation have been defined as:

“.. to provide a notation that is readily understandable by all business users, from the business analysts that create the initial drafts of the processes, to the technical developers responsible for implementing the technology that will perform those processes, and finally, to the business people who will manage and monitor those processes. Thus, BPMN creates a standardized bridge for the gap between the business process design and process implementation.”

(Source: BPMN specification document)

The key point in the above statement, in my opinion, is the fact that the notation aims to address both the technical perspective and the needs of business people. As a result it had to be simple to learn yet powerful enough to depict the potential complexities of a business process; therefore it may not be a surprise that a recent research conduct by Michael zur Muehlen: How much BPMN do you need? found that “the average BPMN model uses less than 20% of the available vocabulary”; suggesting that the notation is used in a simplistic way.

He also indicates in his findings that there are two types of BPMN modellers, which can be summed-up (more or less) as business v. IT focused:

1) the business focused modellers who use BPMN for process re-engineering and process improvement type work, and
2) the IT solution focused modellers who use it for workflow engineering or process automation.

However, in my experience, the first type of users, people carrying out process documentation that is not IT driven, have not yet fully embraced BPMN (many are not even aware of it). Organisations are still using a wide range of inconsistent notations; and making use of numerous symbols and objects in their processes models. It’s not rare to see that within the same organisations or sometimes within the same projects, process maps utilise different symbols, objects and terminology; making it difficult to compare different models or to deliver a consistent message across the organisation (especially in large change programmes).
In 2-3 years BPMN has become the de-facto standard when it comes to workflow automation design, but hasn’t seem to be fully adopted for every process modelling activity.

Sebastian Stein has been asking Where is BPMN heading to?

My view is that the next challenge for BPMN is to ensure that it truly develops into a common business language understood by all; and becomes more accepted beyond the domain of workflow automation and system analysis to be used across all facets of business.

This may require enhancing the notation by adding additional views to help express the full complexity of business processes or business architecture as a whole, for example, a view that covers the organisational perspective showing roles and responsibilities in a hierarchical structure?!. This, since business processes can not be fully expressed using only one type of diagram (The fact that the UML notion includes 13 different diagrams, representing different points of views, illustrates this point). However, this may be difficult to achieve without increasing its complexity.

It will be interesting to see how BPMN evolves over the next few years.

An Introduction to BPMN for Business People

On few occasions in recent months I’ve been involved in process analysis engagements where we had to get business people involved in helping documenting their processes. Our aim was to accelerate the process discover stage by having the people involved in the work actually documenting their current processes, instead of bringing external business analysts that would have to spend time to learn and understand the business first, before actually carrying out the actual process capture work. We were then able to move ahead to the re-design and improvement stage much quicker.

We used a process capture and design tool from Process Master, that is based on the industry standard BPMN notation; however we realised that although the BPMN notation has been well-established and know to business analysts, system architects and workflow solution designers; business users will need some initial guidance and training to understand what each object within the notation means and how to use it. The good news is that BPMN is straight forward to learn and utilise quickly.

The below presentation was part of a 2 days training course we delivered. The purpose of this presentation is to introduce business people to BPMN, its usages and benefits. Following the days they were able to successfully carryout the process discovery themselves as planned, saving significant time on current state analysis work.

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