Tag: Agile

Agility through Business Process Automation?

Sometimes business process automation (BPA) is described as the silver bullet to improve agility and time to market. Especially large vendors spend huge amounts of marketing budget to promote their BPM tool suites, “360 Degree”- and “Zero Code”-approaches.

But why does BPM increasy agility? Is it really easier to adapt processes to business changes if a process has been automated using a BPM suite?

Sometimes yes, in the narrow range of allowed options. Often no, cause IT-coded processes are not as flexible as people in an organisation. But that does not mean that business process automation is a bad idea at all. There are areas in which process automation makes perfect sense.

Especially processes for which the following factors apply:

  • clearly structured and predictable
  • repetetive
  • frequently executed

Interestingly, often agility does not come from automated processes itself, but rather from the people who have their hands free for other more sophisticated ad hoc processes. We have experienced that in a large project for an international organisation from the public sector. Provided people have the right skills, BPA can help turning people from “routine workers” to “knowledge workers” (see It is All Taylor’s Fault). BPA allowed them to automate their repetetive tasks. It was a great improvement and productivity gain for the people and the organisation. The key was to give them a tooling that they were able to control, even without much help from IT guys.

Knowledge workers do not need their processes automated. They need other tools mostly to get the right structured information at the right time. IT can help in this regard, but not via BPA. I would call this Business Process Facilitation (BPF) rather than automation.

BPF means giving the people tools to do their job in a efficient manner without imposing predefined processes on them. In other words, it leaves the process and decision power with the people not the machines. User centered dashboards, search engines and adaptive case management tools are examples for BPF. We have experienced this in another project in which we evaluated the value of process automation using a BPM-Suite. In this highly dynamic environment the decision was to not implement BPM as it would have hindered agilty. Instead we implemented BPF to support the knowledge workers. The system mainly focused on efficient data management and decision making.

All in all it is not black and white, not Taylorism against knowledge work. Success comes from a combination of both. The key is focusing on things that are beneficial for the people and organisation. Sometimes it is automation, sometimes not. Process automation is cleary no silver bullet, but if applied wisely and with the right focus it can help organisations to improve efficiency.

Scrum Planning with Enterprise Architect

Although keeping a Scrum team together 100% on-site is the ideal situation, sometimes it is not possible and the team works distributed. In such situations it might be handy to have a tool that can be used instead the whiteboard. A kind of virtual whiteboard that is accessible from everwhere. A popular modeling tool in IT projects is Sparx Enterprise Architect due to its rich modeling capabilities and fair pricing. In order to use it for Scrum planning, I created a UML-Profile which can be used to easily create and maintain Scrum user stories. The profile contains stereotypes for epics, user stories and tasks together with tagged values to track business value, story points and team responsibilities. In order to use it, download the profile and import it using the resource view in Enterprise Architect as show below.

To use the Scrum model elements, open the toolbox and add them to the palette using the More tools … action at the top of the toolbox dialog.

Now create a new diagram for your Sprint planning. You can use swimlanes (Diagram- Swimlanes and Matrix in the menu) to add stage regions to the diagram. Right click on the diagram pane and click properties in context menu. On the elements tab select Tags and Notes. This gives the Scrum elements a card like appearance on the diagram. That’s it. Now you should have something like this:

You can quickly change story points, etc. and the notes using the tagged values and notes view. By dragging the elements between the swimlanes you can change the status of the respective user stories. The package browser (right click on a package in the project browser) can be used to show all stories and tasks in a table view.

A nice gimmick since Enterprise Archtect 9 is the ability to visualize diagrams in whiteboard mode. Just tick the options Whiteboard Mode and Hand Drawn in the diagram options and you will see something like this:

Because the whole model is stored in a repository, you can create story dependencies by connecting the elements, automatically determine backlog sizes and print story cards based on custom templates.

In my opinion using the whiteboard is still the most efficient way for Scrum planning. But especially in cases where teams are distributed, such an approach is hardly possible. As shown in this post, Enterprise Archictect can easily be turned into an effective Scrum planning tool that can be used in those situations.

You can download the Scrum profile here: Scrum.xml
If you want to change the team members, make sure to edit them in the profile before importing it into Enterprise Architect.

Silverlight Receives Technology of the Year Award

InfoWorld rates Silverlight the best rich internet application platform in 2011.

Quote:

“Right now, we favor Silverlight. In the two categories most important to decision makers — developer tools and design integration – Silverlight trumps Flash/AIR/Flex. The toolset in Microsoft Visual Studio 2010 is demonstrably excellent, and Microsoft Expression Blend bridges the design-development gap much better than Adobe Flash Catalyst. For these reasons, companies like Netflix have chosen Silverlight as their RIA technology. We completely agree.”

Of course such a rating always depends on what is important in a certain context, but it shows that Silveright is definitely one of the leading technologies in the RIA space. Beside many other aspects the toolset is very important, as it helps to boost developer productivity.

I can only confirm that. We are currently using Silverlight in an Scrum project applying an incremental design and agile specification approach. Silverlight is ideal in this context as the toolset supports all phases from sketch, specification, design, development and test in a flexible manner. Business analysts, designers, developers and testers are able to work closely together using the same toolset.

Scrum in Practice at Fraunhofer Fokus

Im am going to give a presentation about Scrum at the Fraunhofer Focus in Berlin at 2.November 2010. The event is called Scrum in practice. In addition to the principles of Scrum I am going to show how Scrum is applied in real projects and how to deal with typical challenges.
I would be glad to see you there. You can register here.