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…