According to recent AIIM Report – ‘Winning the Paper Wars’, 74% of companies have business improvement campaigns that would benefit from paperless initiatives, but only 24% of those have a specific policy to ‘drive paper out of business’. In the era of BPM, BPMS, iBPMS, ERP, ECM (and dozens of other acronyms), I’m asking: how…
Jaisunder Venkat posted a clever blog on scope creep recently which got me thinking. I have been burned by scope creep in the past, so I am very careful to emphasize this issue when quoting/starting any new project. Scope creep can get you in many ways. As a sales guy/project manager, I gather some detailed…
When people think of support activities, they typically consider the post-Go-Live time frame. I believe support—in a holistic view—starts before you Go Live. Whether we’re doing beta testing or entering the UAT phase, we’re already interacting with real users, or at least, we should be. This is an important opportunity to test not only your support infrastructure, but also your rollout documentation and any other artifacts that will supplement your support strategy.
As a best practice, you want to include as many of the real users of your mobile platform as possible. Moreover, for multi-audience solutions, you want to include as many roles and regions as feasible. In mobile BI, this could mean different regions to ensure different networks, local customizations, and so on are tested and validated.
Social Media is both a threat and an opportunity.
Organizations are traditionally used to being in control of customer interactions and have long built IT systems that push messages to the customer. It is clear, however, that social media and the consumerization of technology has already had an impact on customer’s daily lives and is here to stay.
Through social listening and an effective Business Process Management system, organization’s ability to listen to the conversation and respond through changing business processes will become a major differentiator.
Magic is a very technical profession - you’ve got to learn all that sleight of hand stuff and it’s got to be very accurate. It attracts geeks who enjoy that sort of thing who practice by themselves for hours on end, often in their bedroom from a young age. Polishing the act to get it just right.
Yet to be a big success you’ve got to learn strong people skills. How to engage an audience, how to draw them into your story, how to entertain them, not just show off how clever you are at the magic.
A few weeks ago we posted a video of how Toyota engineers helped a New York City food bank optimize how it packs boxes of food to be distributed to families still displaced from Hurricane Sandy. Now the New York Times has a more detailed story of how Toyota Production System Support Center has worked with various parts of The Food Bank for New York City (In Lieu of Money, Toyota Donates Efficiency to New York Charity, Jul 26). It turns out that packing boxes is only one project out of many.
One of the more interesting projects is speeding up how quickly clients can be seated for dinner at a Harlem soup kitchen.
I was recently sent a fantastic infographic called “The Secret Life of Garbage” which explains what happens in the end to end process of garbage collection, recycling and disposal. I’ve embedded the infographic below.
Co-incidentally I’ve just finished an assignment with a waste management client so I thought I’d share a few insights into the process.
In every process we have customer interaction points - how well we manage these “moments of truth” with our customers influences their levels of loyalty towards the firm. Loyal customers spend more and are more likely to recommend the firm to friends or collegues so making customers more loyal should be a major focus – and to do this we need to look at process from a customer experience perspective. How should we do this?
Make the customer everyone’s business. The Customer is the very reason for an organization to exist. There is no need for Lean process management without customers, because there would not be any processes to manage, right? So, make customer everyone’s business, because if their wage is paid by the customer, they should think how what they do contributes to successful customer outcomes that organization should be producing. Getting rid of useless processes is more effective than tweaking them.
I like to think of a BPMS as process glue. Organisations will always have manual processes and disparate systems. These are the areas where work slips through the cracks, where time is lost, where customers are forgotten. A BPMS helps glue the process together. It provides process visibility, it stops the errors, it speeds the process up, it kills manual work, it provides meaningful data, it gives the customers what they need…(if the process is optimised first!)