Challenge

Our project team had some difficulties communicating a very technical project solution between the business  and IT team members. The business seemed lost in the depth of written detail needed to describe the process  improvement being considered and the IT development team spoke an entirely different language, one versed  in codes void of the business concept.  Since this was going to be a complex project involving interaction  between different stakeholder roles in the organization we needed to develop a strategy that would  communicate quickly and to both the business and IT teams to reduce the time being wasted going back and  forth. What we were trying to accomplish had not been done before in our organization and we didn’t want to  invest too much time describing the opportunity and missing our chance to be first to market.

Tool Selection

Storytelling and mind mapping ended up being great solutions to collaborate on the project. The use of mind  maps helped the IT Team understand the main processes and how the stakeholders would interact with each  process as work moved back and forth between the various stakeholders. The storytelling of the current state  “what is” for each role brought many new insights as to where the biggest opportunity for improvements might  be felt and helped to set our benchmark for measuring future success for our learning launch. The current  process involved stakeholders having to sign onto multiple systems, read various e-mails and get processing  instructions from other sources. This was a timely process, which did not provide much job satisfaction and the  turnover rate among those involved was high. The idea, “What if”, would need to focus on a way to reduce the  current pain being experienced by the stakeholders and improve the time it took to process the work.

Tool Application

The storytelling helped IT to focus on the “pain” point of each stakeholder role, which enabled them to keep  focused on where the biggest gains in the current inefficient process might be realized. Using the mind map,  we were able to figure out the best sequence of the processes in the workflow to make it more efficient.

Insight

Since the workflow was repeatable, with few exceptions, the IT department identified that a human to human  BPM would be a perfect solution to systematically orchestrate the workflow. Using the concept of a work  order, an instruction sheet that indicated what needed to be done by each role and attaching the related  correspondence via links contained in the work order. If the particular stakeholder had a question related to the  instructions, the e-mails were attached via links to get the specific details and all roles had access to the same  e-mails. Once the business and IT agreed the process workflow through the pictures and sequence the events,  the BA created a document that outlined the business rules around each workflow process, which included the  business terminology and the associated codes as a quick reference document closing the communication gap.

The documentation provided by the BA (business term/code) helped IT realize that the use of business rules  software would externalize most of the process edits. Externalizing the edits would result in a more efficient  development process and a more rapid deployment of changes for future system changes and lessons learned  from the learning launch.

Approach

Since our organization already had BPM tools in house and experience with this tool, they were able to  implement this process fairly quickly. The business rules concept would be new to our organization and we

didn’t want to invest a lot of money into new tools until we were able to prove the benefits. Our team chose to  use free software as a starting point.

The BPM tools generated maps of the process flow, which helped us to grasp quickly that the process was  configured correctly and tweak those processes that might need to be modified for a particular role based on  the stakeholder input.

The implementation of the free ware for business rules, gave us new insights into how we might build  repeatable test cases so we could quickly test changes to the processes and the business rules. The test case  scenario was not initially part of the project considerations but it did prove to expedite the testing so we  improved the deployment time, which was an additional benefit.

Learning Launch

The learning launch was designed to target a few areas in the country. Although there was a learning curve for  staff participating in the learning launch, the improved process was still quicker than the process it replaced.  The organization of the instruction sheet, matched the process flow and all the related documentation was  available. We did learn that we needed a way to document the questions that went back and forth between the  various roles because this slowed down the workflow and performance efficiencies needed to be considered for  process improvements and staffing models.

Those lessons were learned and the changes implemented prior to doing a full role out.

Our organization realized such a gain from implementing the free business rules software that a much more  robust business rules software product was purchased.

The project continues to be enhanced and has survived several years, even though an acquisition. I share this  because, to me, software solutions that support the business for years and survive an acquisition are a success  story.

