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...

Organizations are composed of processes. Not only organizations, but anything that surround us, that has some type of function, can be described as a series of steps followed to achieve some desired goal. For me, I think the perfect machine, with perfect processes, is the human body. Every function is delimited, has a series of steps, and evolution has made of these processes an art, making them perfect. Every single one of them. The same thing happens in our businesses. There’s a workflow to be followed for almost any function. The only difference, with our bodies for example, is that they are...

Taking a new request for a life insurance is a very complicated process. One of the most interesting things I find is how they ask these strange questions to determine the probability of you killing yourself. But, even if it matters or not, the whole insurance industry is built in probabilities. Nobody though possible the catastrophe that happened in 2005 with the hurricanes for example. An interesting thing I also find is the length of these forms. They always have multiple pages and have a huge amount of fields. The majority of the time the forms have to be filled in an office or desk or a table. Is...