Yes, you have to do it. No, don’t ask more questions about it. Yes, you will need to learn a couple of things, and some of your colleagues are going to refuse using it, but you have to. In the long run, you will increase your organization productivity and you won’t be able to live without it. Some of the things you’ll get: Central document repository: no more storing files on your local hard disk or on a shared folder in the network. With SharePoint you will be able to store documents in a repository accessible via web. When some other person needs to collaborate on the document,...

Productivity has been key factor of growth of companies now days. When organizations can’t reduce more costs and you have others rising, in which you cannot have a direct influence, the only way to increase profits is getting into productivity. When people ask me to define productivity, I respond a four word sentence: do more with less. That’s it. Process more insurance claims without increasing personnel, find company documents and information more easily without wasting time, automate processes and relocate employees to perform value added activities in the business, handle more loans...

How can you really know how your company is doing if are not measuring processes? Do you know how many support requests are you getting from users per month? From what area are they coming? If you go to the customer service representative, do you know how much time is lasting for giving the customer a definitive answer on their problem? There is no way we can improve these type of services if you are not taking measures of the process. By doing so, then we can think about augmenting our customer satisfaction index or reducing the amount of errors that a product has when going out to the streets. In...

When creating a workflow, one of most common activities in them are tasks. These tasks must be approved or completed during the execution of the process. Someone in the organization is in charge of completing the task. For this to happen, tasks must be assign to users or employees inside the organization. They must then complete it according to their criteria. For example, in a bank application for creating a new account, the officer will generally have a task for checking if the person opening the account is already a customer of the bank, maybe using their social security number (going one...

When manual tasks and processes are automated, most of the time something is lost in the middle. The most simple thing that is lost is flexibility. When humans interact with a process, they can always adjusts things to their own way. When handling an expense request, the account payables department may want to approve it faster if the request is coming from that project in China that is behind schedule, so the priorities in the process change. When we automate the expense reimbursement request with software, these flexibilities are gone making the software not likable for users. That is how Alan Cooper...