I’d like to talk for a moment about the way the businesses do projects. I’ve seen a lot of project management methodologies come up over the years like Prince, Agile and scrum, and those things are largely good for projects and can be good for software.

We seem to lack a a solid business approach to a lot of things though, and and that’s something that I really focus on. When I walk into a project and I look at what’s happening I’ll often see the mechanics of the project happening – I can see the organization, I can see maybe an org model so that we know who holds what position. People are dividing and conquering down through the organization splitting to departments getting into eventually functions I guess really at the bottom.

What is often totally lacking or lacks clarity in a big way is the interactions between the roles and the value that they add to the organization. I can walk in and and look at at the the capital that an organization’s already got and what I’ll see is divide and conquer and what do you do for your job. What is lacking though is the the value chain the flow of value through the organization. That’s something I often model pretty much up front. The other thing I like to model is the interactions and I used to use Six Sigma business interaction models but at this stage I’m using a BPMN standard called a BPMN Conversation Diagram. The conversation diagram says who’s talking to who and why – and the why bit turns out to be processes many times; occasionally a function, but many times a process. You can pick out maybe three or four roles that are involved in doing something together and you can see that on that kind of conversation model and out pops the process.

Now having a process is not the beginning and end of things because of course you have got the information you’re dealing with. As well, you’ve got to have a good idea of your organization and the roles you’ve got in order to have a clear view of the value of delivering and how you want to deliver that value. In terms of Tracy Wiersema’s approach the focus is either product or its customer intimacy or its operational efficiency. Those sorts of strategic inferences have to work out in processes if you’re going to do what you say you intend to do.

I have something on my website that is about modeling. You’ll find a page there that talks about modeling the Enterprise for managers (https://theprocess.expert/modelling-your-business-for-executives) and that runs through a number of models and how they interact. It talks about Customer Journey diagrams as well and and Service Blueprints.

So go and have a look at that and if you are starting a project and you reckon you’ve got your ducks lined up, I offer a 3-day project startup that goes into the top end of your project and looks at it to make sure that it makes sense and you have all your bases covered. You might be surprised what I can find in 3 days. Really surprised.

So do yourself a favor if you have a program running – you might have it staffed and all the rest of it, but a lot of times people are still a little bit uncertain about how it is going to go.

Call me I will put 3 days in with you and we will confirm the areas that are gray, catch the areas that are not, and reshape the way that you look at the top end of your project and the context of the organization and the value that you deliver,

I’m Steve Barnes. I’m The Process Expert. I am happy to work on Teams or Zoom globally. I’m available anywhere. The Process Expert