The goal of the cluster – as I understand it – is to enable software companies of the region to collaborate for the common goal of adaptive business processes. Yes – the term adaptive business processes has been on the slide describing the goals of the cluster. Maybe they are also reading my blog . However the term emergent business processes has been used interchangeably. I do not exactly know, what emergent processes means, but I believe it means something similar like adaptive. Probably over the course of time – if there is a difference – it may become clear. But my guess is that emergent is more like an academic term.

The talk defined an adaptive process as flexible and secure integration of ERP processes with Web Services (SOA). That is quite a different definition as the definition we use for Adaptive Case Management. Adaptive Case Management does not depend on ERP processes, nor on Web Services (SOA) – although there is no reason why they should not be integrated with ACM – as I argue in my chapter of “Mastering the Unpredictable”. In the end, ERPs and SOA is less flexible than ACM, so ACM can adapt to the form of ERP and SOA, if they are built in a way that integration is possible.

That little “if” is a big “if”. In my experience it is not just defining a WSDL interface for an ERP systems interface to make process integration a reality. If the ERP service is not built by design for integration, then integrators will have a hard time. Middleware does not solve the problem. Maybe many readers might disagree, but I am convinced of what I say: Middleware does NOT solve the problem!

Before we can solve this challenge we must look at some ugly truths in the first place.

I make a simple example. If an ERP system has a purchase order and the purchase order does not wait for purchase order confirmations (i.e. the ERP system does not support this functionality) before a purchase order update may be sent to the supplier, but the suppliers ERP system can only handle updates after the confirmation, then there is a problem, that even middleware can’t solve. Yes, some purchase order updates may be blocked by the middleware – but what does it help? The confirmations will find a different purchase order state which leads to further conflicts, error tickets, misunderstandings and all bad things.

That is the ugly truth about process integration.

So in the first place the challenge for ERP/SOA integration is to make it work at all. Then, in a second step, flexibility comes into play. Sure, flexibility is demanded. But not always. If you walk over a bridge you don’t want it to be too flexible. It’s the same with business processes. You don’t want the flexibility to bypass the posting of a cheque for example or to send the money to a different account. So flexibility means controlled flexibility.

Both problems can only reasonably be solved by modeling. The web service interaction – the choreography – must be modeled, not only the WSDL signature. This is possible now by using BPMN 2.0 Choreography modeling, which is brand new. I must add some coaching is needed to use it. So I expect the cluster needs to discover this great method of describing the web services in the first place, then find principles of designing their business processes in a way, that they are able to be integrated, and then in the end ACM can also be integrated – that’s the easy part then.

Similarly, leaders in knowledge-based businesses must spend time with promising professionals: Get to know them and be known by them; mentor them and listen to them; challenge them and encourage them.

I think Drucker picks up a very important thought here. The whole essay is about relieving managers from routine work, so that they have more time for investing in people. This is a very important thought, in my eyes.

I always felt uncomfortable to refer to employees or project members as “human resources”. I think this is a term that was coined in the ages of industrial revolution. There are “human resources” and “financial resources”, “natural resources” and “production resources”. A resource is a source that can be used to achieve a goal. And – the use of it can be planned. I might agree that it makes sense to call the routine work of a person or his ability to perform it a resource that can be planned – although I would still not call the person a resource.

In my eyes knowledge work is different. The key to knowledge work, as I believe, is creativity. And creativity is the one thing that cannot be preplanned, nor demanded, nor predicted. It is like pulling a small tree that it might grow faster. It is obvious, that the tree needs certain conditions to grow, sometimes it needs nurturing. In the same way knowledge work needs an environment, where it can grow, as well as nurturing. Knowledge workers need nurturing and mentoring. That is how they learn to become productive.

In the same way the role of the manager of knowledge workers needs to adapt. I would call the future role a knowledgeable manager. The reason is very obvious. In the industrial age, work was comparatively easy to plan. Repetitive processes had to be established and maintained. It still was difficult – but it was easier than planning today’s knowledge work. Managers often have to decide. How can they decide, if they do not understand, what their people are talking about? How can the manager guide the discussion into the right direction, if the manager is not himself an expert of the subject matter?

How does a manager become knowledgeable? He must have gone the way before us. I know that this is a challenging statement. Is this part of today’s management curriculums? I have doubts. The knowledgeable manager cannot know only from books. He must have been through it. Then he has the practical wisdom plus the current state of expert knowledge that is needed. And then he is able to mentor his people. This is the best way to become knowledgeable. The other way is to listen to his people. Listening is hard. It takes time. Sometimes it is 6 months of listening, sometimes a year before it dawns to the manager, where the real problem lies.

I am only mentioning these thoughts to argue, that classical management methods will change and have already changed with the advent of knowledge work. The style of management will be less prescription and more collaboration, even mentoring. Good managers will need to know more and good knowledge workers will need to manage more.

Knowledge workers are only successful, if they are able to align their goals with the goals of many stakeholders and with many projects, where they are stakeholders, and with peer projects and groups. This is quite some management. They can’t rely only on their manager to organize all of this for them. They will take the initiative and be responsible for the result.

So the manager becomes more knowledgeable and the knowledge worker becomes more of a manager. What then is the difference between the two? I think the difference in the type of work they do is only marginal. Yes, the manager has a little more to manage and the knowledge worker has a little more to know. Maybe the difference grows with distance in the number of management levels. But I still believe that even top management will need to know a lot about the subject matter they are responsible for. I think the main difference between the manager and the knowledge worker is their individual set of relationships they need to maintain. The knowledge worker has more contact to his manager than to his manager’s peers or his manager’s manager. And he has more contact to his peers than his manager has. So the quality of work is similar, but the relationships are different. This is what is called self-similar. In my eyes the quality of work of knowledge-intensive organizations is and will be self-similar on all levels. That’s why there is common glue between them. Today it is email and the meeting calendar plus spreadsheets and documents of different forms. In the future – that’s what we believe – it will be ACM.

There is a third role in organizations that I want to discuss, the business process analyst. The classical task of a business process analyst is to develop and maintain the enterprise process landscape, monitor process performance and planning the process portfolio. This is applicable to routine work, while it has also been tried to apply it to knowledge work. It is a cross function in the organization. However the difficulties with that have already been discussed when comparing classical BPM with Adaptive Case Management (ACM). One of the difficulties is that knowledge work processes tend to be unique and tend to be very much influenced by the knowledge that results from earlier process stages. I other words it is very hard for an external observer, that is not part of the process itself, to plan the process. Also it does not make much sense in this instance to include the process into a process portfolio, if it is only executed once or a small number of times. The lifecycle of the process may be very short, which makes it very ineffective to observe it, document it and measure its performance based on that by an external observer.

But: measuring process performance is still necessary. It’s only, that it is not a preplanned process. Everybody would be interested in measuring process performance. The knowledge worker is interested in his own performance or the performance of processes that deliver results to him. The manager is interested in the overall performance of his team and related teams. And the business process analyst would want to focus on cross functional process performance.

Knowledge workers and often also managers do not care so much about formal process performance measuring. They are certainly interested in the performance of the processes, but it’s often not formalized. Business process analysts know many ways to measure process performance. Now with ACM this can become reality also for knowledge work processes. If business process analysts buy in to ACM, they are the best people to mentor managers as well as knowledge workers in how to measure performance. At the same time the business process analysts will find it useful to understand more about the content of the processes they are measuring, what they are about. They might find themselves helping the manager to solve process performance problems (which in many cases in knowledge work are full stop blocks instead of tuning percentages). For the manager and the knowledge worker it is then a little bit more formalized, but not overdesigned.

I believe the future of the business process analyst in knowledge work will be more like an expert for one area of expertise, which is cross functional process performance and adaptive case management. Managers and knowledge workers will need to know how to make best use of ACM to achieve best cross functional performance. For example some case templates may be needed to speed up work with another department. This is an area that ACM mentors would take on.

There is a lot more to say about mentorship in knowledge work, but maybe that’s a good starting point for further discussions.

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…

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.

AUTHORS OF ‘MASTERING THE UNPREDICTABLE’ ANSWER QUESTIONS, SHARE BEST PRACTICES ON MANAGING UNSTRUCTURED PROCESSES

Thursday, July 15 • Moderated by Connie Moore of Forrester Research

WHAT:

Connie Moore of Forrester Research http://www.forrester.com/rb/analyst/connie_moore along with authors of the newly published book Mastering the Unpredictable
http://www.masteringtheunpredictable.com/ will host a Tweet Jam to answer questions about the top challenges facing business and IT practitioners in managing the unpredictable, less structured business processes that remain major headaches for IT organizations – and how Adaptive Case Management (ACM) http://www.xpdl.org/nugen/p/adaptive-case-management/public.htm can help solve them.

According to Nathaniel Palmer, editor-in-chief of BPM.com and executive director of the Workflow Management Coalition (WfMC), “Right now, case management is the next new big thing in process technology and it’s critically important that we take a deep, informed look to make sure we understand how to apply it to our business-transformation efforts.”

Contributors to Mastering the Unpredictable include Palmer and leading experts in the field of business process management (BPM): Longtime WfMC associate Keith Swenson, as well as industry thought leaders Henk de Man, David Hollingsworth, Dana Khoyi, Frank Michael Kraft, Caffrey Lee, John T. Matthias, Dermot McCauley, Max J. Pucher, Tom Shepherd and Jacob Ukelson.

WHEN:    Thursday, July 15, 12:00 pm ET

WHERE: Online on Twitter at #acmjam hash tag or follow at Connie Moore (@cmooreforrester). You can also tune in to coverage of the Tweet Jam at:

http://www.masteringtheunpredictable.com/

http://www.wfmc.org/

http://bpm.com

TWEET JAM DETAILS:

Among the key topics to be discussed:

- What are the similarities, differences and key trends for ACM vs. Business Process Management (BPM)?

- How do I know if I need case management?

- Who in an organization should care about ACM? Why?

- What are some specific examples of knowledge work that ACM supports? 

- What is the primary benefit that a knowledge worker/case manager gets by using ACM? How about a manager?

- Is there such a thing as “Social BPM” or “Social Case Management”?  What does that mean to you?

- How do you measure success in an ACM implementation?

- What are some best practices for getting started with ACM?

For executives and managers of knowledge workers, Mastering the Unpredictable will:
- Explain the need and why previous technological approaches don’t meet the need
- Explain the current technology gap, and the new technology that can close the gap
- Lay out the options that can increase the efficiency and effectiveness of their organizations
- Equip them to best take advantage of this evolving trend

Ten books will be given to the most active and relevant participants in the discussion.

FOR MORE INFORMATION:

Please visit http://www.masteringtheunpredictable.com/ for additional information about the Tweet Jam, the book and the authors.

“Mastering the Unpredictable: How Adaptive Case Management Will Revolutionize the Way That Knowledge Workers Get Things Done” is available now at amazon.com (including for the Kindle) and Publisher’s Warehouse.

All knowledge workers, that I know, and I know a lot of them, don’t organize their knowledge work by using project planning techniques. And that has a reason. It is too clumsy. Changes are too rapid. It is not worth the effort. So certainly the solution to the Math of the Missed Deadline problem is not to use project planning, neither deterministic nor stochastic project planning.

But the Math of the Missed Deadline shows where the key is. The key is in coordination.

I am sure many of you knew that before already. But it is interesting to see which tools are used for coordination. The mostly used coordination Tool is Microsoft Excel, I propose. Why? It is used, because it is so easy to use.

But I must admit I was not satisfied. An Excel of 3.500 entries does not make sense any more. It is hard to structure them. There are so many Excels. One here, one there – for every project a different one. Don’t miss a deadline assigned to you in any number of Excels distributed on many file shares! That is a challenge.

I want to have it cloud based – accessible from everywhere. I want to calculate the remaining effort. Still, the maintenance must be very easy to use. I want a quick search.

I don’t want to explain the whole functionality here and now, because this is reserved for prospects. If you are interested in considering the system for use send me an email: frank.michael.kraft[at]bpmnforum.net

The only statement I want to make today is: Even if the problem “Math of the Missed Deadline” sounds quite complicated, the solution is very simple and easy to use.

I am not using Excel any more. Not for the purpose of coordinating Workstreams.

Maybe you think that working harder would solve the problem. But all the time you are struggling against a mathematical law.

Say we have a case that has to be broken down into workitems. These workitems have dependencies. Some have, some have not. So it is a network of workitems, or mathematically spoken a directed acyclic graph. You can think about it like a BPMN process without loops. Another mathematical term is lattice. Now we can estimate the duration of each workitem and by using standard project planning techniques we can calculate the planned end time of the project, buffer times of the workitems and the critical path – i.e. the workitems that have a buffer time of zero. You surely have heard of it.

When I was in the seminary learning the technique I said to the teacher: I have doubts about this technique. It is well known that most projects don’t follow this plan, but are late. So there must be something wrong with it. Why not plan more buffer time from the beginning? The teacher said I am not in the position to question such a technique, but I have to learn it. So far so bad.

Later I was in a seminary about statistical project planning. Very interesting. Each workitem did have a probability distribution instead of only a planned duration. Of course the probability distribution has an expectancy value and a variance. One tends to think the expectancy value of the workitems duration probability distribution should be equal to the planned duration in deterministic (i.e. non probabilistic) project planning. And one tends to think, that the expectancy value of the duration of the whole project is the sum of all expectancy values of the duration of workitems that are on the “critical path” of the project. But that is not true. Something unexpected happens here – mathematically.

If you use the means of statistics to calculate the probability distribution of the duration of the whole project it turns out, that the expectancy value of the project duration is always bigger or equal than the sum of the expectancy values of the workitems on the “critical path”. THAT is strange. Even if all workitems behave according to their probability distribution – i.e. some take longer but others are completed faster – even then the whole project takes longer.

I am not talking about bad estimations here. I am not talking about the problems that appear, if all workitems take longer than planned or additional workitems are needed. I talk about perfect guesses and a perfectly planned process. EVEN THEN – the whole project takes longer.

Why is this so?

The answer is this: There are dependencies between the workitems. Because of these dependencies certain workitems can’t be started, until others are completed. If one workitem in the chain is delayed, it delays the start of other workitems as well. But if one is faster than planned, it does not necessarily speed up other workitems. Simply said: delays add up while completing ahead of time don’t.

It is the same reason why there is a traffic jam on a highway simply because there are many cars. Why don’t they all drive 120 kilometers per hour? Just because the breaking adds up between the cars and accelerating the car does not.

Of course the effect is much stronger, if the variance of the probability distribution for the tasks is bigger – which is the case with knowledge work.

So – I got my satisfaction. The first teacher was wrong, I was right. I can prove it mathematically .

And you have a good excuse for the next time you miss a deadline. You can say you worked very hard, but there is a mathematical law ….

One goal of the TPS is to eliminate waste – i.e. to eliminate materials, tools and activities that are not needed for the production of the end product. This in itself is goal-driven, because waste is defined as not contributing to the goal. I think this is a good principle in general. But there is a major difference between producing cars and knowledge work.

As we already discussed, the production of a car is completely pre-planned and the process is repetitive. Therefore the process is planned by different people than those that execute it. As we have discussed in knowledge work the same people that execute the process are those that plan the process – at least they work together in small teams. And the knowledge work processes are often not repetitive and often not predictable. There is some repetition and some predictability, but the degree of it is much less as in car manufacturing. Therefore it is clear, that it is the task of the knowledge worker himself to eliminate waste. This is done by re-evaluating priorities of sub goals in relation to a goal or by withdrawing or postponing sub goals. It is not done by a process designer that does it for the knowledge worker.

Also there is a danger in knowledge work about eliminating waste. It is not possible a priori to judge what is waste and what not. Knowledge work is creative work. This also means that experiments must be made and the outcome of the experiments is unknown at the start. Creative minds need freedom to experiment and an atmosphere that primarily eliminates waste can be very counterproductive in this environment. Imagine a soccer match that is only optimized towards eliminating waste. Nobody takes any effort, if the success is not guaranteed. That is boring and that is the sure road to losing the match. If you have seen the match Germany – England you might remember the first goal. Miroslav Klose delivered a brave sprinting fight against the english defense before he scored the first goal. He did not know in advance that he would score. He had to fight for it, even if the result was unpredictable. Only he was able to decide in this situation, if it was worth a try or not.

Ok – I admit the coach does also decide. He does knowledge work on a different level. It is his responsibility to judge if a player does not or is not able to contribute towards the goal of the match and exchange players. The players obviously are not completely autonomous. The team only works as a team if the players fulfill their role within the team. This is in part predictable.

I don’t have all the answers in this discussion and I am also interested in your opinion. Today I only want to make clear that in knowledge work eliminating waste can be dangerous while it is still desirable to a degree and eliminating waste itself is knowledge work because it needs situational judgments and many of the decisions must be done by the knowledge workers themselves.

One aspect of the TPS is tact. Production lines are synchronized by using tact. There is a temptation to try to synchronize knowledge work by tact as well. I do not know how many out there try to do this, but I know of at least two companies.

Nobody is against recurring meetings to synchronize tasks and progress. This is no new invention and certainly not rocket science. We also can discuss SCRUM. But today I want to point out the limitations and difficulties with trying to synchronize knowledge work by tact.

There is a concept – I see it as a law of nature – called irreducible complexity. It means, that there is a minimum complexity for a system to be functional that cannot be reduced without harm. For example a car engine – if there is but one part missing, the engine very probably is not functional. The car engine must be absolutely complete before it is functional. It does not make any sense to assemble an engine into a car, if the engine is not absolutely complete or perfectly functional. In car assembly the “wedding” – i.e. the moment when the engine is assembled into the chassis, follows a strict tact. Thereby the chassis and the engine together become the car. So the engine line and the chassis line are synchronized by this tact.

What happens, if due to any small unpredicted deviation the engine can’t reach the “wedding” in time? The chassis line must be stopped as well. There is no other way. So the whole system works well as long as all work complies with the predicted times and if the work is executed completely perfect.

It becomes clear now, why knowledge work does not fit into this pattern. Knowledge work has many unpredictable components, be it the needed preconditions, the workitems themselves, their duration and their deviation from the expected duration. Imposing tact over knowledge work often results in odd behavior like delivering a half-baked document or installing a half-finished software patch. In Germany we say: “Verschlimmbessern”. This means making it worse by trying to make it better. This is especially the case, if the work does not create a new work result from scratch, but does modify an existing work result – which in my opinion is the main case.

Does this mean I argue for not synchronizing at all or to not plan at all? No! This is far from true. I only argue that the type of synchronizing and planning must respect the laws of nature that we find in knowledge work. This relieves the knowledge worker from the odd feeling and produces more reliable results for the project or management.