...strongly held opinion, bigotry, ego...-IainB
Am I the only one that sees the irony?
@IainB: I tend to agree with superboyac, I believe you know what you are talking about. That's despite the fact that you've demonstrated little insight into superboyac's situation and needs, and that your writing is sometimes obtuse and disjointed. I'd expect someone successful in your profession to be perceptive and a good communicator.
Since at least some of your vitriol seems to be aimed at me, let me defend myself just a little. When I referred to "best practices" (and even then I knew your eyes were rolling), that was within what that Fortune 50 company had experienced in the 12 divisions around the world that participated in the project the first year. In that year, each division was mostly on their own in implementation methods. The next year they unified the methodology based on what worked best, imposed an awkward project management system and then rolled out the project world wide. The IT department made them spend too much on a bad project management system, but would not let them invest one dime in documentation or automated BPM technology. We used Word, Visio and Excel. I suspected that there had to be a better way and demonstrated the value of treating processes as data by using Excel to harmonize the financial processes at different manufacturing plants. Financial management was willing, but the IT department didn't want to investigate the concept. Financial management also embraced the project as a process improvement opportunity, even though most processes were functioning well and process improvement wasn't the goal. That's politics in a high functioning company.
Another one of my clients was a mid-cap company that had an extremely bad attitude about Sarbanes-Oxley. The only process changes that they accepted, even when obviously beneficial, were the minimum necessary to eliminate control design failures and even most of those changes were a fight. They didn't even use Visio. Flowcharts were done with Word! Not surprisingly, a couple of years later the company was in hot water over financial irregularities. That's politics in a low functioning company.
Politics in a low functioning environment is superboyac's situation. We already knew that he was under-resourced; does not have access to BPM professionals; and analysis and process improvement are off the table. Instead of expecting superboyac to absorb your education and experience through osmosis so that he can spend money that he doesn't have for expensive tools for automating BPM that he won't be able to use, it would be much more helpful to provide practical advice on how to use tools like Word, Visio and Excel to document the processes as they exist. What ever happened to KISS?
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