I’d talk with the end users and capture some pain points off the record in an informal setting. Next schedule a formal interview with the prospective manager and ask them to map out their primary process’s at a high level. Your questions from your prior informal discussion will help you ask relevant questions. Match the pain points to identified process activities. In a one page process improvement proposal the goal is the high level process ID with the manager and the objectives are the activities validated by the worker bees. This is your ammo for suggesting improvement to the sign-off stakeholders. Before the proposal approved you have already generated most of your consensus up and down the chain of command. keep it simple smarty

I say give me all the ads in one area of the web page all day as long as you keep sprucing up all the essential tools I use daily. OK here comes the rub. Why haven’t we seen this type of initiative in the BPMS market. What a huge opportunity. Not only the BA modeling the process but possibly down stream to the actual user (ideally this will be a BPMS solution). This would be an excellent strategy for any ISV trying to break into the SME/SMB market. I’m just saying.

“The partnership bridges the gap between real business needs and IT,” said Brian Chan, Liferay Portal’s chief software architect. “It provides an extra degree of agility for enterprises that need to react quickly to changes.”

“Intalio|Portal’s use of Liferay Portal also allows users to integrate our process management tools with any number of other applications that may be valuable for an enterprise,” added Ismael Ghalimi, CEO and founder of Intalio. “We think this integration will greatly increase efficiency in the workplace. Users can easily see and act on the information they need to get their job done, all in one central location.”

The integration of Liferay Portal and Intalio is already being leveraged at Lucca Consulting of Sydney. OpenSoft, Intalio’s System Integrator partner helping with the project, assisted in creating a bureau reporting service for credit score carding and recovery agency performance based on Liferay Portal, the Intalio platform and CAS Security server. The integrated offering is sold as a chargeable service to individual financial institutions. “Liferay and Intalio were selected because they provided a cost-effective and flexible solution for adapting the service to specific customer needs,” commented Chris Waldron, CEO of Lucca Consulting. “OpenSoft was selected because of its proven ability to integrate and support commercial open source solutions.” A debt collections software product is also currently being developed.

In its ninth year of development, the award-winning Liferay Portal provides enterprises with shared space for sharing and managing content as well as a full suite of collaboration tools. Its flexible SOA framework allows standards compliant applications and technologies to be easily accessible via the web.

For more information and an online demo, visit www.liferay.com. For more information on Intalio, please visit www.intalio.com or subscribe to the RSS feed at http://www.intalio.com/blog.

About Liferay, Inc.
Liferay, Inc. is the provider of Liferay Portal, the world’s leading enterprise open source portal framework with Fortune 500 clients world-wide. Liferay Professional Services offers technical support, custom development and professional training to ensure successful deployment of its flagship product in the most demanding IT environments. The company is headquartered in Los Angeles. For more information, please visit www.liferay.com.

About Intalio, Inc.
Intalio is the leading vendor of Open Source BPM and SOA software. The Intalio Business Process Platform™ empowers organizations of all sizes to develop process-driven applications faster, better, and cheaper. Founded in July 1999, Intalio is a privately-held, venture-backed company located in Palo Alto, California. For more information on Intalio, please call 650-596-1800 or visit www.intalio.com.

The Intalio Business Process Platform is a trademark of Intalio, Inc. All other names, brands or products may be trademarks or registered trademarks of their respective owners.

Media Contacts:

Alice Cheng
Liferay, Inc.
1-877-LIFERAY
pr@liferay.com

Jonathan Crow
Intalio, Inc.
650-596-1800
crow@intalio.com ]]> http://techtools.toserveu.com/2008/04/29/liferay-portal-and-intalio-partner/feed/ http://techtools.toserveu.com/2008/04/29/managing-change-successfully-six-layers-of-resistance/ http://techtools.toserveu.com/2008/04/29/managing-change-successfully-six-layers-of-resistance/#comments Wed, 30 Apr 2008 04:18:08 +0000 Troy Green http://techtools.toserveu.com/2008/04/29/managing-change-successfully-six-layers-of-resistance/ Why is there resistance to change? Are people just naturally perverse, or are there concerns which if understood and correctly dealt with will create the buy-in required to turn resisters into supporters and generate the momentum needed to overcome the gravitational pull of the status quo?

There are six layers at which resistance can occur.

We Do Not Agree on the Problem

Go into any poorly performing organisation and ask people from various functions what the issues are. In all likelihood, within each function you will find different opinions as to what the problem is. The situation is not unlike the six blind men in the rhyme, who went to see the elephant. Each honestly describes his experience, but none of them captures the essence of the whole.

This is why different initiatives are launched in each department to try and solve the different problems. But if we remember that organisation are systems and departments/functions are interacting parts of a whole, we then realise a more holistic approach is needed. This is where the method outlined in the last article is useful. Through a combination of rigorous logic and experience based intuition, we build tight cause effect relationships that lead us to the core problem.

Usually disagreements as to the problem disappear once this approach is used.

We Do Not Agree on the Direction of the Solution

If a problem is long standing, its persistence indicates that there are conflicts preventing its successful resolution. An example of such a conflict is where management proclaims quality as number one and generally supports actions that guarantee quality until sales volumes are threatened. Then the quality mantra is quickly abandoned - especially if we are talking about the last quarter of the year. When the pressure eases early in the new year, quality becomes important again.

Another case is the conflict between delegation - to improve speed of operations and customer service on one hand, and control - to contain costs on the other hand.

By questioning the assumptions behind each of the conflicting positions, erroneous paradigms can be unearthed and thus the basis of the conflict eliminated. Thus a particular direction for solving agreed problems can be pursued. A powerful tool for resolving conflicts is the Evaporating Cloud which is part of the TOC logical tool set.

We Do Not Agree that the Proposed Solution Resolves the Problem

Even with the problem and the general direction of the solution agreed, it may be difficult to convince stakeholders that a particular solution completely solves the problem. In this case just as logical cause effect relationships can be used to construct a diagram to represent the problem (as described in the last article) so also can they be used to construct a diagram logically relating the proposed solution to the new desired states.

Thus such a logical description can be used to convince stakeholders that all the original problems are eliminated when the solution is implemented. Yes But… the Proposed Solution Will Create Other Problems

It is not unusual that the designer of the solution is blind to the shortcomings. So even though stakeholders now agree that the solution solves the stated problem, they may claim that it creates other problems in their place (like the case where eliminating a pest causes a proliferation of other undesirable creatures that it preyed upon).

The solution here is to acknowledge the concern and then work with those affected to eliminate it by the same logical process already described. Involvement of affected stakeholders creates even stronger buy-in. At this point every one is ready and willing to go ahead, but…

Yes But… there are Huge Obstacles to Implementing the Proposed Solution

The solutions proposed may require skills, resources, technologies, approvals that are currently unavailable. The obstacles are attacked in a step by step manner. The outcome of the process is a sequence of prerequisites needed to overcome the obstacle and thus implement the solution.

At this point there is complete buy-in along with a plan for executing the required changes.

Unverbalised Fear

At the end of the day, any residual resistance is most likely due to unverbalised fear - a vague feeling of unease arising from the fact that we will be doing something entirely new. Leadership is what is needed here to provide the inspiration and confidence to go forth and just do it!

Samuel Okoro is the CEO of Leapfrog Alliance Ltd, a management training and consulting firm that helps organisations to reduce costs and improve quality through better business processes. His personal passion is to help move Third World business to world-class levels.

By Samuel Okoro

For further details please visit http://leapfrogalliance.com/resources.html

Article Source: Managing Change Successfully - Six Layers of Resistance

BRD ELEMENTS

• PROCESS INFORMATION
• SIPOC DIAGRAM
• SIPOC METRICS
• PROCESS DIAGRAM
• “INPUTS” DETAIL
• “OUTPUTS” DETAIL
• IMPROVEMENT OPPORTUNITIES
• FUNCTIONAL REQUIREMENTS
• NOTES/COMMENTS
• FLOOR PLAN
• ACTIONS/ISSUES

Business Process Modeler Tools

• TIBCO
• Savvion*
• WorkPoint
• Bizagi *
• Embarcadero
• Lombardi Blueprint - added 4/28/08

Open Source Modelers

• Eclipse
• Intalio
• Process Maker
  

VISIO Tools

• Interfacing Technologies
  
• Frank Puhlmann’s BPMN Template
• Monteiro’s BPMN Template
• Tomislav Rozman’s BPMN Template
• Tyner Blain’s BPMN Templates

BMPN Poster

• BPMN Poster

*Offer a free version, others are evaluation only

business process management

Promising to do for business process management what the iPhone did for portable devices, Vitria this week announced M₃0, a BPM suite aimed at blending process management and event processing through a slick, Web 2.0-style interface. The result is described as a unified environment in which untrained business users can intuitively model, manage, monitor and optimize processes without help from IT.

Many BPM vendors having been working on intuitive modeling environments that can be used by both business and IT analysts, but M₃0 is said to extend this idea to all phases of process management and optimization without introducing separate tools and interfaces.

“This isn’t just an Ajax-based portal added to the suite; it’s a 100-percent Web 2.0 interface built on [Adobe] Flex,” says Dale Skeen, founder and CTO of Vitria. “We’ve brought the kind of layered visualizations you see on the Web to a single environment for modeling, process collaboration, operation and optimization.”

Just as you might see roads, retail locations or hotels superimposed over a Google Earth map, M30 is said to visually overlay role- and task-specific information on top of a shared process model, be it IT-relevant detail or business-oriented information on overall process performance or individual process instances. This unified experience will be “a game changer” says Forrester analyst Ken Vollmer.

“Roll-based modeling on its own is not new, but Vitria has introduced a slick interface that combines unified modeling with business activity monitoring and event processing, and it also abstracts a lot of the technical details away from the business user,” says Vollmer. “The model you built is the model you watch executed and the model you optimize.” A new Exception Manager product offered with M₃0 is built on an event processing architecture designed to rapidly detect and respond to unusual or out-of-threshold events. Skeen acknowledges that event-driven architecture isn’t new, “but we’re letting business users define and manage event policies in business-friendly terms, and those policies can guide the business response to exception conditions.”

Vollmer says the technology can monitor business processes as they execute and orchestrate repairs and responses to exceptions that occur in the course of normal processing. “If a retailer gets an invoice from a supplier and the invoice doesn’t match the purchase order, you typically face a highly manual task of figuring out what went wrong,” he explains. “M₃0 can automatically bring in the purchase order, the advanced ship notice, the receiving documents and maybe even relevant email messages. All that information is then presented to a knowledge worker so they don’t have to interrogate several back-end systems.” In system-to-system scenarios, data could be presented to rules to automatically determine the best course of action.

Slick though it may sound, M₃0 isn’t quite ready for the market. Vitria announced and is demonstrating the product this week at Gartner’s BPM Summit in Las Vegas, but it won’t be generally available until March.

Continue reading at: http://www.intelligententerprise.com/showArticle.jhtml?articleID=206104724

TIBCO iProcess Suite was honoured with the prestigious Yphise award following a comprehensive, comparative assessment of leading BPM vendors including BEA System’s AquaLogic, Pegasytems’s Pega Rules Process Commander, Axway Synchrony, and W4 BPM Suite. Yphise’s in-depth comparative analysis was based on more than 190 technical and functional assessments for each competing product. Aggregating these inputs, Yphise created four categories that would enable enterprises to accurately choose a BPM solution. These include understanding business processes, productivity in implementing processes, facilitating business agility and operational management of processes.

Fabio Pulidori, senior vice president for EMEA at TIBCO, commented: “Recognition by Yphise as the best BPM solution is testament to TIBCO’s sustained efforts to strengthen the solution on which enterprises can easily create and scale their business processes. By continuing to drive innovation in the BPM space, we have enabled many global organizations to accomplish their goal of achieving process efficiencies and providing improved service levels to customers and partners.”

Yphise’s assessment commends TIBCO technology for its ease of use and flexibility of orchestration at run time. The report also states that TIBCO iProcess Suite is a reliable and scalable product. Additional unique features highlighted include:

• Powerful simulation tools, including graphical comparisons of versions for optimizing processes;
• Flexible BPM integrated into a full SOA platform;
• Capability to natively link and coordinate application services in an SOA environment;
• Unique provision of dynamic planning or modification of processes in operation to accommodate changes required by operational decisions;
• Ability to prevent disruption: monitoring of processes in operation and ability to alert and escalate efficiently.

According to the Yphise executive report issued this month: “TIBCO confirms its leadership by improving the ease of designing processes and the flexibility of orchestration at run time. The force of TIBCO is providing flexible BPM integrated into a full SOA platform.”

For more information on TIBCO iProcess Suite or to download the executive report, please visit: www.tibco.com.

About Yphise

Yphise identifies and certifies the software products that allow large companies to increase the value of their information systems while optimizing the costs and managing the risks. Yphise covers all areas of interest in order to develop, operate, maintain and secure the applications to compete. Yphise has assessed 150 software products each year since 1985. Each assessment is ISO 9001:2000-certified in order to guarantee independence and to focus on key issues for large companies. Yphise distributes more than 8000 comparative assessment reports each year all over the world. Yphise has unparalleled experience in the recognition of winning strategies in software vendor claims. Thousands of investment decisions made by large companies have used Yphise independent research.

About TIBCO

TIBCO digitized Wall Street in the ’80s with its event-driven “Information Bus” software, which helped make real-time business a strategic differentiator in the ’90s. Today, TIBCO’s infrastructure software gives customers the ability to constantly innovate by connecting applications and data in a service-oriented architecture, streamlining activities through business process management, and giving people the information and intelligence tools they need to make faster and smarter decisions, what we call The Power of Now®. TIBCO serves more than 3,000 customers around the world with offices in more than 20 countries and an ecosystem of over 200 partners. Learn more at www.tibco.com.

# # #

TIBCO, TIBCO iProcess Suite, The Power of Now and TIBCO Software are trademarks or registered trademarks of TIBCO Software Inc. in the United States and/or other countries. All other product and company names and marks mentioned in this document are the property of their respective owners and are mentioned for identification purposes only.

“This next generation release of Metastorm ProVision and Metastorm Knowledge Exchange gives our customers the ability to better support enterprise alignment and enable agility,” said Greg Carter, vice president of development and CTO of Metastorm. “By fusing together powerful new capabilities for analysis, collaboration and scalability, we believe we can help organizations drive innovation across their entire enterprise.”

Enhancements included in Metastorm ProVision 6.1 include:

Reporting and Analysis – New reporting and analysis capabilities in the areas of Portfolio Management and Six Sigma will allow organizations to examine the underlying structure of the enterprise to optimize its asset investments and improve process performance. These capabilities provide multiple methods for analyzing processes and systems. The reports and analysis scripts can be used as is or modified to suit a customer’s specific statistical analysis requirements.

• Portfolio Management reports – Reports for Portfolio Management support a sound business approach for optimizing investments in enterprise assets. The Metastorm Portfolio Management reports cover risk, cost, benefit, time and resource investments in the project portfolio, as well as asset management issues found in system and technology portfolios.
• Six Sigma/Lean Sigma reports – New Metastorm ProVision Six Sigma reports for Voice of the Customer, Cost/Benefit Analysis, SIPOC, RACI and FMEA provide organizations with access to the most widely used methodology for improving process performance.
• Collaborative Analysis – Metastorm ProVision also introduces new collaboration capabilities with statistical analysis tools including Minitab and JMP. For example, these statistical analyses can use simulation to pinpoint the time and conditions where a process bottlenecked or excessive costs were incurred.

Interoperability – New interfaces using the latest XPDL and XMI standards increase interoperability and demonstrate Metastorm’s continued commitment to and support of its Common Interchange Format (CIF), which supports numerous open standards interfaces and enables easy integration with third-party software packages.

• XPDL Interface – New interface capabilities are available with the Workflow Management Coalition (WfMC) XPDL process definition interchange standard. This feature enables the export and import of both XPDL 1.0 and 2.0 process definitions.
• Rational Software Interface – Enhanced interface capabilities provide both an export to and an import from Rational Software Architect (RSA) and Rational Software Modeler (RSM). The interface employs XMI 2.1 that can interface with RSA, RSM or any other software tool conforming to this standard. The Rational software product will then contain models and objects sourced from Metastorm ProVision, which will be beneficial to the many Metastorm customers that use Rational for application development.

Metastorm Enterprise™ Developments – To more effectively align strategy with execution, Metastorm is moving its independent EA, BPA, and BPM applications to a common platform – Metastorm Enterprise – that will include shared services and a common meta-model for enhanced visibility and better understanding of the impact of decisions at all levels. As part of the Metastorm Enterprise platform development, Metastorm ProVision 6.1 includes enhancements that allow it to better interoperate with Metastorm BPM® and to scale to the needs of large enterprise architecture demands.

• Metastorm BPM Simulation – Metastorm ProVision will become accessible to Metastorm BPM users as the simulation module of the Metastorm BPM suite in its next release. This will allow processes in Metastorm BPM to be visible in Metastorm ProVision so that simulations can be performed. Running simulations on process models allows organizations to make informed, knowledgeable decisions regarding changes to processes and enhances full life-cycle process management. Metastorm ProVision is one of the leading, full-scale BPA tools on the market and its combination with Metastorm BPM – a leading BPM suite – provides customers with both depth and breadth for the analysis and execution of critical business processes.
• Enterprise Scalability – The Metastorm Knowledge Exchange collaboration server and respository allows business and IT analysts to build, manage, update, share and colloborate on business and system models via the web – enabling globally-distributed teams to work together on a common, model-based view of their enterprise. Version 6.1 is designed to better support the scalability and productivity challenges encountered by large enterprise architecture programs, which need to model hundreds of objects and interdependencies and often support thousands of users.

“As a long-time customer, Seagate is excited to deploy Metastorm ProVision 6.1 and take advantage of its many new capabilities, especially with regard to the Six Sigma reports and expanded enterprise scalability,” said Debra Berard, program manager for Business Excellence, Lean/Six Sigma at Seagate Technology. “We have always appreciated Metastorm ProVision’s robust functionality for analysis, and are confident the additional features will help Seagate reach our goal of cross-functional excellence.”

About Metastorm
With a focus on enterprise visibility, optimization, and agility, Metastorm offers market-leading software for Enterprise Architecture (EA), Business Process Analysis (BPA) and Business Process Management (BPM). As an integrated product portfolio, Metastorm Enterprise™ allows organizations to improve business results by unifying strategy, analysis and execution. Metastorm is bringing together these critical disciplines to enable an understanding of enterprise architecture and strategy, accurate impact and opportunity assessment, effective process execution, and accelerated value realization for organizations worldwide. For more information on powering strategic advantage with Metastorm Enterprise, visit www.metastorm.com.

®Copyright 2008, Metastorm Inc. All rights reserved. Enterprise Process Advantage, Metastorm BPM, Metastorm Discovery, Metastorm DNA, Metastorm Enterprise, Process Pod and ProVision are either registered trademarks or trademarks of Metastorm Inc. Other product, service and company names mentioned herein are for identification purposes only and may be trademarks of their respective owners.

THIS NEWS RELEASE CONTAINS ARCHIVAL INFORMATION, WHICH SHOULD NOT BE CONSIDERED CURRENT AND MAY NO LONGER BE ACCURATE.

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Metastorm
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