When looking the emergent, unpredictable, human processes that lend themselves to adaptive\dynamic case management, we have found that many of these processes get into trouble at the point of handoff between participants in the process. That is when instructions are misunderstood, deadlines are misinterpreted, follow-ups are missed, steps are skipped.
That is very different from BPMS managed processes – there the model can keep things on track. But for emergent, ad-hoc, unstructured processes there is no model to keep things on track. A guideline or best practice can help and provide a framework, but can’t ensure successful hand-offs. So can tracking, reminders, notifications and social conventions. Ensuring there is an owner also helps – as do the social conventions people adhere to in the workplace (especially when their actions are viewed by others). But in the end, it is up to the participants themselves (and mainly the process owner) to ensure successful hand-offs. A key key feature in any dynamic adaptive case management system is how it handles hand-offs.
I’d be really interested in hearing whether this matches with other peoples experience too.
I was reading an article in the Economist (Data, data everywhere) about the growing abudance of digital data, and the problems caused by the need (desire?) to analyze all that data and extract usable information. That got me thinking about why the capture of the data in digital format (the data existed before, just no one was capturing it – sort of as the same issue as with the email filter problem) is causing so much angst. Then it hit me – the capture of this data is missing something- the context of the process involved in creating the data. The data captured after the fact is a jumble of direct information, symptoms and side-effects caused by the process of interest. So looking just at the data is the equivalent of doing forensic analysis of the aftermath of an unknown process – and trying to piece together the process (this is very hard to do, and what makes CSI such a compelling show to watch). If there was someone watching the actual events as they unfold (or the actual “murder” process) they could just say – this mess was caused by A shooting B and then running away – and understanding the resulting data (e.g. blood splats on the wall, shell casings on the floor) would be much simpler (and CSI would be a very boring show).
Of course, we can’t track the process for many kinds of data (e.g. a star exploding in astrophysics, or customer buying patterns in a physical store) – so we have no choice but looking at after the fact data and doing forensic analysis. But for any process that you can directly watch and provide the eyewitness view – the amount of data analysis needed goes down drastically, since the context is known.
Bottom line, if we know the context – understanding the process becomes much easier, in many cases almost trivial. Not having an actual birds eye view of the existing process one of the key issues in trying to model actual business processes in any organization (especially since most interesting business processes involve human participants). Modeling a business process is similar to forensic analysis – finding the participants, interviewing them, looking for clues and artifacts, creating tentative models, simulation. Hard, interesting work. Maybe we could create a show “Business Process Investigation”…
This is where adaptive case management (ACM) tools can be invaluable – since they can start managing a process without a-priori modeling. But how do you get people to start using an ACM tool – since they would need change the way they do the process first – not something they would embrace. This is where doing ACM in existing email and document environments can really make a difference – users can remain in their regular environment – with the underlying process system-of-record proving the “eye-witness” birds eye view of what actually takes place. Then if is there is still the need to model the process – it becomes much, much easier.
When we talk about managing unstructured, ad-hoc process (or using the adaptive case management terminology – knowledge process), one thing we always discuss is the notion of a best practice – which is a framework which describes a general outline of the work to be done (what needs to be done, not how to do it). In many cases we have seen these best practices boil down to a checklist (or a series of checklists).
Turns out that the lowly checklist is a very valuable tool for managing complex, unstructured ad-hoc processes in many domains. I was reading an excellent article on the benefits of checklists in unstructured processes from an old article in “The New Yorker“ by Atul Gawande, that was referred by Jon Udell’s blog post on “Atul Gawande on why heroes use checklists“.
Now of course checklists are a far cry from a full fledged process model. They don’t go into details, don’t proscribe how things should be done and generally just describe a small part of whole process – but provide crticial checkpoints to ensure that bst practices are adhered to. They are much more human friendly than process models – both to the humans creating the checklists and to the humans executing the process. Of course from an IT perspective – they are a lot less sexy…
So why are checklists so valuable for human processes? Atul explains that checklists provided two main benefits in managing complex, ad-hoc human processes. First, they helped with memory recall, especially with mundane matters that are easily overlooked in patients undergoing more drastic events. A second effect was to make explicit the minimum, expected steps in complex processes.
So are guidelines, best practices and checklists the unstructured process equivalent of a process model?
Last week seemed to be the kickoff of a new area of process management – Adaptive Case Management. Yay – finally third party validation of ActionBase’s sweet spot. Interesting presentations by both Forrester (though they also use the term dynamic case management) and the WfMC (the slides and recording are available from their site – look for the link on their homepage). When I listened to the webinar – it seemed like they were giving the same pitch about unstructured, ad-hoc, emergent human processes that we give about HPM (and I write about in this blog) – so maybe the process management world is finally moving in our direction…
