The decision to call a meeting is separate from the decision of when to hold that meeting. When calling a meeting, you usually have some idea who needs to be there. Given this, you then go through a process to determine the best time for those people. Here is how to do it in Weaver. Continue reading
We have somehow endured the fourth week of sheltering at home for the corona virus, and we are beginning to understand the nature of this crisis. It is also the 10 year anniversary of publication of “Mastering the Unpredictable.” The corona virus response is unfolding exactly like an unpredictable crisis — both the good and the bad. Continue reading
Every collaborative system needs some way to notify people of things that need attention. Email is by far the most ubiquitous option for reaching out to people. Done well, email is an effective way to draw people in to work they need to do. Done poorly, and the email is an annoying waste. What is needed to do it well? Continue reading
This is the final post on the problems of business process models for automating work, and one that sums it all up: hand drawn business process models simply are not agile enough.
In the last five posts I outlined five ways that business process models are dificient when it comes to automating work. In this post I give a sixth, and quite possibly the most significant problem: Agreement takes effort, and once you have agreement, that agreement becomes a barrier to further change.
We knew that BPMN needed fixing, but CMMN didn’t fix it enough. This is another installment in the series on how we need to move beyond process models for automating work. The last post pointed to limitations in BPMN, and this post covers CMMN.
One bright hope for business process modeling, developed between 2003 and 2010, was the standard known as Business Process Model and Notation (BPMN). This would be the way to model businesses! But today, most people use a simple flowchart in everyday use. Why is that?
Just this week I received an email from a professor in Germany with some process models and with the apology: “Sorry, these are not in BPMN or any formal notation.” Well, they usually aren’t and it is time to start asking they question: why? Continue reading
This another installment in the series pointing out the problems with using a hand-drawn business process model. The last post was how a business process model fails in the promise to be easier than programming. Even if you get past that issue, and hire programmers to make the models, a static model is not really suitable for a human organization anyway. Continue reading
Whew! It has been a few months since my last post in October on my way to the EDOC conference in Stockholm. Presentations and papers went very well there, and I have been working on an entirely new concept. It all centers around realizing that having to tie an organization down to a fixed, manually drawn process is the main problem. Instead, a completely new approach is needed for supporting business processes: Emergent Synthetic Processes.
I will be participating in this presentation / discussion of new trends in Adaptive Case Management and other support for knowledge workers in Copenhagen on Oct 12. Morten Marquard will show the latest developments in DSR graphs, Thomas Hildebrandt will talk about their EcoKnow project, and I will be introducing the new subject of “Emergent Synthetic Processes”.
The meeting will be in English. There will be lots of time for questions and answers. It should be a very good discussion, so if you are in the area, I hope you can make it.
Thinking Matters 