BizTechFuturist

10: Have fun. You are making life altering improvements in the lives of your colleagues. You are giving them back valuable time and saving them from tedious tasks so that they can get on and do what they were hired to do – run the business. Celebrate the victories the users have and record those successes on a wall-of-fame. Deal with every error with urgency and honesty and involve the users in the solution. Embrace suggestions from the user, they know their business best, and try out their ideas. Fail fast, fail often and learn from each one but never stop experimenting. And have fun doing it.

We are fortunate to live in a time where almost every user we meet is very savvy about technology. They are used to the idea of process automation and this makes our task easier in some ways. It also sets the bar high for what we do. Are you ready to leap that bar?

9: Find the fire starters. When the system becomes established look at each and every exception and trace it back to the point at which it originated. Too much of our time is spent fighting fires so the most effective thing we can do stop them being started. Use the Process Change Process to refine the automation so that those kinds of errors cannot occur again. Track the exception counts as a KPI and drive them towards zero.

7: Be visual, document less, automate more. BPMS tools that need programmers are a thing of the last century. Today’s best in class tools are very visual and easy to understand even by non-technical users. Ensure that you use the workflow charting capability of your BPMS solution to describe every aspect of the processes you are automating. Expose your users to the tool, get them used to seeing the tool being used. Soon they will have the vocabulary of BPMS and be thinking in workflow terms. This really improves communication between the implementation team and the users and significantly speeds design and acceptance. If your BPMS tool frightens the users you picked the wrong tool.

6: Humans do the thinking and systems do the work. Nothing is stranger in an automated process to see a task assigned to a user that requires them to go online to another system, obtain some data, enter it into the process automation and pass the task along. Wherever possible the automation should talk to the other system and populate the data and transition the task and the human should not be involved. Humans are best when they are problem solving. The reason we are automating the process is get more time for the users to do their real job of managing the business. Let the software do the repetitive tasks.

5: Set alerts and have them sent to you. As more and more users come online to your system there will be increasing numbers of questions, issues and problems. If you hare setting threshold alerts for user managers make sure you are notified too, even set the alert level a little lower and get alerted sooner than the user. If you can look at why a back log has been created or why an SLA limit is being breached before it actually happens and affects the business you can engage with the manager and learn if it is a problem with BPMS system, the automation you have developed, the users use of the system or real business issue. Being proactive and dealing with problems before they are problems is important early in the roll out.