Frank Michael Kraft's Blog

I want to comment more about the discussion Does Unpredictable Work Exist?

Jean-Jacques goes on to explain, that classical BPM has neglected the state transitions of resources and only focused on activities. He goes on to explain that there is a relationship between state transitions of resources and activities and that this will bring a new level of enlightenment to the BPM community. I can’t agree more. I hope that we can do some work about this.

However he argues that therefore processes are predictable. That is not true, because in creative processes it is not know a priori which resources (Business entities – for example research reports, experiments, designs, models, customer quotes, …) will result from the creative process.

The discussion goes on with some definitions and a medical example. Then JJ says:

It is like saying, to start a journey, a path must be chosen. All you need is a map, maybe even a compass would do.

I really like this comparison. The activity model is the path, the resource / business object composite state model is the map. I agree that the area of using business object composite state models has not been used in BPM as it should have been used. Therefore maybe JJ is more fighting for that idea. That I very strongly support as well. But what if you neither have a path nor a map? These situations happen very often.

To me it is not enough to assume a “could be” map or path. As a vivid example I have my company startup. Of course there are predefined process snippets for this and that (for example for the tax process – certainly for the tax process!!!). But in the end the tax depends on decisions I do – which legal form I choose, which depends on other considerations. Product and service definition, strategy, financing, partners, market strategy – the special combination of all of that are all unique to my new company (I hope!) and therefore the activities leading to the needed results are unique. And they depend on many decisions that I cannot predict as well. Of course if you do abstraction, then it is the same as with all startups: Write a business plan, Create a product or service, sell it – but I have argued before the abstraction leads to a useless plan. So what I am actually doing is to merge specific process snippets – some predefined like tax – some newly invented by me (product and service innovation) – into one big workstream that is unique, concrete and unpredictable.

To be continued…

I want to make some comments about this discussion: Does Unpredictable Work exist?

Jean-Jacques

To be clear, the answer is “no” processes are not “unpredictable”, they appear “unpredictable” because you are not relating the activities of the processes to the lifecycles of the underlying business objects. Business entities can have a very complex lifecycle, even made of composite states (the entity is in more than one state at a time). Activities are performed to transition business entities from one state to another.

I have seen this statement very seldom and I can’t agree more to the observations about business objects and state. I have modeled (governed the modeling process of) 400 business objects of a whole ERP suite with composite states and yes, it works! In my opinion it is the best way to describe the business process that is encoded in business objects.

I do not think like Jacque, that it is necessary to relate unpredictable processes to these business objects. The idea is that we are addressing the complementary set of business processes with the concept of ACM. However I agree that there is big value in thinking about how to connect unpredictable processes to processes of business objects. This results in flexibility in how to achieve the goals, but in the end the result is reflected in standard processes. I have not seen this said so clearly before by anyone other than me.

BPMN is useful, it can help document the “happy” path, the most commonly taken path,… but rarely it can reflect all the possibilities that can arise if you associate activities to transitions between states of business entities.

Very good observation! At least this is the standard use of BPMN – the way most people use it. But BPMN can still be used to express all the possibilities in a manageable way. The knowledge of how to do this is not yet commodity. But I am looking forward to this discussion.

Jean-Jacques mentions the example of a project business object, that transitions through predefined states. By this, the process is not unpredictable, he says, because the states are predictable. But – the workitems of the project are not predictable. For some projects, they are. For others, they are not. For typical knowledge worker projects, they are not. I am not saying “Project” for knowledge work, but I rather prefer the term “Workstream”.

Keith argues that we are not omniscient, and therefore some processes are unpredictable. I agree. I will try to avoid a metaphysical discussion about the state of the universe and the unpredictability of the decisions in human minds. By all practical means we can agree that it is not possible to look into people’s mind and find out how they will decide. This is neither necessary nor desirable.

Take a chess game for example. It is possible to enumerate the alternative moves, that one player can choose. We know in advance, that it will be one of the moves. But we don’t know which one in advance. We might enumerate all possible responses to each of the possible moves, but where does this lead? It will lead into an explosion of alternatives. Yes, I know there are very good chess computers. But chess is a relatively limited and well formalized decision space. Still it becomes incredibly complex the more moves are taken into consideration. In sum none of the chess games is predictable. If it were, there is no point in playing it. The winner would be known from the beginning.

If we raise the abstraction level, the chess game becomes perfectly predictable. The chess game is either “Not started”, “Started” or “Finished”. The result may be “Winner Player 1″, “Winner Player 2″ or “stalemate”. This is perfectly predictable. But that’s only because the abstraction level has been raised. So Jean-Jacques is right by saying that all processes are predictable – and I add: if the abstraction level is raised so much, that the prediction is useless.

But in practice what we need to do to complete our work is to define goals, next steps, be concrete instead of abstract. Defining goals, next steps and responsibility is creative work and creative work is not predictable. Probably creative work is the most unpredictable process in the universe. How should anyone predict the result of a creative process? How should anyone predict if a creative process results in 1, 3 or 10 alternatives and how they look like? This is blatantly unpredictable. How could anybody have predicted the text that I am writing right now? No – that was a deliberate decision and a creative process. The only thing that was predictable was that it is a chain of characters from a predefined set. But I hope that is not all, that you take with you.

I want to comment more on the discussion, but next time.

If you are interested in my tweets in yesterday’s Adaptive Case Management TweetJam, here they are: