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10 ragioni per gestire i processi

Stanno diventando popolari le "10 list".

Eccone una sulle 10 ragioni per gestire i processi con BPM

10) Actually see the activities required to provide goods or services
9) Identify activities that don't add value to the goods or services
8) Stop performing non value add activities [reduce costs]
7) Identify activities that touch your customer
6) Stop performing activities that are not customer friendly [happy customers]
5) Improve customer relationships [happy customers]
4) Produce more goods or services in less time [increase revenues]
3) Find more time for innovation [increase market share]
2) Create a competitive advantage [increase market share]
1) Increase profits

Estratta dal blog di Scott Cleveland

Testate le vostre conoscenze su BPMN

La Humboldt University di Berlino ha messo in linea un auto-test che permette di controllare le proprie conoscenze di BPMN.

Anche se non volete eseguire tutto il test è molto interessante la presentazione iniziale delle caratteristiche del BPMN.

Per il test cliccate qui

Nel 2010 scommettete sul BPM !!!

Lo dice Gartner!!!

Leggete cosa dice Jim Sinur qui

Gli utenti cambiano lo specifiche!!!!

Una delle osservazioni più frequenti da parte degli sviluppatori è che "gli utenti continuano a cambiare le loro richieste"

Ciò è sicuramente vero ma come si vede da questo schemino ripreso da un blog russo (tutto il mondo paese!)

non sempre è colpa loro !!!

Cerchiamo quindi di dotarci di strumenti che sopportino lo sviluppo "iterativo" invece che quello classico a cascata e li faremo contenti.

Orchestrazione vs coreografia

Una domanda frequente che ci viene posta è sulla differenza tra coreografia e orchestrazione; vediamo di provare a dare due definizioni che possano chiarire il concetto.

Per prima cosa osservo che le due parole sono state scelte in modo accurato e rendono l'idea.

Orchestrazione: (come nel caso di una orchestra) esiste un direttore (sistema centrale) che dice agli orchestrali (servizi o sistemi remoti) cosa fare; la sincronizzazione è gestita centralmente

Coreografia: in questo caso, come nel caso di un corpo di ballo, ogni ballerino (sistema remoto/servizio) sa cosa deve fare e si sincronizza con gli altri ballerini per eseguire i propri passi. Quindi ogni singolo sistema remoto/servizio conosce casa fare e chi chiamare alla fine della propria attività

Previsioni per il 2015

In un recente studio della società WinterGreen che ha analizzato i trend del mercato BPM & SOA si dice:

"Business process management (BPM) and services oriented architecture engine markets at $1.8 billion for licenses, maintenance, and services in 2008 are expected to reach $6.2 billion by 2015"

Rilasciato Teamworks7

E' stato ufficialmente rilasciata la nuova versione di Teamworks: la versione 7

Per scaricare la nuova brochure cliccate qui.

Nei prossimi giorni pubblicherò la lista delle nuove funzionalità.

BPM è la tecnologia più importante degli ultimi 30 anni per migliorare il business

Questa frase un po' impegnativa è stata pronunciata da Toby Redshaw, CIO in AVIVA (uno dei gruppi assicurativi più grandi al mondo) nel corso di una intervista su Financial Times .

Attualmente Aviva ha 23 progetti attivi su BPM.

Ad esempio il processo di gestione di" assunzioni e dismissioni del personale", uno dei primi ad essere realizzato, è stato sviluppato in meno di 12 settimane.

Aviva è utilizzatore di Teamworks di Lombardi.

Qui potete risentire l'intera intervista (circa 7 minuti)

Una community sul BPMN 2.0

E' nato da poco un sito che per poter discutere e mettere a fattor comune le esperienze su BPMN 2.0.

Lo trovate qui.

Esiste una sezione di tutorial dove vengono spiegati i costrutti.

Vi ricordo che Temworks7 di Lombardi è uno dei primi BPMS a supportare tutti i costrutti BMPN.

why process not technology will drive business improvement

Lo sosteniamo da tempo .... e qui un bell'articolo su computerweekly.

Riprendo una frase:

"However, over the next few years we will see a shift in the types of businesses that use IT successfully and the ways they use it. Those that will likely be most successful will be those that focus on modelling and modifying their business processes rather than concentrating solely on the technology."

Un commento sulla nuova release di Blueprint

Interessante commento alla nuova release di Blueprint dal blog di Bp3.

Riporto integralmente:

"Lombardi’s October 2009 Blueprint Update was just announcend. Seemingly minor changes, but with interesting implications…

I would list them in reverse of the order Lombardi has listed them in their announcement:

First, increased notification options to keep you abreast of process modeling updates in your domain. Of course, I’d like to see an RSS feed as an option rather than just email-focused options, but combining the email notifications with a good email filter and you can get about the same result.

Second, additional properties to track against the activities of your process. Identifying systems, cycle time, cost, etc. That’s great… but by itself it is just documentation…

Third, leveraging those properties for heat-mapping and analysis of your process. This is actually the whiz-bang feature of the release, and shows how a small incremental improvement on a good foundation can really change the way you look at a tool. Prior to the analysis/heat-map, odds are you might just enter the data because it is “the right thing to do” to document the process for posterity (or for yourself). Now you have a reason to do it that is for the analysis of improvement opportunities. I’ll point out, however, that without reading the release note, it would have been easy to open Blueprint and not even notice the “Analyze” button, and the fact that you can choose which attribute to base your heat map on is easy to miss. But analysis mode works equally well on the process mapping view as well as the BPMN diagramming view.

What’s exciting about this release is that it offers a real reason to capture valuable data about your process… and it also opens the door for feeding information from your executing processes in Teamworks back to Blueprint for analysis (technical challenges remain, but it becomes increasingly obvious that this can be done)

"

Lombardi al symposium Gartner

Nuova release di Blueprint

Sabato scorso è stata messa in linea una nuova release di Blueprint. Ecco qui di seguito le novità:

The October ‘09 update is now available on blueprint.lombardi.com! This release has some exciting enhancements that I think will make Blueprint an even more valuable tool for discovering and sharing your processes. We’ve added a new process analysis mode, several new properties to the Blueprint documentation template, email notifications for changes happening to your processes, and a many more improvements based upon your feedback.

Let’s take a look the enhancements in detail:

• Enhanced Process Analysis: We’ve introduced a new analysis mode in today’s release that allows you to instantly highlight the areas of your process that need attention and improvement. When you switch to analysis mode, Blueprint heat maps both the discovery map and process diagram with the data you’ve entered in the details for each activity. This allows you to instantly see which parts of your process have problems, excessive cost or cycle time, or that are risk points. It substantially increases the visibility you have into all of your processes, and is an excellent tool to help you make a business case for improvements.

  You can find the Analyze button in the toolbar whenever you’re viewing a process. Give it a try and let us know what you think!

• New Properties: One of Blueprint’s great strengths is that it’s always offered a template for documenting the important information about your processes — who’s involved, what’s required and created at this step, and the like. We’ve heard from you that there are a few other key pieces of information that you need to catalog at each activity, and today we’ve added the most valuable and frequently requested ones:
  • Systems
  • Cycle Time:
  • Cost
  • Value Added / Non Value Added
  • Risk
  • Supplier and Customer (SIPOC)

  All of these new properties can be heat mapped onto the diagram using the new analysis mode, which can be extremely powerful. Need to highlight areas of your process with unaddressed risk points? How about the areas that will be affected when you decommission one of your legacy applications? What about the non-value added parts that are wasting money? Analysis mode can make answering all of these questions a snap.

• Email Notifications: The Blueprint activity feeds are an extremely valuable tool for tracking and discovering changes that happen to your processes and the processes that you depend on. Since weintroduced them a few months ago, we’ve heard from many customers that they’ve helped increase involvement and visibility across the organization, which has in turn led to many improvements that would have been lost previously. Today we’re introducing the ability for Blueprint to proactively push these changes to your organization via email. You can subscribe to a weekly digest of your activity feed, a daily digest of all the changes to your favorite processes and projects, and instant notifications of replies to the comments and feedback you’ve left.

  You can choose which emails you’re subscribed to on your user settings page, which you can bring up by clicking your name at the top of the page in Blueprint. Give them a try and let us know what you think!

  
  

Primo numero del bollettino Lombardi

E' appena uscito il primo numero del nuovo bollettino informativo di Lombardi: The Lombardi Times.

Qui il link.

5 semplici domande....

Ecco 5 semplici domande da porsi per controllare se il proprio processo di business ha bisogno di un software di workflow/BPM. (dal blog Process Maker)

1. How many employees do you have ?

2. Can you send me a diagram of your workflow in any format ?

3. What is unique about your process ?

4. Are you looking for Project Management Software ?

5. Do you say “process management,” “order,” “control” but mean “collaboration,” “”messaging,” and “negotiation” ?

Molto intrigante la quinta domanda.

Leggete qui il post completo.

Dovete gestire vari ERP? Usate il BPM!!!

Un recente report di Forrester Research si è concentrato sul tema dei sistemi ERP maturi, per non dire obsoleti, che molti CIO si ritrovano come eredità di gestioni precedenti.

"La 'madre di tutti i problemi', scrive Forrester, è che il business evolve più velocemente del software ERP, sia in termini tecnologici che di best practice supportate.

Molti dei CIO intervistati da Forrester descrivono una situazione di scarsa standardizzazione ERP nelle loro aziende, con SAP e Oracle nella sede centrale e nelle divisioni e filiali più grandi, e il software di fornitori midmarket come QAD e Infor nelle sedi più piccole"

Bene utilizzare BPM come orchestratore delle varie instanze permette di gestire al meglio un ambiente con vari ERP senza spendere una fortuna per le integrazioni.

Nuovi filmati sull'uso di Teamworks

Sul sito Lombardi Software sono visibili nuovi filmati su Teamworks e Blueprint:

1. Come raccogliere i requisiti

2. Come sviluppare le applicazioni

3. Come vede le applicazioni l'utente

4. Integrare Microsoft Office(Outlook, Infopath, Sharepoint) e BPM

5. Come migliorare le applicazioni BPM

Cliccare qui per vedere i filmati

Blueprint: online la nuova versione

E' stata messa online una nuova versione di Blueprint

ecco le novità

"This morning, the August ‘09 update went live on blueprint.lombardi.com! The team has been hard at work over the past month and I think you’ll be very happy with the latest improvements. We’ve improved the portability of your processes with the first shipping implementation of the BPMN 2.0 export format, added full text search across all of your process data, and made substantial usability improvements to Blueprint’s activity feeds based upon your feedback.

Let’s take a look the enhancements in detail:

• BPMN 2.0 Exports: We’re committed to ensuring that you can use your processes in whatever way you’d like with whichever system that works best for you. To that end, we’re delivering the first shipping implementation of the BPMN 2.0 export format. We expect BPMN 2.0 to quickly become the de facto standard for exchanging process diagrams among modeling tools. The BPMN 2.0 specification just reached beta status, and as Bruce Silver pointed out there are areas where it still could be improved. We hope that our implementation can help further the discussion and serve as a reference for others in the industry. We think that well designed and supported standards are hugely beneficial for our customers and we’re committed to making BPMN 2.0 just that.

  And don’t forget: Blueprint also supports XPDL 2.1 to give you the maximum flexibility with your models today.

• Full Text Search: Blueprint’s search feature now indexes all of the content in your account — project and process documentation, inputs, outputs, and all of the other assets you’ve entered. Have a question about the onboarding process in your company? You’re just a search away from the answer. Need to see everywhere your legacy CRM system is leveraged in your organization? Not a problem. We’ve been using the enhanced search at Lombardi for the last few weeks and it has hugely increased the visibility of our internal processes already. You’ll wonder how you ever lived without it.

• What’s New Feed Improvements: Blueprint’s What’s New activity feeds give you instant notifications and visibility into the information you care about to do your work more effectively. The feeds are very powerful — just like social networking sites like LinkedIn and Facebook do for you for updates from your circle of friends, Blueprint lets you know about changes to processes that are important to you at your company.

  Our design team has been listening to your feedback and as a result we’ve introduced significant improvements to the usability of the feeds. They are much more readable now, making it even easier to skim them for the information you need. Similar entries are rolled up to save space and reduce clutter, the times of updates are always visible to give you better context, and filtering options have been expanded and improved. Try it out and keep the feedback coming! """

I° semestre: continua la crescita Lombardi

Lombardi Software continua la sua crescita (+900% negli ultimi 5 anni) anche nel primo semestre 2009, malgrado la crisi.

Ecco alcuni dei nuovi clienti (ripresi dal comunicato stampa Lombardi):

"Aviva Plc, Callidus

Software,

Capgemini BPO, COFIDIS,

Cotemar S.A de C.V., Enerplus Resources, HDI Seguros Brazil, Louisiana Dept of Natural Resources,

Stanford University, Teacher

s Credit Union, Thomas Cook, Trion World Networks and UNIFI Mutual, as well as several US government agencies"