Juan Le Roex

Industry experts weighed in on the issues facing BPM today

The ‘Six Sigma’ approach to business process management (BPM) is not yielding the expected benefits, as businesses are rapidly evolving.

So said Steve Towers, co-founder of the BP Group, speaking during the ITWeb BPM Summit, at The Forum, in Bryanston, recently.

Six Sigma is a business strategy that seeks to improve the quality of process outputs by identifying and removing the causes of defects and minimising variability in manufacturing and business processes.

Towers likened the Six Sigma approach to weight-loss programmes, saying they typically start off well, generating excitement and great progress, “but all too often fail to have a lasting impact, as participants gradually lose motivation and fall back into old habits”.

Recent studies suggest that nearly 60% of all corporate Six Sigma initiatives fail to yield desired results, he added.

“We can’t solve problems by using the same kind of thinking we used when we created them. Add to that, if you do what you have always done, you will always get what you have always got.” He explained that Six Sigma failures could be a result of escalation in commitment, which he said refers to the tendency of decision-makers to continue investing in a failing course of action.

Towers also pointed out that the Six Sigma approach tends to leave businesses organised in rigid structures, like a pyramid.

“However, processes wend and meander their way around these rigid structures,” he explained.

Steve Towers

He also said businesses using Six Sigma often have an “inside-out” approach, whereby they concentrate on doing things right. “These organisations mainly focus on improving efficiency, effectiveness, cost control and throughput. However, this industrial focus misses massive opportunities.”

Towers urged organisations to shift their focus to improving customer experience as well as removing points of failure. He referred to this approach as “outsidein”. Quoting Jeff Bezos, CEO of Amazon, Towers said: “Rather than ask what we are good at and what else can we do with that skill, you ask ‘who are your customers?’ ‘What do they need?’ And then you say, ‘We are going to give that to them regardless of whether we have the skills to do so.’”

He urged businesses to adopt a scientific approach towards customer experience. “The customer experience is the process,” he added, quoting Steve Jobs. “You have to be scientific in understanding where a process starts and where it finishes.”

Concluding, Towers said the outside-in process achieves dramatic internal benefits, typical cost savings of 40% to 70%, and extends an organisation’s value chain. “Outside-in is winning in terms of revenue profitability and customer service.”

Another aspect of BPM that needs careful consideration is cloud BPM, said Patrick Shields, senior principal consultant and pre-sales manager at Software AG.

He said cloud computing must be economically viable, commonly accessible and must ensure strategic ownership of infrastructure and operations in order for BPM to derive value from it.

Previously, BPM was more workflow-orientated, Shields noted, with its roots in document-centric workflows. This is no longer the case; BPM has evolved to become part of the culture of many organisations, which means it must now be able to collaborate, and should be used as a platform to enable customers to co-design processes in organisations.

There are a few questions that organisations need to ask before deciding on a cloud BPM solution, he advised. It’s important for organisations to decide on a migration platform – whether they are going to have on-premise private cloud solutions or hosted offsite cloud solutions.

Businesses must look at the end-to-end visibility of the cloud service provider, as this will assist in providing technical input to process designs. This is especially important in the design phase, Shields said. Changes need to be accommodated in design phases, as this has a cost implication to the business, especially if last-minute changes are made, he explained.

Lastly, there needs to be a BPM competence centre, as this will enable the measurement of processes. If a process can’t be measured, then they have no meaning.

A good approach to BPM, according to John Hayden, chairman of consultancy firm John Hayden and Associates, is agility. Unlike the traditional waterfall approach to BPM, the agile approach is highly disciplined and flexible.

Hayden defined a business process as a series or sequence of activities, often across departmental and organisational boundaries, which involve different functional disciplines that are initiated by a trigger. A business process requires input, adds value and produces outcomes for an external or internal customer.

He explained that the traditional waterfall approach to IT systems development requires that full specifications are completed and signed off before IT development starts.

“Waterfall is very structured, stepping through requirements analysis, design, coding and testing in a strict, pre-planned sequence. Progress is often measured in terms of delivered artefacts like design documents, requirement specifications, test plans or code reviews.”

Pointing to the criticisms that have been levelled against the waterfall approach, Hayden said it is inflexible to changes in requirements while in mid-stream; it is slow and bureaucratic; and it is demeaning of role-players.

Agile is a response to the well-recognised shortcomings of waterfall, he pointed out. “Agile’s view is that requirements or specifications are ‘perishable’ – they don’t stay fresh. Agile also values user involvement versus rigidly sticking to processes, methodologies and tools.”

Agile requires a fundamental change in people’s culture and mindsets, and how a project team works and behaves, he said. “It emphasises co-location and face-toface, verbal communications, collaboration and cross-functional teams.

“It’s about a leadership philosophy that encourages teamwork, self-organisation and accountability. It’s about managing a team rather than individuals,” Hayden added.

Nonetheless, he said the biggest challenge in implementing agile methods involves changing the culture and mindset of people on the project team.

Juan Le Roex, information management systems manager at Parsons Brinckerhoff Africa, said many projects are initiated with insufficient attention being paid to setting up business processes.

Not enough attention is paid to systems and data flOrganisations need to be more process-centric, with well-defined, configurable business processes and secure data management, he emphasised.

Two years ago, Parsons Brinckerhoff Africa conducted research, in the form of a time and effort assessment, to show the costs of unstructured data and the effect of having too many spreadsheets. One organisation spent R100 million on resources allocated to sifting through this information, Le Roex said.

Introducing incomplete, un-integrated and often complex systems into the project delivery process, where the initial startup process was neglected, is inefficient, wasteful and a risk to the overall project delivery, he noted.

Organisations need to be more process-centric, with well-defined, configurable business processes and secure data management, he emphasised.

The technology is simple, Le Roex said, the biggest problem is that it needs user buy-in from business.

According to Carl Townsend, services director at K2, BPM is not about modelling, but is rather about seeing models executed in a manner that delivers business efficiency.

Townsend said the main objective of implementing BPM in an organisation is to realise return on investment. “BPM helps organisations to get both direct and indirect financial gains,” he noted.

“Some of the indirect financial gains include efficiency improvement, staff retention through increased morale, and it also enables businesses to reallocate staff to more needy areas. On the direct financial gains, BPM ensures that enterprises reduce the running costs of their business,” he added.

Townsend also highlighted some BPM design methodologies that he said most businesses are implementing.

First, he referred to the ‘iterative approach’, which develops a small number of workflow steps and then keeps reworking these based on stakeholder feedback.

“There’s also the ‘overarching approach’, which develops the high level process end-to-end, but keeps detailed steps manual and avoids integration at first. This approach progressively builds up detail and integration through subsequent iterations.”

The ‘low-hanging fruit approach’, said Townsend, develops the simplest process first.

Finally, the ‘slice approach’ develops a single process from the front-end, through the workflow, all the way to line-of-business system integration.

According to Townsend, different approaches produce different results for different organisations, depending on their needs.

Townsend, however, cautioned organisations against having ‘big bang’ approaches in their BPM implementations, saying these approaches look sound theoretically, but in reality, they take ages to implement.

Before implementing a new BPM solution, he urged businesses to “take a second look at their current processes. Talk to everyone in the process, not just the process expert. Do not automate a wrong or bad process. You should focus on identifying a successful implementation.