Marlon Dumas
Adjunct Professor with the Information Systems School at Queensland University of Technology and Professor of Software Engineering at the University of Tartu.
Location Tartu, Estonia
Activity
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Marlon Dumas replied to Michelle Goodyear
Yes absolutely. Thanks for sharing these thoughts. Belief is a strong driver. The process stakeholders have to believe in the benefits of the process change collectively.
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Sorry, the correct link is this one:
http://accadvisor.blogspot.com/2013/03/p3-business-analysis-harmons-process.html
This one is also relevant:
http://accalecturenotes.blogspot.com/2011/02/what-is-processstrategy-matrix-for.htmlBut if you want to know more, it's best to get this information directly from Paul Harmon's Business Process Change book. It...
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Marlon Dumas replied to Michelle Goodyear
Great example of how important it is to know the "why" of every step, especially business-value-adding steps.
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Absolutely correct, the definition of "good" or "bad" in a customer-facing process is a matter of customer expectations. Good and bad are relative terms. They depend on what the customers expect, and this is largely determined by what they can find elsewhere. If what they can find elsewhere becomes "better" in some respect, then our process has suddently...
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Marlon Dumas replied to Ted Rook
Thanks for raising this point Ted. Companies certainly creates value in the business and we should stress it. By the way, all tasks related to payment collection are BVA as well, and certainly we would not do without them. The point with BVA steps is that we should do them, but also, we should make them as "transparent" as possible to the customer. The...
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Marlon Dumas replied to Peter Stott
The evaluation of the application (by a committee) is VA, as is the notification. This is the happy path, what the customer wants us to do...
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Marlon Dumas replied to Robert Doak
Or you can organize a workshop with the appropriate stakeholders, you can do a "sticky notes" session, with three colors of sticky notes: red for NVA, yellow for BVA and green for VA. Have the participants in the workshop brainstorm steps of each type, and have them put them on top of a value chain (or high-level model) of the process on a blackboard. So you...
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Absolutely - the Pareto principle is very evident in a process portfolio. There is always a handful of processes that are responsible for the highest revenue/cost.
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This is great. A big advantage of having mapped your process with those of industry reference models is that you might now be able to benchmark your processes against those of your peers in the industry. APQC for example provides a lot of benchmarking data, maybe you find some benchmarking data there for your specific vertical.
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Thanks for clarifying this point. Yes you are perfectly right, in the prioritization step of the process identification phase, the goal is to classify the processes in an organization into those that "we should examine" and those that we temporarily "put on hold" (read: give lower priority).
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As you have hinted, there's no way to future-proof a product or process portfolio forever. What we can do instead is to build up a system of continuous product and process improvement, where products and processes are continuously monitored and weaknesses and opportunities are continuously identified and addressed. Establishing a culture of continuous...
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Large companies have hundreds or even thousands of processes. It is not possible nor desirable to spread limited resources and management attention to improve all of them at once. Hence, in addition to enumerating/designating the processes in a company, we also need to prioritize them. This prioritization effort should be driven by the company's strategy. For...
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Thanks for this detailed analysis. Some of the issues (and causes) you spot were actually an issue in the company from which this process description is inspired. In particular, works engineer were indeed providing approvals only a couple of times a day and this sometimes led to the rental request being pushed to the next day, and the equipment only arriving...
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Great try!
In general, approvals have a business reason to exist (although you would be right to say that some companies and gov agencies abuse of them).
It turns out that in the company referred to in this case study, the works engineer is the one responsible to overseeing construction projects. His approval serves both as a way to check that there is... -
Thanks for the contribution. A couple of comments:
- Approvals are generally BVA. They add value to the business, they reduce risk and allow us to achieve compliance and orderly running of the business. They are however rarely VA, except if what the customer is seeking is precisely an approval, which is the case in an applicationt-to-approval process (e.g.... -
Thanks for this detailed answer. A couple of comments:
- Paying an invoice is BVA rather than VA. It does not add direct value to the customer (BVA), but of course, the business needs to pay its invoices, otherwise the consequences are severe.
Nice analysis of the issues. -
Absolutely spot-on. With respect to your doubt (logging into spreadsheet), I would indeed argue that this is BVA. Maintaining a record of rented equipment, their cost and rental can help us later to quantify how much are we renting? Are all these rentals necessary? Do they add value? How much could be saved in absolute numbers if we tried to reduce the amount...
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Tere Kairi,
You are right to suggest that activities related generating customer leads are value-adding. Such activities do not occur in this particular case study because the case study relates to a purchase-to-pay process.
A similar remark can be made about "improving customer service". It is BVA. Absolutely necessary for the sustainability and growth of... -
Thanks for your contribution. I fully agree with your VA and BVA step. Maybe the fact that the clerk selects the most suitable equipment and checks its availability is VA - in the sense that the site engineer would otherwise have to do so. Or at least one could argue that it is BVA.
(Re-)work caused by defects is NVA as you rightly point out. Transportation... -
Great try!
In general, approvals have a business reason to exist (although you would be right to say that some companies and gov agencies abuse of them).
It turns out that in the company referred to in this case study, the works engineer is the one responsible to overseeing construction projects. His approval serves both as a way to check that there is... -
Thanks Jocelyn for this very in-depth analysis
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Spot-on Jackie. You went on step further w.r.t. to what we were expectint at this point.
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Marlon Dumas replied to Ian Cowden
Yes, definitely - customer feedback would be particularly important here. It provides the initial set of "issues" from which we can start the analysis, as discussed later in the course.
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Marlon Dumas replied to Yousab Magdy
Good start... We'll see later that maybe the clerk is not really needed in this process, and that the supplier could be playing a more pro-active role...
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Marlon Dumas replied to Roger Horne
Thanks Roger for this detailed and perfect answer!
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Marlon Dumas replied to Nicholas Hassapis
Thanks for the comment. We'll take note for next time.
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Marlon Dumas replied to Georgia Wilkinson
Very detailed and absolutely perfec answer indeed!
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Marlon Dumas replied to Jackie Palman
yes absolutely, the supplier is an actor in this process. It's an external actor.
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Perfect answer!
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Spot-on answer!
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xcellent answer on all points. Please note though that the customer in this process is the "site engineer", not BuildIT.
Why? Because this is a procure-to-pay process, and a procure-to-pay process is an internal process. An internal process is initiated by a stakeholder (e.g. employee) inside a company (inside BuildIT). In this case, the one who initiates the... -
Thanks, nice contribution. We will see later in the course how this process could be re-designed - e.g. by putting the onus on the rental supplier to make sure that BuildIT has the right equipment at the right time (i.e. letting the supplier be more proactive).
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Excellent answer. The customer is the "site engineer", since he or she is the one who starts an instance of the process. The site enginer is the one who wants to get the correct equipment delivered and picked-up at the needed dates.
In your performance measures, you mention the "processing time" required to fill in the paperwork. Other performance measures,... -
Excellent answer on all points. Please note however that the customer in this process is the "site engineer", not BuildIT.
Why? Because this is a procure-to-pay process, and a procure-to-pay process is an internal process. An internal process is initiated by a stakeholder (e.g. employee) inside a company (inside BuildIT).
What happens though is that this... -
Indeed spot-on. I recommend you by the way to have a look at the value-driven BPM framework, which argues that BPM is not only about "quality versus efficiecy" but also about two other axes: the networking-integration axis and the compliance-agility axis. What you mention in your latest comment is a "networking" concern - BPM should contribute to identifying...
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Yes, quality and efficiency are two common performance concerns. But there are others, e.g. compliance and agility - i.e. the ability to rapidly adapt to changes in the business environment and exploit new business opportunities.
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Marlon Dumas replied to Jackie Palman
Thanks. We have a plan to launch an extended version of this course at the end of 2017. The longer version of the course does have examples of more complex processes and a hands-on project were you take an example of a process at an insurance process and apply a range of BPM techniques. So pls stay tuned.
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Marlon Dumas replied to Joao Lopes
Banks have a huge number of processes. For example, they have a loan application process, which starts when a new loan application is received and ends when it is (hopefully) approved and disbursed. One loan application = one process instance.
What has happened in the banking and financial sectors, is that processes have become highly automated. For example,... -
This case study refers to a purchase-to-pay process and particularly to the acconts payable part of this process. This is indeed not core. But what Ford learned to do with this and similar initiatives is to acquire the capability of modernising their processes. And they have applied this throghout the company, including in their order-to-cash processes.
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That is the trick indeed. Oftentimes, efficiency and quality play against each other. You can often increase quality at a higher cost. The trick is to find a way of reducing costs with the same quality (or better quality), or to increase quality at constant (or lesser) cost.
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Yes, when managing accounts payable (invoices to be paid), you try to postpone the payment as much as possible, within the allowed limits of course.
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"Lean" refers to a broad management which embraces the idea of eliminating "waste", which on the end means producing with as little input as needed. One of the techniques for process analysis that we will mention consists of identifying and eliminating various types of wastes, such as waste arising from defects or rework. The "lean" management approach...
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Ford came out stronger out of this and many other process changes. It has had its ups and downs, but over time it remains a strong employer. Nowadays it employs over 200K people, and its employee base has an upward trend, see:
https://www.statista.com/statistics/297324/number-of-ford-employees/ -
One should see both the short-term and the long-term impact of process change. In the short-term, introducing process change may be painful in many ways, including the local short-term social impact of potential downsizing or re-deployment. In the long-term, businesses come out fundamentally stronger from their process change efforts. Suffice to say that...
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Marlon Dumas replied to Cheryl C
Not sure that two years is a long enough cycle time to assess the impact of disruptive technology-enabled process innovations - be it anticipatory logistics/shipping, drone delivery, on-the-move 3D printing, etc., which are all in early testing mode. It usually takes longer for these innovations to find their place and for the right tradeoff between complexity...
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Marlon Dumas replied to Peter Centner
The set of slides used in this MOOC are not publicly available (due to IP policy of institutions involved in the MOOC).
However, the authors of the "Fundamentals of BPM" MOOC have made our lecture slides available in the companion web site of our book:
http://fundamentals-of-bpm.org/supplementary-material/lectures/The slides found in the above web site...
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Marlon Dumas replied to Angie Wong
Yes you are right. There is big "shift" in the field of process improvement from focusing on efficiency and compliance (via automation) towards focusing more on customer engagement, customer experience, and more generally a shift from looking for improvements inside the organization (in the backend) towards finding improvements in the way the organization...
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Marlon Dumas replied to Cheryl C
Another case of outward-looking process innovation at Amazon is predictive shipping:
http://www.theverge.com/2014/1/18/5320636/amazon-plans-to-ship-your-packages-before-you-even-buy-them -
Yes, your statement is spot-on, except that the final assessment of the admission application (the one where the committee decides if the application is accepted or not) is value-adding to the customer. This is precisely what the customer wants us to do - to assess the details of the application in order to decide on admission.
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Marlon Dumas replied to ALLAN MUNIZ
This is correct:
- Interactions where relevant information is relayed to the customer are value-adding
- Control steps, such as checking documents to assess the eligibility of the application, are business value-adding.
- But even if the process is entirely digital, there can be some non-value-adding steps, such as for example unnecessary emails between the... -
When assessing business value-adding steps, one should always consider the ratio between:
- The cost of the check - calculated for example over a large number of process instances (e.g. over an entire year)
- The benefit that it brings, e.g. in terms of reducing a certain potential loss, e.g. if a check brings down the risk of a potential loss L from 10% to... -
Yes, our MOOCs are all free and the software used in the courses is available for free. As usual, the only paying item is the optional certificate.
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Absolutely, critical path analysis is basically about finding the path with the maximum cycle time. However, critical path analysis is used in processes that do not have "conditional branching" (very deterministic processes). In business processes, there are many decisions that have to be taking so a lot of conditional branches (decision gateways) and hence...
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We are soon going to deliver a longer MOOC (12 weeks) where one week is dedicated to simulation. The longer MOOC has three parts, the ones that would be relevant for simulation are parts 1 and especially 2, see: https://moocs.qut.edu.au/
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Absolutely correct. This is a typical form of "rework" hence non-value-adding. Thanks for the example.
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Marlon Dumas replied to Toby Gill
Yes indeed. More generally, all forms of "rework" (having to do the same thing multiple times) is non-value-adding.
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Marlon Dumas replied to Peter Centner
Rework is a form of non-value-added. Rework can take several forms, for example:
1. You did something, there was a defect in what you did, it comes back and you have to correct it. The second time you work on it, it's rework, hence NVA.
2. You do the same BVA step twice just for the purpose of satisfying the idiosyncratic requirements of multiple... -
Marlon Dumas replied to Matthew Bissell
Assess application is a BVA step. Notifying the outcome is a VA step.
Certainly, cycle time is an important performance measure in this process and we should seek to minimize it. Sometimes we can do this by automating or semi-automating some steps (e.g. notification steps can be automated). Other times we can speed up by parallelizing (e.g. think of multiple... -
Marlon Dumas replied to Patricia Dearnaley
Excellent - provided that the available number of places allows it, conditional acceptance can help to "lock in" the customer (the student in this case) and give time for the required BVA steps to take place.
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Marlon Dumas replied to Shehu Ibrahim Idris
Excellent point. When we say that a step is value-adding, it does not necessarily mean that it is "cost-effective" (or profitable) to the business. A step being VA simply means that it adds some value to the customer. This in turn means that can somehow monetize this value. But of course if the cost of performing the VA step exceeds the direct/indirect revenue...
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Marlon Dumas replied to Michelle Hill Risley
Yes, communication steps with the customer can be highly value-adding.
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Marlon Dumas replied to Roger Kofi kyeremeh
Absolutely - when we say that a step is value-adding, it does not necessarily mean that it is cost-effective. Value-adding simply means that it adds value to the customer and hence somehow we can monetize this value. But of course if the cost of performing the VA step exceeds the direct and indirect revenue we get from it, it is not cost-effective and might...
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Providing "personalized advice" to a customer is generally value-adding. If the customers appreciate this personalized advice more than the "general advice", the personalized advice is bringing them additional value. On the other hand, if the personalized advice does not give customers any additional insights beyond the available "general information", then it...
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Marlon Dumas replied to Eber Mello
Thanks Eber for this detailed analysis.
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Marlon Dumas replied to Israr Shaikh
We are in full agreement here. Control steps should be integrated with value-adding steps wherever possible. This is why we want to identify business value-adding steps (in particular control steps) that are spread across the entire process. Once we have identified all business value-adding steps, we can bring them up as early as possible and embed them with...
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If the goal is to analyze the weaknesses in the current process, their impact and their root causes, then capturing the "as is" situation is a first step in this direction. Of course, we should always remember that we are modeling for a purpose (understanding, communicating and analyzing the process for example) and we should aim to model enough to achieve...
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Maybe you are thinking here about "operational-level issues" such as as a specific (one-off) customer complaint, or a one-off defect in a product delivery. These must tracked and resolved of course. But in this segment of the course we are rather referring to "tactical issues" such as recurrent customer complaints or recurrent defects in the execution of the...
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Absolutely - we will see both Ishikawa/Fishbone diagrams and why-why diagrams in subsequent segments of the course. They can be used in a complementary way.
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Absolutely spot-on. However note the important of distinguishing "operational-level issues" such as as a specific (one-off) customer complaint, from "tactical issues" such as recurrent customer complaints or recurrent defects in the execution of the process. In the issue register mentioned here, we focus on the tactical issues.
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The idea of breaking down activities into small steps is meant to facilitate value-added and waste analysis.
These two types of analysis techniques (together with other analysis techniques) allow us to identify weaknesses in the process.
These weaknesses are then documented in an issue register. -
I have seen companies using Jira or similar tools to maintain their process management issue register. It's important though to keep the BPM issue register separate from operational issue registers such as day-to-day issues/complaints. The BPM issue register is for tactical issues, not for operational issues.
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I agree absolutely Kevin. The issue register must be managed. Input to the register can come from across the organization, but there has to be a person or small group of persons who moderate and consolidate this input, and more importantly, who prioritize the issues and triggers improvement initiatives with concrete action points. Otherwise the issue register...
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Marlon Dumas replied to Michelle Hill Risley
Absolutely - we will get to the notion of "urgent", "less urgent" and non-urgent when we put together the insights from different process analysis techniques into an issue register. This is coming up below.
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Marlon Dumas replied to Eber Mello
Absolutely. One has to avoid falling into the trap of analyzing the "as if" process (the process we would like to have if everything was perfect). We should analyze the "as is" process.
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Marlon Dumas replied to Peter Centner
I concur with your view that process management should go hand-in-hand with product management. If the expectations of the customer are unclear or changing, then the product needs to adapt and with that the process needs to adapt to. Recently, there is a strong interest in "customer journey analysis", which aims at capturing and analyzing what the customer...
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BPM can be done bottom-up and indeed this is how it happens in some organizations.
However, there can also be top-down BPM if the top-level management has a strong commitment to operational excellence. A well-documented example is BPM at Lego:
http://www.leadingpractice.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/10/LEGO-LEADing-BPM-Practice-Case-Story.pdf
There are many... -
There is quite a lot of documentation about ITIL in public wikis, e.g. https://www.itsmprocesses.com/Wiki/Englisch/index.htm
But apart from ITIL, I am not aware of other open/public reference process model. You either have to join a consortium that maintains a reference process model to get the detailed documentation (e.g. SCOR, eTOM, APQC), or if you want to... -
Process designation means "giving the right name to each process" and categorizing these processes. For example, given a company that manufactures and sells shirts, designating their processes means coming up with a (structured) listing as follows:
- purchase-to-pay of raw materials: the process from the moment we need to purchase some raw material, to the... -
Process designation simply means "giving the right name to each process" and categorizing these processes. For example, we can start looking at a company that sells shirts, and designate their core processes, e.g.
- purchase-to-pay of raw materials: the process from the moment we need to purchase some raw material, to the moment the material is received and... -
I fully agree - the prioritization of processes should in large part be driven by the strategy.
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Hi Neda, Izeta, Your comments are spot-on. Process designation simply means "giving the right name to each process" and categorizing it. For example, we can start looking at a company that sells shirts, and designate their core processes, e.g.
- purchase-to-pay of raw materials: the process from the moment we need to purchase some raw material, to the moment... -
Hi Neda, I concur with your viewpoint. We can think of project management as a specific set of business processes required to conduct projects successfully in an organization. These processes include project scoping & inception, project monitoring & resource allocation, re-planning, etc. A comprehensive list of activities and processes associated with project...
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Marlon Dumas made a comment
Thank you all for the impressive amount of relevant ideas that you have articulated in this thread. I try to summarize some of them below.
- When the level 2 employee has found a resolution, they should send it directly to the client. The moment the request is forwarded to level 2, level 1 is no longer adding any value in the process - they just add a level... -
Marlon Dumas replied to Jonathan Brown
The process you refer to is broadly known in the BPM as an "issue-to-resolution" process. However, you are mainly involved in the "registration" part of this process (i.e. the "inception"). I assume the process you mention continues in different other government bodies, depending on the type of incident. I wonder if the flooding and pollution center is also...
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Marlon Dumas replied to Brian Huxley
Porter's value chain analysis is a very useful tool for process identification. It allows us in particular to enumerate the processes in the organization in a structured way. The concept of value chain is a starting point for decomposing large end-to-end processes into more manageable (sub-)processes.
In this course we do not go deep into process... -
The term "workflow" was quite popular in the later 90s up until the early 2000s. But it lost traction later because it had the connotation of being something mechanic, sequential and rigid. Nowadays the term "workflow" is used for very simple predictable and indeed mechanic processes, such as a "approval workflows" or other "document workflows". The term...
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Marlon Dumas replied to Thandar Oo
Indeed, and there a number of processes such as the incident-to-resolution process, which tie up all these functions and delivery value to customers.
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Marlon Dumas replied to Steve Cottren
Process 1 is the "order to cash" process.
Process 2 is the "purchase-to-pay" process.
In the wholesaler example, we show these two processes. In the restaurant example, the second one is not shown but instead, an equipment maintenance process is shown. -
Marlon Dumas replied to Carlos Santander
The definition of process includes a notion of "outcome". An execution of a process leads to one of several outcomes, including positive outcomes and negative outcomes. The "goods being damaged", or the "customer being dissatisfied" are examples of negative outcomes. On the end BPM is partly about reducing these negative outcomes (thus maintaining or...
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Marlon Dumas replied to Kenneth Runcie
Yes definitely a process incorporates a set of business activities. But a process is really a "procedure" though in the sense that it is not "normative" or "rigid". The process helps us achieve our objectives rather than simply dictating us what steps can or cannot happen next...
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Marlon Dumas replied to Alberto Jacob Njikho
Agree - we need to attach performance measures and performance objectives to very process and monitor the achievement of these objectives. And these process performance objectives are intimately related to the SLAs that the organization offers to its customers and partners.
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Yes indeed, the purchase-to-pay process for direct procurement (i.e. purchasing the goods necessary to deliver core services) is a very important process in an organization. This is one of the two core processes shown in the example of the wholesaler (the other one is their order-to-cash process). In the restaurant example we focused on the order-to-cash...
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You can think of project management as a specific set of activities/business processes required to conduct projects successfully in an organization. These processes include project scoping & inception, project monitoring & resource allocation, re-planning, etc. A comprehensive list of activities and processes associated to project management are documented in...
