Process Improvement is Everybody's Business
Our newest update moves Blueprint from being a great modeling tool to being the place for everyone in your organization to go for business improvement conversations. We've leveraged social networking concepts to facilitate the discussion about how each person can make their job better. Everyone can see and be notified about changes that are relevant to their work, discover relationships between what they do and the rest of the organization, and contribute feedback and suggestions to the community.
Product Tour: If you would like a detailed walk-through of the product, check out the 38-minute webinar and Q&A Blueprint Sr. Product Manager Dave Marquard recently conducted introducing Blueprint and the Spring '09 release.
Feature Details: For your reference, here are the details behind Blueprint's latest features:
- See Changes and Discover Relationships: Social networking sites like Facebook and LinkedIn can tell you when a colleague switches jobs or a long lost friend gets married. It's news you wouldn't have heard otherwise, or perhaps even known to ask about. Blueprint now does the same for process in your enterprise. The new Activity Feeds show you changes happening to your processes and helps you discover relationships between what you do and the rest of the company. Now you'll know when something changes two steps upstream from you that will affect your job, or that the person in the next building over does something similar that you leverage.
- Involve Every Desktop In Process Improvement: You have core teams of people modeling your processes in the business, but how do you involve the tens, hundreds, or thousands of people that participate in those processes? We've introduced a new "participant" role in Blueprint that allows people at the desk level to reference, review, offer feedback on, and participate in discussions about their work.
- Share And Control Access To Processes: Once you start involving a larger audience in your process improvement efforts, it becomes essential that you ensure that the right people have access to the right information. To that end, we've added the ability to set access controls for each of your Blueprint projects that allow you to choose to grant full edit privileges, review only access, or no access at all to the appropriate audience. This allows you to keep sensitive information private, or even share a limited set of processes with your customers or vendors. And just like the rest of Blueprint, we've given you this power in an interface that doesn't require a degree in rocket science to understand!
- Understand Relationships At A Glance: How many times have you been asked, "who is affected if we were to shut this legacy system down tomorrow?" or "who else in the organization depends on the work we do in this process?" Blueprint can now let you answer those questions with a single click. The new Where Used view can show you everywhere a person or system is involved in processes, where your inputs and outputs are used, or even where you see the same risks, problems, and opportunities for improvement.
- Better Usability And Experience: The Blueprint design team has been listening to your feedback and doing research on ways to make using the product even easier and more productive. To that end, we've redesigned the home page to make it far more personal-Activity Feeds and Favorites put information that's relevant to you at your fingertips. We've studied your navigation patterns and made it easier to get to the view of the process you need with fewer clicks. We've made the Discovery Map better than ever by adding panning, zooming, and printing to PDF just like the Process Diagram. Finally, we developed the participant / read-only view for processes from the ground up to make sure the highest value information is viewable on the screen at all times.
