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IQPC BPM Summit: David Haigh

Last speaker of the day — and of the conference — was David Haigh, Global Director of Continuous Improvement at W.E.T. Automotive Systems, discussing Lean Product Development. It’s actually refreshing to be at a BPM conference where I’m the only person that I heard (since I missed Jodi Starkman-Mendelsohn’s talk this morning) that talked about the technology.

They previously tried out a lot of different quality programs, including ISO 9000, Six Sigma, Lean, BPR and other techniques, but these were always initiated by the subsidiaries and didn’t really catch on, so in 2006 they started on a global program that included the shop floor, logistics and product creation. Whereas they had always focused on the production/fulfillment value stream previously, they expanded the scope to include the entire order-to-cash cycle, particularly to include the design portion of the cycle that has the smallest cost element but the largest cost influence.

I loved his analogy for hand-offs in the business process: it’s like the telephone game that we played as kids, whispering a message from one person to the next to see how message changes by the time it reaches the end; any hand-off results in a reduction in information clarity, as well as being a big time-waster.

Since he’s in an engineering manufacturing environment, there’s some interesting ideas that at first seem unique, but have value in many other areas: set-based design, for example, where you spend the engineers’ time researching and pushing boundaries on the technology that underlies customer solutions, rather than spending the time building one-off customer solutions. The equivalent in the BPM world would likely be having them focus on building out the service layer, not assembling the services using a BPMS. He also spoke about Toyota’s practice of streaming engineers up to higher levels of engineering rather than “promoting” them to sales or management — I always tried to do that when I ran a company, since there’s always some people who just want to stay technical, and don’t want their career to suffer for it.

They’ve built a “workflow” and project planning tool in Excel that has some interesting concepts: no dependencies between tasks, just points of integration, and the team sets the deadlines (can you say “collaboration”?). This helped them by providing tools for visualizing waste in the process, and driving to reduce the waste, which is the main focus of Lean.

This has been an interesting conference, although the attendance is quite a bit less than I had expected, but that makes for a much better environment for asking questions and networking. And speaking of networking, I think that I just have time to run home before the Girl Geek Dinner tonight…

2007 06 27 Six Sigma Comments (0)

IQPC BPM Summit: Kirk Gould

Kirk Gould, a performance consultant with Pinnacle West Capital, talked about business processes and metrics. I like his definition of a metric: “A tool created to tie the performance of the organization to the business objectives”, and he had lots of great advice about how to — and how not to — develop metrics that work for your company.

I came right off of my presentation before this one, so I’m a bit too juiced up to focus as well on his presentation as it deserves. However, his slides are great and I’ll be reviewing them later. He also has a good handout that takes us through the 10 steps of metric development:

  1. Plan
  2. Perform
  3. Capture
  4. Analyze
  5. Display
  6. Level
  7. Automate
  8. Adjust
  9. Manage
  10. Achieve

He has a great deal more detail for each of these steps, both on the handout and in his presentation. He discussed critical success factors and performance indicators, and how they fit into a metrics framework, but the best parts were when he described the ways in which you can screw up your metrics programs: there were a lot of sheepish chuckles and head-shaking around the room, so I know that many of these hit home.

He went through the stages of metrics maturity, which I’ll definitely have to check out later since he flew through the too-dense slides pretty quickly. He quotes the oft-used (and very true) line that “what gets measured, gets managed”, a concept that is at the heart of metrics.

2007 06 27 BAM Comments (1)

IQPC BPM Summit: me!

Here’s the presentation that I did for the IQPC BPM summit in Toronto this afternoon. You can click through the presentation in place using the controls at the bottom, or click through to download the presentation.

2007 06 27 BPEL
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IQPC BPM Summit: Manish Mehta

Manish Mehta, a project manager at the government of the Region of Peel (which covers a huge chunk of the bedroom communities north and west of Toronto, about 1.2 million people in urban and rural areas), gave a presentation on implementing process management at Peel.

For them, process management was part of their quality management, which already included ISO and some other quality programs. They wanted to strengthen corporate thinking, reduce their silo departmental focus, increase alignment and connection, and measure employee and client satisfaction.

The steps in their process management project were as follows:

  • Phase 1: develop standard terms, definitions and symbols
  • Phase 2: provide process management training, and develop a process management framework
  • Phase 3: develop their service improvement initiative (SII) to apply process management

As with the previous OPG talk, this was not about a BPM implementation, but about putting standard, optimized processes into place in an organization in order to not only improve service delivery, but measure it as well. Specifically, their three goals were to implement process management across the organization, to implement a consistent approach to client satisfaction measurement and management, and to develop and monitor a corporate client satisfaction rating.

They first applied this to their TransHelp program, which provides transportation for those who are unable to use public transportation, then to their waste management program; in both cases, they found that doing client satisfaction surveys identified factors that clients found important that had not been considered by the inside workers: definitely a good reason to get out there and talk to people rather than sitting in the ivory tower and deciding the best process to implement. They are seeing some measurable improvements: with TransHelp, their no-show/cancel rate has dropped in half, and with waste management, their number of complaints has dropped. For process improvement work that they did with children’s services within their financial assistance area, the time to complete an application and assess eligibility dropped dramatically with the new process. Once they’d done these three pilots, they found that other areas started to come to them to ask for help in process improvement: you really need to show some successes in order to get started in a diverse organization such as a regional government. Measuring client satisfaction for regional governments is still in an early stage, and Mehta said that they were working with other government organizations to develop methods for doing this. He also showed a great public sector reference model that linked resources, processes, services and programs and how they interact with providers and clients.

They used outside facilitation for process redesign, but mostly created their own methodology and guidelines and do have some capacity for the process redesign internally. They’ve developed a fairly structured project management approach in terms of defining scope and schedules. They have discovered, not surprisingly, is that pulling subject matter experts away from their regular jobs for several days in order to do the process redesign is much more effective than trying to have people add this on to their real jobs, in spite of the grumbling that will inevitably occur when you try to get a group of people to a multi-day offsite meeting.

Something I really like about what they’ve done is to split their SII approach into three stages, depending on the state and complexity of the original process: repair (quick fixes to smaller broken processes through understanding customer needs), improvement (considering root cause analysis and piloting a solution), and design/redesign (similar to improvement but with best practices and benchmarks). They see both improvement and redesign projects as requiring a trained facilitator.

Mehta showed some private sector studies that showed that employee satisfaction leads to client satisfaction, which in turn provides even greater employee satisfaction, and client satisfaction also leads to greater profitability. Applied to the public sector, you can replace the profitability part of the equation with trust and confidence: greater customer satisfaction results in more trust in the government body and their ability to execute works on behalf of the citizens.

Off to lunch, then I’m up at the front of the room after that.

2007 06 27 BPA
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IQPC BPM Summit: Ron McGillis

I missed Day 1 of the IQPC BPM summit due to a road trip to Detroit, but I’m here this morning to hear the speakers, and this afternoon to give my own presentation. It’s a small group, probably less than 40 people, but I’ve already been hearing great things from the attendees about how much that they’ve learned from the two days so far.

I missed Jodi Starkman-Mendelsohn of West Park Assessment Centre speak first thing, but I’ve heard her speak twice this year already so just had a quick update from her at a break on what they’ve done since I last saw her.

Ron McGillis of Ontario Power Generation talked about their contractor management program, where they manage all contracts for everything that they do with power generation: everything for both construction and non-construction servicing of the 3 nuclear power generation plants, 4 fossil fuel plants, 64 hydroelectric and 3 wind power facilities in the province. This came out of their safety compliance programs, since McGillis stated that this was their greatest concern with their contractors (the WSIB people in the audience applauded at that point), and that it needed to be the same level of safety for contractors as for OPG employees.

In 2002, they did a safety audit that showed some serious problems — “systemic, cultural-based problems with the existing contractor safety management process” — and recommended some standardized processes around the safety standards for contractors. This resulted in OPG’s current policy statement that their contractors and subcontractors must maintain a level of safely equivalent to that of OPG employees while at OPG workplaces, and set out requirements that the contractors are accountable for the health and safety of their own employees while at OPG, including ensuring that they don’t harm OPG employees or the public.

They’ve come up with a contract management process that’s documented and freely available on their website. They have consistent pre-qualification processes (which would pre-qualify a contractor for working with any division of OPG), processes for awarding contracts, standard performance reporting, and training for anyone involved in the contract management process. Using the ISO standards as a guideline, they recreated a Plan - Do - Check - Act program for contract management, and defined roles and responsibilities for each contract: owner, administrator, monitor and buyer.

Every contract stipulates these roles explicitly, and also safety clauses in terms of reporting, inspections, procedures and rules. This trickles down to any subcontractors, too.

Their contract process has five steps: planning, procurement, post award (which ensures that all parties are ready to go to work on the execution), execution, and close-out.

The contract management manual is only 13 pages long, and is at a “contract management for dummies” level, with the following content:

  • The steps in each stage
  • Who is accountable for each step
  • Forms (mandatory)
  • Worksheets (mandatory)
  • Job aids (good practices)
  • Check lists
  • Notes and references

Training was a key part of their success, including contract administration and monitoring courses at various levels of detail, ranging from 4 hours to 4 days.

From an automation standpoint, this isn’t a BPM system implementation: this is BPM in the sense of “management discipline” as defined by Gartner, where there’s a structured business process that is providing a huge benefit to the organization, but none of this process is automated. They have database applications that provide some analysis — for example, a contractor database allows for input of various scoring factors and provides a pre-qualification rating — but most of this is about getting people to follow the correct business processes. Their contract management process is so successful that it’s been adopted by some large companies and other power generation companies.

Their lessons learned for any business process change:

  • Let the process “soak”, giving it some time for people to get used to it before making changes (since people will always chafe against a new process when they’re first getting used to it).
  • Listen to and engage the stakeholders.
  • Benchmark against other similar companies, and don’t reinvent the wheel (including using ideas from other successful organizations).
  • Ensure senior management is fully committed, or you will fail.
  • Ensure that you’re adequately resources for all stages of the project, including post-implementation.

At the end of the day, they’ve cleaned up all the problems identified by the 2002 audit, and has provided a consistent pre-qualification process for contractors that benefits the entire organization.

McGillis travels extensively both to make sure that the program is being implemented consistently within OPG, and as an evangelist with external companies and by speaking at conferences.

Could parts of this process be automated to some benefit? Possibly, although they’ve likely gained so much of their ROI already in terms of cleaning up the process and capturing the relevant data in their database application. Process automation might provide them with some additional visibility into the processes, although likely not much more efficiency.

2007 06 27 BPM Comments (0)