This view falls short of addressing the hottest needs of today’s organizations : achieve wide-ranging business transformation. So how do we strike the right balance between developing efficient, enterprise-wide processes and maximizing their alignment with corporate goals?
First, Get The Big Picture…
BPM is about more than just increasing efficiency or cutting costs in a department, group, or enterprise. At Aprico, we believe that it should serve enterprise goals. To that end, we focus on strategy long before process modeling or automation starts.
That means careful analysis of current processes to understand their related
issues. See what goes on inside a process, for example:
- What individuals are involved in the process, and what are their respective responsibilities?
- How do team members work and
- how do their tasks fit in with their colleagues’ activities?
- Is the process based on a structured or ad hoc work style?
- Does it require interaction with a wide range of content types?
- What information do team members need to access and how?
Too often in this exercise, I find that business executives are removed from the staff that’s involved in day-to-day operations. So BPM provides a unique opportunity to bridge this disconnect between executives and staff. And it also provides the foundation you need for business and IT professionals to work more collaboratively.
Align with Strategy
According to the ISO 9001 standard, the primary goal to achieve quality management is to meet or exceed customer expectations. So this calls for aligning business processes to meet customer needs.
To that end, I offer the following tips:
Talk to Domain Experts
To understand an organization’s processes, you can’t beat collecting information by face-to-face interviews with team members.
Ask people to explain what they do. Get the big picture about their knowledge, skills, and connections to each other. Identify their roles and responsibilities carefully. You might find that their roles and responsibilities are ill-defined, or have often changed over time.
In traditional organizations, people still think in terms of individual tasks, rather than streamlined processes. You need to see beyond the biases that can cause inertia or resistance to change.
Assess Task Value
By processes, we mean a set of activities that, taken together, produce an outcome that is of value to a customer. That’s why you need to ascertain:
- Why each action is performed
- What value is added by each action
- Whether an action can be eliminated without negatively impacting the outcome.
Individual tasks handled by multiple people with successive handoffs can cause problems, including inefficiencies, errors or delays.
A process improvement may therefore require coordination, such as aligning activities, tasks, and information among interdependent units in an organization. Achieving the optimal level of coordination will often reduce bottlenecks and cycle times.
Implement the Process
The next step is to translate the insights that you have gathered into action. This will likely require bridging separate silos of activity within the organization. Depending on circumstances, you may :
- Focus on Organizational Issues: a “culture of collaboration” helps integrate and better leverage existing business processes. You can do this through formal and informal coordination mechanisms, such as coaching, working beside team members, or removing people from functional departments and assigning them to a process or case team. Process definition and documentation play a key role here.
- Focus on Automation where required: a BPMS platform can play a substantial role in driving efficiency, process automation, and worker productivity. It will provide an integrated environment that can integrate systems, transactions, and data through automation.
A BPM implementation, however, requires integration with your existing infrastructure. Connectivity is critical for linking processes to the resources they control, such as people, system data and event streams.
Pre-built components, such as out-of-the-box interface applets and connectors to legacy that are provided by professional services firms, such as Aprico, can help you configure solutions without extensive custom development, reducing time-to-value. The benefits can include development time and cost savings, increased flexibility of applications, and reduced time-to-market.
Aprico: The BPM Partner
to Get it Done Right
At Aprico, we believe that harnessing business processes is key to remaining competitive in today’s digital age.
With over two decades’ experience helping companies transform their businesses, we can help you implement a consistent and sound Business Process Management. Our process analysis and process improvement skills, combined with domain expertise in key industries, such as financial services, energy, transportation, and government, can go a long way to optimizing business performance.
That’s why Aprico Consultants can help you develop compelling mobile apps and services by leveraging the Xamarin Mobile Application Development technology. This cross-platform offering lets your development teams write code in C# and quickly converts it into native iOS, Android, and Windows Phone apps.
What’s more, Aprico’s architectural blueprint and out-of-the-box accelerators can vastly reduce the effort needed to design and implement mobile apps.
Code Once, Deploy Anywhere
The Xamarin Mobile Application Development technology allows you to leverage your organization’s existing C# development skills and expertise to deliver Android, iOS and Windows apps with native performance.
From a single code base in C#, apps are turned into native code for target mobile devices. Sixty to seventy-five percent of the code, for example, is usually common to Android and iOS. The other twenty-five to forty percent can then be handed to user experience people for creating fully native UIs customized for each platform.
By using Xamarin, your team develops its apps once, creates reusable elements and distributes them on multiple platforms, accelerating your time to market.
Build:
The Xamarin studio – now integrated in the Visual Studio IDE — gives you access to all iOS, Android and Windows Phone platform-specific device functionality to deliver truly native apps. You can create iOS and Android projects, e.g. define screens, flows, images and any other media, while reusing the code from one platform to another. The result? Significantly reduced development time and end-user training.
The Xamarin.Forms is a cross-platform UI toolkit that lets you easily create native user interface layouts that can be shared across Android, iOS and Windows Phone. In addition, you can customize the user interface in each platform by creating specific views with Xamarin.iOS and Xamarin.Android. Xamarin.Forms includes more than 40 controls and layouts, which are mapped to native controls at runtime.
Integrate:
Back-end software and services are what delivers real productivity. With Xamarin, you can easily integrate new apps with legacy apps and data sources, depending on where your back-end data is stored: in the cloud, on-premise, or both.
Microsoft web Apps, in particular, let you rapidly build, deploy and manage back-end services supporting your mobile applications. Many mobile-optimized cloud services functions, such as identity and security, off-line data synchronization and locations-based messaging, can be introduced with a few clicks.
You can also quickly build and consume APIs in the cloud using the language of your choice. As part of its Mobile Framework, Aprico has abstracted messaging system support for major suppliers, making it easy to implement push notification in the Azure back-end. We also support full offline mode, providing native sync experience across your iOS, Android and Windows apps.
Test:
The vast array of devices and OS variants, as well as their associated emulators, creates major testing challenges. Mobile apps must undergo tests across multiple form factors and operating systems, including UX functionality and flow under a range of conditions, such as offline, WiFi or cellular network operations.
Xamarin takes care of most of this tedious work. It lets you test every new feature and perform comprehensive regression tests from the UI down to ensure high quality releases. For example, you can automatically run UI tests locally or execute them on Xamarin Test Cloud where they can run on thousands of physical devices. Xamarin Test Cloud’s parallelization feature can split test runs and execute them across multiple devices simultaneously, increasing testing speed and frequency.
Reports give you the details that you need to know when a test fails, including statistics about UI, memory usage, duration, CPU usage and overall navigation.
Deploy
Software deployment can be a repetitive and sometimes fastidious task. That’s why Xamarin orchestrates deployments across multiple targets and perform rolling updates. Once you create a new build, for example, it automatically gets sent through a testing phase, and then onto the deploy phase. Delivery options can include different OS, public, private, and hybrid cloud deployments, or on-premise solutions if your organization has specific governance or regulatory requirements.
Hockey Apps, in particular, is great for distributing your apps in a unified way for all platform end-users. You can distribute beta versions, collect live crash reports, get feedback from real users, and analyze test coverage.
Continuous integration, automated testing, distribution, monitoring and engagement capabilities give you faster release cycles. Bugs, app crashes, or code failures can be detected and fixed much faster than with traditional development methods. Detailed data results let you rapidly determine where and why issues show up, and decide when you should focus your efforts to respond quickly.
What’s more, you’ll appreciate the Notification Hub. This multi-platform push engine integrates the different providers’ native push systems. It lets you engage your users via push notifications, by sending them targeted messages at the right time.
Fast-Track Approach:
At Aprico, we have implemented a Mobile Framework for using Xamarin technology to reduce costs and increase performance. It addresses the complete mobile app development life cycle — from development and testing to deployment.
For more information on how to accelerate the delivery of your mobile apps, call 02.712.05.92.