PS Village: August 21, 2008
By Jodi Cicci

In working with many companies regarding process definition and efficient operational tool usage, I’ve come across a Catch-22 of sorts:

• process driving tool selection and usage
• tool features and limitations driving process

Let’s take the example of a company with well defined processes and looking for a tool to introduce business efficiency and perhaps automation.  Tool selection involves evaluating products against defined requirements and making a best fit selection.  Then the deployment activities begin and the details of what your tool can and can’t do start modifying your well defined processes.

You need to watch that the tool doesn’t start to dictate your processes. Compromise is good to a point but if the tool cannot handle your processes efficiently or introduces more manual work than you had before the tool, then you may need to revisit your tool selection.  Carefully documenting your requirements during the tool selection process and weighting the critical ones that will keep or improve your business efficiency will help you avoid this situation.

What about the example of a company with a robust tool and not using it to its fullest extent.  This is the biggest catch-22 area since the tool selection may not have included requirements for these other areas or perhaps included them but with lower priority and weighting.  Defining what your processes are should be done first.  This may include a complete ‘outside of the tool’ definition or a process that has limited information extracted from the tool.  This gives you a base of expectation.  Review the tool next to see how much of the process can be accommodated.  Details will be revealed about what can and cannot be accomplished or automated.  Now the decision is how much of the process will be handled by the tool and how much will continue outside of the tool.  Is the tool changing your process?  If so, is it in areas that can be compromised?  Be careful not to force tool usage and make your process more cumbersome.

Best practices for most tools are available from the product vendor’s Professional Services organization or partners.  These are great resources to help you with process definition pertaining to the tool as they’ve worked with many clients that may be in your similar industry.

If your business doesn’t have a set process or is in the middle of redefining process, then you can use the tool to drive a process definition.  In this case, you start with the tool and what features it has in certain areas such as resource management, project management, etc.  Warning – many products have robust features so you can easily fall into a ‘use it all’ trap.  Look at the options and work out a business process that takes advantage of automation, if desired, and good reporting.  Whenever I work with companies my emphasis is getting information out of the tool – that typically drives what you need to put into the tool and the details about how to ‘characterize’ this information.

To established business processes from a tool perspective, best practices can be extremely helpful and save you lots of time in initial definition.  Business consulting organizations specializing in your particular tool can point out the do’s and don’ts as you define rollout plans and configuration needs.

The result of marrying business process with tool usage should be efficient business operations including data tracking and reporting.  Not a test of how many tool features you can use!  And definitely not a burden to your end-users!