BPM is awash with theories. Some develop concepts in order to create a term they hope will be part of the BPM buzzword dictionary (‘Agile’ is an excellent example) others simply recycle existing terminology to become part of the in-crowd.
In order to save you the embarrassment of having to repeat the same old chestnuts like ‘Automation’, ‘Agility’, ‘BPMN’ and ‘Cloud’, I’d like to introduce you to two new theories which will really make you the star at the next gathering of your fellow senior managers:
Adam Deane this week finally published his theory on FDBPM and it’s pure magic. It has all the ingredients a solid theory needs as it explains the past as well as the present plus it has the added benefit of providing all the excuses you could possibly need should your BPM initiative fail. In a nutshell, FDBPM is based on three major observations of human behaviour:
1. I believe it will work.
2. I hope it will work
3. If it didn’t work – it wasn’t the design that failed, it was fate.
I would urge everyone to pop over to Adams blog and read up on the details of FDBPM. (There may be a test later on!)
For those of you fond of dividing process participants into while-collar and blue-collar workers, the second new BPM theory provides an important extension to the sartorial BPM approach. A very prominent BPM expert – of the female persuasion no less – recently informed me that the importance of stylish footware has long been underrated. To quote: ‘Feeding the mind is easier when you’re wearing fashionable shoes’, she said during a BPM conference. As I pride myself on my live-and-learn approach I was especially grateful for her contribution as all those presentations on BPM-S finally made sense to me: Business Process Management Shoes is what the industry has been advocating all these years…and I never even noticed.
Dare I hope that once these theories find a broader audience we will see process managers dressed in high-heels and working on the beads of their rosaries? It’s really no worse than putting BPMN in the cloud to become more agile, or is it?