Business Development/The Missing Element
By Daniel W. Fritz for ITtoolbox PeopleSoft Knowledge Base
Daniel has been involved as a consultant and VP of Process Management in Business (Re)Development and Restructuring endeavors, Process Analysis and Management activities and Quality Assurance Program Development for the past fifteen years.

Summary:

The element that is almost universally missing in all development endeavors is the 'Human/Personal Relationship' that should be maintained by a 'Process Management Professional'. The role of the 'Process Management Professional' besides developing specifications, maintaining project status etc, should be to interact freely and openly with all individuals who participate in the Process Modification and/or (re)development activity. Such relationships help to reduce conflicts and facilitate project development by reducing development time, costs and inaccuracies.

Full Article:

Analyzing Process Management, Business Re-engineering, Business Improvement and Quality Assurance endeavors it can be seen that in most instances there is a distinct element missing from each of these activities that when appropriately included significantly improves the efficiency, timeliness, and quality of the product to be presented.

In fact when reviewed from an evolutionary point of view, the processes employed for either upgrading or creating new business functionality has veered sharply in the direction of the acute, the stark, and the realm of total non-personalized interaction.

The trend has become to be strict, disciplined, and analytic in respect to process development with hard and fast rules that have to be diligently obeyed for the improvement/recreation process. A significant example of this current tend can be seen in the publication of 101 rules that should be known and applied by the application assessment staff. (Specific reference omitted to avoid unnecessary confrontation). This along with the trend to react to the changes in technology as the motivating factor for recreating the business process has led to a somewhat less than productive process.

In a recent article, 'The Process Paradigm', Paul Ciandrini states; "Instead of technology being the prime driver for business process improvement, companies are now looking for deep experience and analysis skills that can enhance their business performance. Business knowledge and experience, not application software innovation, now drive process improvements."

Now as we all realize structured development and a succinct knowledge of the business are basic requirements for intricate business process development but not when this stringent format is at the exclusion of the development of personal interactions that significantly facilitate the development process through knowledge inherent within the business community that can be gleaned from this personal interaction and which will substantially benefit the total development cycle.

In actuality, when assessed, the astute recognize that these practices, without a significant realm of personal interaction, only serve to created resentment and even in some cases open hostility between the assessment, development, and business communities, with resulting delays and inaccuracies in the product presentation.
>From diverse experiences it would be suggested that the element that is almost universally missing in all such endeavors is the 'Human/Personal Relationship' that is usually maintained by a 'Process Management Professional' {Please note that I refuse to take the usual step at this point in this article and shorten this to 'PMP' for that is just the epitome of the problem being addressed, the impersonalization of the Business development cycle.} The role of the 'Process Management Professional' is to interact freely and openly with all individuals who participate in the Process Modification and/or (re)development activity. Now I am sure that at his point there are those who are scoffing at this suggestion and subliminally stating, well yes this is obvious, be friendly to the representatives involved in the endeavor but get your work done.

Experience has shown that there is a much a greater effort required then 'just being friendly' in that the 'Process Management Professional' works from a defined approach and methodology. In actuality there is a distinct process to this function just as there are other very well defined methodologies that have emerged for the other steps employed in the enhancement/creation and assessment procedures.
Various and diverse experiences could be set forth to substantiate the success of this methodology, but for the sake of the brevity only one example of recent origin will be related.

Part of the past consulting assignment included the assessment of a new Intranet Lan application that provided pre-selected data elements from several key files in several associated formats from a legacy mainframe application. Through the creation of a 'friendship' with the development representatives and business community it was possible to directly communicate processing issues and business requirements as they were found. Following the usual Assessment procedures these issues were appropriately documented, logged, and quantified in order of importance, report date, severity etc., but the real work took place with the personal phone calls or with the face to face meetings held with a friendly free floating interaction.

A light hearted phone call at 8:30 in the morning; "Hey Eugene, this is the Process Management pest, the *&$% system is down" goes much further than writing up a trouble report, submitting same and waiting for a procedural response. Using this approach the issue documentation, assessment, logging etc., became the backup and reminder facility rather than the point of contention and critical critique as usually evolves. In that there was a timely completion of the project being referenced it is hard to quantify what the savings were in the time and cost for this project development, but the substantiation of the process was that the user community readily accepted and employed this new application and was quick to relate to the 'Process Management Professional' a wish list of additional functionality that might be included in the application as soon as possible.

Now the above example only emphasizes one part of the personal interaction equation for the 'Process Management Professional', for if the same process is employed, as it should be, when defining the requirements with the user community basic misunderstanding could be avoided. Unfortunately most managers and consultants in the IT world have seen the circumstance under which the development team has begun coding with vague or only partially defined specifications, and not having a relationship with the user community has taken assumptions that eventually produces an erroneous product that does not address some if not all of the basic requirements that were originally envisioned.
 

When a 'Process Management Professional' is interjected into the development sequence who has the ability not only to create specifications, undertake development reviews and to conduct the QA assessments but also creates the appropriate relationships with the requesting business community, the development resources and the assessment representatives, and eventually with the systems, operations, and audit departments then a complete and accurate product can be generated on a timely basis.
 

Now as previous mentioned there is a definitive skill set and specific training required for the 'Process Management Professional' with predefined steps of developing the associations that are necessary for this part of the business development endeavor. This skill set and training required can be and has been quantified and will be the source of another presentation. But there is one further note to include in this introduction.

The Process Manager verses The Project Manager

The dissertation above makes an assumption that there is an understanding that for a new Business endeavor to be successful there should be a specific representative working with the project who can easily function across all business, system, and development areas of the firm. Unfortunately, in personal experience this has not usually been the case. In fact quite often the various participants find themselves asking the question, and sometimes quite overtly, "Who's in charge here?" Experience has shown that in many instances when a major endeavor is proposed a representative from some department within the firm is selected as the "Project Manager".

At times this representative is from 'Applications Development', at times it is a senior officer in 'Risk Management' or the 'Project Management Office' etc. However even though each of these individuals may be qualified and have specific skill sets, they most likely have not had experiences functioning across various levels of the firm while leading a development project and conducting assessment procedures, logging issues, steps etc. Now of course many of these activities can be assigned, a coordinator can be enabled, but it is still extremely advantageous for successful project completion to employ an independently trained Process Manager (a Process Management Professional) who knows how to interact personally with all departments, meeting and knowing all individuals even remotely responsible for processing, who can draw up and confirm specifications, who can conduct the assessment process, who can confirm complete response to original specifications etc. A combination of skill sets that enables complete and thorough project management.