The Insiders Guide to BPM - Step 3

The Insiders’ Guide to
BPM
7 Steps to Process Mastery
By Terry Schurter Step 3 – Improve Personal
Productivity

The Insiders’ Guide to BPM: Step 3 Improve Personal Productivity
To improve personal productivity, we must first understand what
the productivity challenges are in the current process design.
Those productivity challenges are tasks in the process that for
one reason or another, force Participants to:
• work harder than necessary
• engage in unnecessary interactions
• perform work outside of the process design
• juggle multiple competing tasks
• have specialized knowledge to complete a task that is not a
specialized task
Improving Personal Productivity
2The Insiders’ Guide to BPM by Terry Schurter - www.tschurter.com

The Task Analysis provides some perspective on the challenges
faced by process Participants. From it we can see:
1) The Tasks each person is expected to perform
2) How many different objects they must interact with
3) What kind of actions we are expecting them to perform
From this perspective, we can get a sense for some of the
challenges Participants face in achieving new levels of
personal productivity.
However, more is needed. In this step we seek to identify those
challenges that are not obvious just from the Task Analysis.
One Perspective – the Task Analysis

Challenges to Personal Productivity - Examples
document legibility Difficulty in accurately reading information on one or more documents
exception-handling Extra work based on exceptions to the "normal," or planned work
duplicate data entry Entering the same data more than once (including across Tasks)
searching (detective work) Spending time finding ANYTHING needed to complete a Task (physical or digital)
complex forms/documents Dealing with complex forms or documents that are non-intuitive
complex business rules Business rules that are difficult to understand or apply to real world scenarios
missing document A required document that is missing
inaccurate data Data, physical or electronic, that is needed but is not accurate
incomplete data Data, physical or electronic, that is needed but is not available
swivel-chair movement Movement of a Participant between objects (systems, documents, et. al.)
complex user interface A system interface that is difficult to successfully navigate to a desired conclusion
technical system issues System or equipment issues that result in work outage or additional work
pulled away for other work Competing priorities that shift focus in a random or unplanned manner
frequent changes Changes to systems, rules, procedures or work instructions that occur frequently

Whether you use the examples provided on the previous slide,
others you define yourself, or any combination thereof the
important thing is that Challenges are identified…
And they must be assessed for each Task.
Identifying Challenges to Personal Productivity
There’s something magically about the number 3. Where one or
two is not enough, three is just right. Where four or more is
too much, three is just right.
Therefore, in Step 3 we look to identify a maximum of 3
challenges to each Task in the Task Analysis.
The Rule of 3

This is not complicated, but it is easy perform incorrectly. We are
not looking to find 3 challenges for each Task, we are looking
for up to a maximum of 3 very real challenges that stand out
to process Participants. Therefore:
1) Some (perhaps many) Tasks will have no challenges
2) Few (perhaps no) Tasks will have 3 Challenges
3) If we don’t know what the real challenges are – do not make
them up or speculate!
So how do we know what productivity challenges really exist in a
process?
Caution – Know How To Do This Properly

1. Think about what you know, you may already have much of the
information that you need.
2. Observe Participants performing their Tasks. Observation will
often bring obvious challenges to the forefront.
3. Ask the Participants about their challenges. Be a good
interviewer and lead them to uncover their biggest pain-points.
4. Research process to uncover patterns behind rework,
inconsistencies, or quality issues – all clear signs of challenges.
Regardless of how you identify productivity challenges, the next
step is to build those into our process picture.
Know, Observe, Ask, Research

From Step 2 - The Agile Style Task Analysis…
Participant
Action
(the task being performed)
Primary Object
(the object of the Action)
Work Object
Type
1 As an Underwriter I review the application Document
Challenge 1 Challenge 2 Challenge 3
legibility Inaccuracy
…we add Challenges (Step 3)

From Step 2 - Assessing Process Improvement
#Tasks
# Hands-off
(each time work
changes hands)
# Participants
# Objects
(unique)
# Challenges
B
1
2
n
Baseline – Total for each category before improvement
# Tasks – Total number of Tasks Eliminated
# Hand-offs – Total number of Hand-offs Eliminated
# Participants – Total number of Participant (roles) Eliminated
# Objects – Total number of different objects Eliminated
# Challenges – Total number of challenges Eliminated (defined in Step 3)
Baseline
Improvement 1
Improvement 2
Improvement n
Challenges from
Step 3 go here in
the Step 2
Assessment

From Step 2 - Calculating Net Gain
Tasks
Hands-off
(each time work
changes hands)
Participants
Objects
(unique)
Challenges
B 100% 100% 100% 100% 100%
1
2
n
Tasks – Percent Improvement (Tasks Eliminated/Baseline Tasks)*100
Hand-offs – Percent Improvement (Hand-offs Eliminated/Baseline Hand-offs)*100
Participants – Percent Improvement (Participants Eliminated/Baseline Participants)*100
Objects – Percent Improvement (Objects Eliminated/Baseline Objects)*100
Challenges – Percent Improvement (Challenges Eliminated/Baseline Challenges)*100
Baseline
Improvement 1
Improvement 2
Improvement n
Step 3 Challenges go here

In Step 3 we have:
1) Identified any real personal productivity challenges by Task
2) Included Challenges in our Process Assessment
3) Calculated the Net Gain
4) Resulting in a clear understanding of how well we have
addressed productivity challenges in our improvements
Note – as before, the improvement approach outlined in The
Insiders’ Guide will eliminate Tasks, Participants, Interactions,
object and Challenges. Step 3 adds Challenges into the practice.
*If we feel we have not met the challenges of personality productivity, what do we
do? This can be an important motivator to go back to improvements and
innovate on new ways that additional challenges can be eliminated.
Improving Personal Productivity - Summary

http://www.amazon.com/Insiders-Guide-BPM-Process-Mastery/dp/0929652096
Would you like to learn more about Mastering BPM?
http://acuitystudio.com/human-centric-process-analysis-and-improvement/

The Insiders Guide to BPM - Step 3

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